Farm 2 Facts can strengthen your reporting capacity when applying for grant funding.
Farm 2 Facts (F2F) worked with leaders at Hope & Main to secure a Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP) grant in 2018 by leveraging their existing data, success, and partnerships to support the market’s growth through this new grant funding.
About Hope & Main
Hope & Main is a food incubator space that hosts a farmers market, provides commercial kitchen rental space, and training to support emerging value-added food entrepreneurs. As the only venue of its kind in Rhode Island, Hope & Main leaders developed partnerships across their community. Before securing their FMPP grant they had already supported the development of over 100 businesses.
During our three-year FMPP grant F2F is helping Hope & Main to expand their reach, adopt stronger organizational practices, and tell a stronger story about economic impact through data collection. F2F success follows from Hope & Main’s strong partnerships, excellent vendors, and great leadership. F2F is helping them document their success, which is critical in detailing these achievements to the USDA and other partners. Thus far, successes include: an 18% increase in visitors to the market, 104% total increase in number of vendors, 91% average sale increase for vendors, and 110% increase in gross total sales. Through their business incubator program Hope & Main created 49 new jobs, which indirectly created 113 jobs throughout the community.
By partnering with F2F, Hope & Main was able to ensure that their data collection processes uphold basic social science research standards and remain sensitive to the unique characteristics of their farmers market and organization. F2F online platform provided Hope & Main with a user-friendly portal that allowed Hope & Main to analyze data for economic impact analysis and to generate reports. Hope & Main was able to track their progress in real time, aiding their relationships, recruiting, and annual reporting.
Additional work F2F is doing together with Hope & Main includes supporting organizational changes that make them more effective, and further, assessing the broader economic impact of businesses incubated by Hope & Main. These “add-on” services help Hope & Main reach for new goals and partnerships.
Farm 2 Facts goal with Hope & Main, and every partner, is to ensure that market managers can focus on developing a thriving market while leaning on F2F ensure that they can communicate their successes in a compelling and robust way.
