Grant Writer- Help Grow a Food Forest with Harmony House

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Plant Community LA seeks a volunteer grant writer to help us secure our first round of funding for our inaugural project: The Harmony House Food Forest! Plant Community LA is partnering with Victory Starts Now, an organization which provides homes and treatment for homeless individuals with serious mental disorders who have been diverted from LA County’s increasingly vast jail system. Their simple model of harm reduction and housing first has been successful in removing thousands of persons with mental illnesses from incarceration. The Harmony House Food Forest project will provide an empowering, healing, and educational program for the community members of one of VSN’s leased properties, Harmony House in South Los Angeles. Through this program, the residents themselves will be enabled to greatly improve their own home, neighborhood, and quality of life. In our initial meetings with the members of Harmony House, we learned about the residence to some 20 men, which sits in a neighborhood lacking shade and green space, and has an empty garden plot with heavily compacted and nutrient deprived soil in which little can grow. They have built some planter boxes and the community members of Harmony House wish to grow some fruit trees, annual vegetables, and culinary herbs, interlaced with a pollinator garden comprised of native plants. In the midst of a severe global heatwave and record drought in our own region, the issues surrounding water-conservation, ecology, and sustainability are at the foremost of our concerns. To address these topics, we will be developing a garden program that draws from emerging restoration and permaculture strategy, employing various water-conservation and phytoremediation techniques. For example, we will employ the use of drought-adapted native plants to attract pollinators, companion planting, composting, rain-barrels, hugelkultur, soil-sponging, swale-building, etc. Our goal is to create a naturally regenerating garden using minimal irrigation and imported materials, and add to the biodiversity, ecological habitat, and cooling effects of green space in the area.

We are currently crowdfunding our first round of support for this project. However, there are literally 100’s of these types of properties around LA and we would like to scale up our capabilities in order to address more fully the scope of the opportunity. We also have an ongoing public school garden project that we need to secure grant money in order to continue our work. We would like to be able to hire a full time grant writer and pay them a competitive wage, but we need help getting up to that point.

Ideally the candidate would have experience in grant writing and a working vocabulary related to our field of work(urban reforestation, intersection environmental justice, etc), and share our passion for our mission. Please submit a cover letter and cv to parker@hardycalifornians.com we look forward to hearing from you!