BFRDP Projects

Supporting Beginning Farmer Programs with Technical Assistance to Apply for BFRDP
[Final Report]

Award Amount: $249,657
Grant Program: 2016 Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program Awards
Project Director: Sarah Lambertson
Email: sarah.lambertson@tufts.edu
Organization: New Entry Sustainable Farming Proje

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  • Overview
  • Results
  • Materials
  • Delivery Area
  • Comments

Project Overview

New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, in collaboration with their partners supported inexperienced BFRDP applicants through the EET-Assistance grant. The project team has extensive and diverse experience working with NIFA applicants as the Training and Technical Assistance provider for Community Food Project applicants, beginning farm programs and evaluation. Additionally, the project team has an extensive national network of contacts to ensure that organizations across the US are able to benefit from the support. During the duration of this project, the team has successfully: 1.) Identified inexperienced applicants’ challenges in understanding and submitting successful BFRDP proposals. 2.) Expanded number and availability of training materials, resources and webinars designed to support inexperienced
applicants with submitting BFRDP applications. 3.) Developed online tools to help inexperienced applicants understand their level of readiness to apply for BFRDP, and 4.) Developed an online portal for public questions and answers with BFRDP program staff to streamline the RFA and application process. The team worked closely with BFRDP program staff to understand challenges already identified, as well as evaluated past applicants to understand common barriers. From this, the team developed extensive resources to support inexperienced applicants, including written materials, webinars, an online self-assessment tool to assess readiness to apply and a dynamic FAQ portal that will allow applicants to see what others have asked, as well as ask their own questions.  All tools and resources developed are publicly available on the New Entry, NIFA, and BFRDP websites.

Number of Participants: 558

Results

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Delivery Area

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