In a Nutshell
What: Through a long-term relationship with IFF that was established nearly 15 years ago, Seed St. Louis has repeatedly leveraged flexible financing to acquire facilities, build its net assets, streamline its programming, and deepen its relationships with community members and funders – all of which have helped the nonprofit expand its impact as it seeks to address unequal access to healthy food options in the St. Louis metro area.
Sector: Healthy Foods
Location: St. Louis, MO
IFF Support: Five loans since 2011 totaling $526,140
IFF Staff Lead: Stephen Westbrooks, executive director of IFF’s Southern Region
“Gardens grow more than food; they grow communities,” says Matt Schindler. “Whether you’re a gardener or not, these are spaces that provide a place for people to gather and build connections.”
Schindler has good reason to know this as the former CEO of Seed St. Louis, a nonprofit that provides communities in the St. Louis area with the education and resources needed to create community gardens and urban orchards. The organization’s mission is rooted in a desire to promote “food freedom”—which it defines as self-sufficiency to grow one’s own food—that directly addresses unequal access to healthy food options in many St. Louis communities. By helping to build or otherwise supporting the creation of 250 urban gardens in the region, Seed St. Louis has meaningfully increased access to quality, nutritious food in areas that the U.S. Department of Agriculture classifies as food deserts, but where the day-to-day experience of residents is sometimes better characterized as “food apartheid.”
Founded in 1984, Seed St. Louis launched with a $1,000 grant and has continually evolved over the years to expand access to affordable, fresh food by repurposing vacant lots for urban agriculture, with the nonprofit today operating with an annual budget of more than $1.3 million. This growth has enabled the organization to expand its programming to reach children in local schools, create a demonstration garden, find new ways to provide educational resources about urban gardening, and more.
Helping Seed St. Louis along the way over the past 14 years have been a series of loans from IFF that have provided the organization with flexibility in uncertain times and the capital needed to continue building a foundation for its future. The long-term partnership began in 2011, when a $140,000 loan from IFF enabled Seed St. Louis to acquire an office space it had previously rented in St. Louis’ Downtown West neighborhood. This both provided Seed St. Louis with a stable, permanent facility with which to build its net assets and eliminated the possibility that the organization could be uprooted at the end of each lease, enabling the organization to focus solely on offering programming that’s responsive to community needs.
“Our work is all community-led, and we want to help people invest in their gardens to create community assets and make sure they’re able to grow,” explains Schindler. “As long as there’s a community aspect to the growing and maintenance of the garden, we’re willing to help.”
Seed St. Louis’ support for such projects often begins with a community member approaching the organization and seeking help starting the garden on an open plot of land in their neighborhood. After confirming that the plot can be used for a garden and that there are a sufficient number of people in the community to help maintain the plot, Seed St. Louis typically gathers volunteers to provide seeds and soil; builds trellises, garden boxes, and compost bins; and prepares the garden for planting.
Education is also a key component of Seed St. Louis’ programming, with the organization offering classes throughout the year on topics like the best crops for the St. Louis region and weather patterns’ impact on crop yields, hosting annual conferences for its network of growers to share information and build community, and even supporting school gardens that serve nutritional and educational purposes at roughly 90 St. Louis-area schools. As part of this school-based work, the organization provides teachers with a special curriculum titled Seed to STEM, which provides a guide for using their school garden to teach students about nature, science, and agriculture while meeting state testing standards.
Planting the seeds for stronger communities
Over the years, Seed St. Louis has helped a wide variety of community groups get a start in growing their own food. Sometimes, it’s a religious congregation or just a dedicated group of neighbors who need help getting started. Other times, it’s a nonprofit or community group, such as the Good Journey Development Foundation, a former participant in IFF’s Stronger Nonprofits Initiative, which received Seed St. Louis’ help for their community youth garden, Bustani Ya Upenda. Sometimes, the support runs deeper. In 2018, Seed St. Louis assumed management of the International Farm from the International Institute of St. Louis. The garden, which is tended by refugee and immigrant community members to grow produce from their home countries, was also added in 2019 to Seed St. Louis’ land trust, which protects community agriculture projects from future development.
“I love touring the school gardens and seeing the children’s pride and joy as they show off the plants and bugs living there,” says Schindler. “But for the longest time, I had to turn away school buses that arrived at our office—not because we couldn’t teach the children, but because they were in the wrong place. The office space we acquired with IFF’s help was a valuable asset, but it was also far from our demonstration garden where we hosted classes about gardening.”
Seeking to consolidate their operations in one location, Seed St. Louis again turned to IFF for support. Using a loan of approximately $50,000 to kickstart its search for a new location where it could combine its offices and demonstration garden in a single location, Seed St. Louis commissioned surveys, reports, an architect, and a capital campaign consultant. This ultimately helped the organization identify a nonprofit social innovation hub still being developed at the time, Delmar DivINe, as its ideal location.
“We need more organizations out there like IFF that understand nonprofits and the funding challenges we face, who are willing to provide the capital needed to navigate short-term uncertainty and to achieve long-term goals. That support over many years has been crucial for Seed St. Louis in helping us get to where we are today.”
In early 2020, however, the COVID-19 pandemic put both Seed St. Louis’ capital campaign and Delmar DivINe’s development on hold. Seed St. Louis found surprising advantages migrating to remote work. For one, attendance for its gardening classes skyrocketed when they went online, as quarantined St. Louisans craved information about growing healthy food and being outside. For another, the move online allowed the organization to prepare its existing office for sale. Running its few remaining in-person operations out of the facility that housed its gardening equipment and supplies, Seed St. Louis sold its office space that fall. The sale enabled the organization to pay off its most recent loan and provided critical operating capital to weather the pandemic, positioning the nonprofit to continue working toward its goal to establish a physical presence at Delmar DivINe.
By 2021, as the worst of the pandemic passed, Seed St. Louis re-launched its $4.5 million capital campaign to consolidate its facilities and, in early 2022, accomplished its goal to move into the completed Delmar DivINe complex. The organization’s new space there immediately tendered benefits, including increased visibility for the organization’s work as it joined dozens of nonprofits in the high-profile, newly redeveloped facility. This, in turn, increased the organization’s access to capital as more funders became aware of its mission.
The move also brought Seed St. Louis even closer to IFF—literally—with IFF’s St. Louis office also located at Delmar DivINe, setting the stage for continued partnership. In 2022, IFF lent Seed St. Louis $215,000, helping the organization acquire the land for, and begin pre-development work on, its new demonstration garden adjacent to the Delmar DivINe property, which is on track to open next summer.
“Rather than needing to hop on a Zoom call, I could just walk around the corner to talk to IFF,” says Schindler. “I can’t put a price tag on that level of convenience. We need more organizations out there like IFF that understand nonprofits and the funding challenges we face, who are willing to provide the capital needed to navigate short-term uncertainty and to achieve long-term goals. That support over many years has been crucial for Seed St. Louis in helping us get to where we are today.”