Stewards VISTA: Plant It Forward - Fund & Dev Y3

Plant It Forward provides resettled refugees to become urban and local farmers in the greater Houston area with access to land, capital, technical assistance and markets. So far, we have relied on direct purchase of produce from farmers and selling it downstream to retail and wholesale customers under our ¿Enterprise¿ program. But this is not financially sustainable, and creates dependency on farmers to rely on us to sell their produce. We want to revamp our Enterprise program to become an ¿Opportunity Creation¿ lab for our farmers through the following: Training both farmers and a cohort of ¿Market Assistants¿ to help the farmers to sell more produce at farmers markets throughout Houston/Galveston through better displays, data capture and salesmanship, connect with midstream and downstream food processors and consumer packaged good companies to create partnerships with our farmers to use their produce into new, novel products, organize cooking classes and other high-end, high margin experiences and events to generate more income for farmers and selectively look for restaurants, Food Access organizations and other wholesale channels and train farmers to service those clients. This is a great opportunity for a VISTA volunteer to learn about, design, deploy and scale new business models and products in produce & food marketing, and re-design a $400,000/year business/sales operation from the ground up.