The goal of the project, Advancing Equity in Capital Access for Beginning Farmers BFRDP Project is to build the strength and resilience of socially disadvantaged beginning farmers and ranchers through increasing their knowledge, skills, experience, and network accessing capital to grow their businesses.
In the first year of this project, we have begun developing and delivering a thorough and practical financial literacy and capital access curriculum combining one-on-one coaching, workshops, and peer-to-peer learning and mentoring. This has resulted in 82 farmer participants attending 7 workshops and receiving 314 hours of one-on-one coaching and 212 farmer participants attending 13 peer-to-peer and short course events.
We have also begun strengthening a collaborative network of business and farm support organizations to participate in curriculum development and delivery, including networking and funder matchmaking events. With 10 partner organizations and 5 committed as key partners, we have held 12 meetings to discuss project progress and curriculum development. We also planned a funder <> business technical assistance meeting that occurred at the very beginning of Year 2.
Development and execution of a rigorous evaluation plan to track outputs and outcomes, and regularly communicating with and gathering the network of project partners to share learnings, make improvements to ensure project success and sustainability is underway. A project director was onboarded and group partner meetings were supplemented by attendance to state and regional meetings of farm support organizations. Improvements to evaluation included incorporating partner and participant feedback into data collection and tracking tools.
Our work continues to be well regarded by federal and state agencies, community-based organizations, and farm and business technical assistance service providers. So far, this project has resulted in 37 underserved RI farmers receiving individualized technical assistance , allowing them to overcome barriers to accessing capital and funding programs.