Strategic Plan
2025-2027

Welcome to The Food Project 2025-2027 Strategic Plan

Who we are and what we do 

The Food Project has provided transformational growth opportunities for more than 2,000 teens. On our 70 acres of sustainable urban and suburban farmland across eastern Massachusetts, these young people have helped cultivate, harvest and distribute more than 5,000,000 lbs of nutritious vegetables.

Our mission is to create a thoughtful and productive community of youth and adults from diverse backgrounds who work together to build a sustainable food system. Our community produces healthy food for residents of the city and suburbs, provides youth leadership opportunities, and inspires and supports others to create change in their own communities.

We envision a world where youth are active leaders, diverse communities feel connected to the land and each other, and everyone has access to fresh, local, healthy, affordable food.

How we did this

In our most inclusive strategic planning process to date we spent nine months gathering input from more than 150 stakeholders in the community. We revised, and reviewed, and revised again. 
We hope this level of rigor and focus on centering diverse voices means everyone in our community can see themselves somewhere in this plan for our next three years.

Goal 1

Cultivate youth catalysts

Goal 1

Magnify our youth programs’ impacts equipping emerging adults to become change agents in their communities through extended engagement and curriculum development.

  • Extend the youth programs pipeline by piloting a program for middle-school-aged youth and refining the curriculum of our alumni Fellowship program.

  • Engage youth in policy and systems change with a new advocacy curriculum, leveraging partnerships with community agencies and established resident councils.

Why?

In our 2021 study, 76% of alumni that had participated in multiple phases of our programming said that TFP informed their being engaged in community work as adults. By creating opportunities for extended engagement and with a new emphasis on community-led advocacy, we aim to inspire greater leadership in the next generation of emerging adults.

Continue our proven core work, including:

  • Seed Crew, Dirt Crew and Root Crew, which will serve more than 125 teens each year.

  • Curriculum updates, based on continual learning from partner institutions and maintaining alignment with core program principles (Relationships, Relevance, Responsibility & Rigor)

  • A robust training program for youth staff, ensuring consistency by investing in their growth.

Goal 2

Empowering gardeners

Goal 2

Deepen our work supporting food justice by providing more holistic services and resources to Boston and Lynn gardeners.

  • Pilot programming to provide comprehensive urban agriculture education, mentorship and network building to urban growers.

  • Strengthen gardening communities and build social capital at events and utilize our urban farms as spaces of learning and gathering, including establishing a new greenhouse in Lynn.

Why?

This strategy builds on an overwhelming level of interest from community members and unprecedented support from municipal partners. The Food Project has a history of building programs that later inform policy, and urban gardening has attracted increased attention as an effective public health investment in recent years. Build-a-Garden has also been a program that can effectively and meaningfully engage our youth crews, yielding mutually beneficial impacts in food justice and youth empowerment.

Continue our proven core work, including:

  • Build-a-Garden, providing 150+ lead-safe gardens for the community each year.

  • City Farm Fest, providing access to seedlings, compost, and supplies.

  • Community growing space at the Dudley Greenhouse.

  • Farmers markets that serve over 5000 families each year

Goal 3

Climate and resilience

Goal 3

Respond to challenges facing New England agriculture by embracing our farms as learning laboratories.

  • Engage in a multi-year process to better analyze the specific needs of each piece of land we steward and pilot new production and distribution schemes that meet our program needs while also supporting the health of our staff and land.

  • Replace outdated infrastructure and make targeted capital investments to increase climate resilience and improve efficiency, including new greenhouse spaces.

  • Embrace our role as a leader in the region, convening with other farms to compare experiences, generate ideas and share the results of pilot projects.

Why?

Small, diversified farms in our region are facing two significant threats: the escalating impacts of climate change and challenges in hiring, exacerbated by the high cost of living in the region. We recognize that new approaches will be required to keep New England farming vital in the years to come. As a nonprofit and a leader in the field, The Food Project is in the position to engage in experimentation and convene dialogue around these shared challenges.

Continue our proven core work, including:

  • Providing a meaningful and rigorous farming experience for youth in our programs, as well as volunteers.

  • Growing fresh produce for our farmers market customers, as well as donations to hunger relief partners.

  • Providing green space for neighbors and other city residents.

Impacts

Impacts

We’ve built 2,070 lead-safe gardens, which can produce up to 62 tons of produce per year
After receiving their gardens, we saw a 43% increase in Build-a-Gardeners who said that fresh vegetables are always an important part of their diet.

In a survey of alumni that participated in at least two sessions at The Food Project:

  • 100% graduated from high school

  • 96% of alumni were currently employed or in school

  • 76% said that their careers have been influenced by The Food Project

80% of sales at our farmers markets are to customers using public nutrition subsidies

Cultivated more than  5.5 million pounds of fresh, healthy produce



We’ve hired 2,131 teens to cultivate change in themselves and their communities

We’ve shared our model with over 1000 individuals at 300 organizations in annual trainings

“You don’t ever think ‘I can do this’ until you get in a real life space of moving things around, seeing people you’re helping, handing things to people and even kind of suffering in the heat some days,”

Nox Southard, 17, Seed Crew Peer Leader

To begin a conversation about how you or your institution can philanthropically support our strategic goals, please contact:

Director of Donor Engagement

Director of Institutional Relations