Hello LEFDP Fans! Just a quick greeting from the Discovery Program desk and a simple request . . .
We had a stellar week last week in the fields with about 180 kids visiting the farm between Wednesday and Friday. It would have been about 240 kids had Monday’s visit by Ann Soldo Elementary not been rained out. We admit to relishing those surprise moments of calm, when we can catch up on paperwork, answer phone messages and the like. We also really look forward to Ann Soldo Elementary’s rain date.
On Wednesday we hosted 17 new Homeschooling families, which was a pretty good turn out for a wet morning. They were all treated to late season harvests of apples, tomatoes, basil, padron peppers and the last of the strawberries. We cleaned up the quince orchard and took all of the plastics (irrigation hose and mulch) out of the strawberry field. A number of families took home the year-old strawberry plants to give them a new life in home gardens. I look forward to hearing how our Albions do in their new places. We finished our busy morning with well earned apple cider made from Galas and Pippins the kids collected from the ground and trees. On the same day Grace lead a group of first graders from Happy Valley Elementary.
On Thursday Wavecrest Montessori celebrated the Harvest with Squash soup, scarecrow making, and pumpkin carving, while Soquel Parent Education Nursery lead by Kim Woodland and our very own Doug Dirt explored the treats a farm in the fall has to offer. I had an especially good time hosting some very good friends in that class, who showered me with love and hugs.
Friday brought Santa Cruz Children’s School to the farm and that is how we were able to host so many kids on the farm in one half week. Our fall dance card is as full as can be with tours running later into November, than ever before. Thank you for making us feel so important to the fall experience for local kids. Now lets just hope the weather holds on this coast.
A call for help. We are desperately in need of a database to track all of our contacts, volunteers, donations, etc. Yes we are there; we have matured as an organization to the point of needing to centralize our information. All of these well-organized and well-built spreadsheets are just not enough anymore. So we need your advice on what we should use. We have about 2000 contacts, which play multiple roles and we have Filemaker software. We need to organize volunteers, donors, and participants. Please, if you have worked in the land of database management, design, programing or nonprofit management and have advice to share, get in touch with me ASAP. Here are three ways you can help in this area:
* Tell us what to get
* Donate to help us with this purchase (CC Nonprofit, one Filemaker software purchase we are considering, costs $250)
* Help us get the data transferred – it will take some time to transfer the information from our spreadsheets to our new database AND we have lots of new contacts coming in all the time, which need to be added.
Thank you,
Jessica Ridgeway, Director – LEFDPDirector@gmail.com or
Grace Chollar-Webb, Program Coordinator – LEFDPeducation@gmail.com
Live Earth Farm Discovery Program
Seed to Mouth, Farm to Fork, Child to Community Connections
