Rachel Bonar & RAPP CC KC Provides Curriculum

Our RAPP colleague Rachel Bonar, Project Manager for Catholic Charities' New Roots for Refugees Program is pictured above at Juniper Gardens in Kansas City.
 
Friends,
 
New Roots for Refugees offers a series of workshops in the winter months focused on different things relating to developing farm businesses in the US. Here is a list of our workshops.

1. Introduction to New Roots
2. Vegetable Production and Planning I
3. Vegetable Production and Planning II
4. Vegetable Production and Planning III
5. Introduction to Marketing Vegetables at Farmers Markets
6. Advanced Organic Production
7. Paying Sales Tax
8. Greenhouse Production
9. How to Conserve Water
10. Healthy Soils
11. Keeping Harvest and Sales Records
12. Understanding Government Benefits and Farming Income
13. Land Lease
14. Advanced Marketing of Vegetables (CSA’s and other models)
15. Tools (tiller, hand tools, drip)
16. Harvesting Guidelines

 
I’ve attached our Vegetable Planning and Production workshops just so you have an idea of what they look like. We use a lot of pictures and hands on activities.This is just the basics. Every year, we think of new workshops to add. I find that most of the learning actually happens in the field through our field walks.Please let me know if you would like the lesson plan from any of the other workshops.

We also do ESL classes twice a week and focus on: vegetable recognition, scale usage, making change, basic market vocabulary, using a calculator.
 

We require all of our participants to sell at a farmers market and trough a CSA. I found that most farmers didn’t have clear knowledge of available US markets, and experiencing them first hand was the best way to introduce them to it. If a farmer had been in the program for several years and wanted to move toward wholesaling or another marketing channel, of course I’d love it! We want to help our farmers decide what they want their business to look like, but I feel that they need a little help getting started.
 

We encourage all our farmers to report their income to SRS (Kansas’ benefits office). Most of our farmers are no longer receiving cash benefits because there is at least one income in the home. Food Stamps aren’t too impacted by small amounts of income (you’ll have to look into your state’s regulations), and we tell the farmers that it is good to make money and get off the benefits. Also, farmers are providing food for their families so the need for food stamps goes down. It’s up to the farmers whether or not they report, but I just want to make sure that they don’t get in trouble for not reporting. Our regional refugee coordinator from SRS came the first year to teach a workshop on benefits and we met with her to decide how to categorize the program. SRS includes the New Roots program as work readiness training, so I send them attendance records.

 
Please let me know if you have any other questions! Good luck!
 
For more information:

 
Rachel Bonar
Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas
New Roots for Refugees, Program Coordinator
913-909-1027 (cell) 913- 621-5255 x. 187 (office)