An urban farm on the edge: Nonprofit Frogtown Farm sends out emergency alert

Frederick Melo, Pioneer Press
·10 min read
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Nestled on top of a hill off Minnehaha Avenue and Milton Street in St. Paul, Frogtown Farm grew and distributed some 7,000 pounds of food last year, most of it landing on the plates of low-income St. Paul residents through partnerships with charities such as Feeding Frogtown and the Sanneh Foundation.

The garlic, zucchini, eggplants, beets, carrots, cabbages, tomatoes and herbs were plentiful. The funding was not, leaving Frogtown Farm, an 11-year-old nonprofit urban farming organization that operates on city-owned parkland, shouldering a $150,000 budget deficit at the outset of a new growing season.

“Coming into an organization as an executive director, from my nonprofit work of the last 20 years, this is one of the most challenging situations I’ve seen,” said Lachelle Cunningham, a healthy foods advocate who was hired last July as the organization’s executive director. Her three-month employment contract is now being renewed, month to month.

“We haven’t decided to disband. We’re actively talking about the possibility,” Cunningham said.

Turnover

Money isn’t the only issue. Turnover among leadership, including staff and board members, reached a recent tipping point, hammered home when husband-and-wife founders Seitu Jones and Soyini Guyton retrenched from the nonprofit. Jones, once the public face of Frogtown Farm, hasn’t been involved in about a year. Guyton’s term as board chair also came to a close in 2023. Neither of them could be reached for comment.

Over the summer, the entire six-member board turned over. With the exception of Jones and Guyton, a previous board almost entirely turned over in 2019.

Cunningham, a chef and food business training instructor by trade, has tried to raise Frogtown Farm’s public profile through her community radio show, newsletters and social media. She’s the first to admit it hasn’t worked.

“The organization went through a lot of struggles, prior to even trying to become financially stable,” Cunningham said. “We find ourselves in a dire situation with our financials and our land access. It’s really struggle mode.”

Lease expires

In December, the urban farm’s eight-year lease with the city of St. Paul also expired.

The nonprofit continues to maintain its hoop house, three growing fields, outdoor pizza oven, sizable storage containers and two work shacks on the 5.5-acre site on a month-to-month basis, but the city issued a request for proposals on Feb. 1 for what could be a new managing partner for the land.

The deadline for applications is April 16.

A spokesperson for St. Paul Parks and Recreation said it was not uncommon for the city to test the market after a lease expires and issue an RFP to see what different organizations might bring to the table, but Cunningham and others associated with the farm said they have few illusions. The city seems open to a divorce of sorts.

Until an emergency board meeting on March 28, it was unclear if Frogtown Farm would even apply.

“We’re looking at that application and started building a proposal, but we also find ourselves in a really dire situation even to be sustainable in this current growing season,” Cunningham said. “We find ourselves post-COVID still trying to recover from (the pandemic). Land access is an issue, but it’s secondary.”

Farming plots

In 2013, the Trust for Public Land acquired 13 acres of land from the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation that now comprises both Frogtown Farm and the city parkland it sits on.

The land was later conveyed to the city with the goal of increasing access to public parklands and healthy foods in Frogtown, one of the city’s most racially and ethnically diverse but least green neighborhoods. The concept — operating a nonprofit urban farm on the same site as an urban park — was celebrated as novel and well-intentioned, but infighting overshadowed some of its progress almost from the start.

Some community advocates quickly took diverging positions on whether the farm should open up farming plots to Frogtown residents in the vein of a community garden, or treat the farm as more of a privately-run demonstration project that would rely on groups of visitors for volunteer labor. In the end, the latter strategy prevailed.

Patricia Ohmans once thought of her own urban gardening nonprofit, Frogtown Green, as a key partner in Frogtown Park and Farm. Her initial involvement was short-lived. In 2020, she and a fellow healthy foods advocate petitioned the city in an unsuccessful effort to force the nonprofit to keep the farm open during the pandemic, on the premise that access to affordable fresh vegetables was suddenly as important as ever. Citing funding challenges and the potential for COVID-19 exposure among volunteers, Frogtown Farm put growing on hold through 2021.

Ohmans said the city’s Parks and Recreation Department should take a firmer hand with oversight. Better-established groups could help. There’s no shortage of urban farm advocates in the Twin Cities associated with the Good Acre, Dream of Wild Health, Urban Roots, Urban Ventures, Youth Farm, the Hmong American Farmers Association and others operating in the nonprofit space.

“I know there are other organizations in Minneapolis and St. Paul that see the vast possibilities that this site offers,” Ohmans said. “Whether they feel like they have the capacity to take on the job is a different question.”

‘Save Frogtown Farm’

After four years of leading instructional tours pointing out the wild medicinal herbs that grow throughout the farm, Eva Nyrie Garrett was appointed Frogtown Farm’s board chair in January. Under Cunningham’s direction, the farm had just regained its lost tax-exempt status and hired two graduate students on a part-time basis to help with communications, fundraising and programming activities. Cunningham said the nonprofit had to return some funding last year because the farm had fallen out of compliance with specific grant requirements.

“It was in such despair when we jumped in,” said Garrett, a master herbalist and naturopath. “We’re brainstorming, reaching out to different contacts that we know and organizations that we know and pleading for help, really. Not just financially, but can you come and grow? Can you donate seedlings? Can you volunteer? It’s a ‘Save Frogtown Farm’ campaign.”

Seven urban farmers who had previously served on the board of Frogtown Farm, worked for Frogtown Farm or were otherwise involved either declined comment for this article or did not return messages.

Cunningham said the nonprofit operates on an annual budget of about $500,000, all of it funded through piecemeal grants. As best as she could tell digging through 40 separate email accounts and old annual reports, the nonprofit had not landed a grant larger than $50,000 in years, or developed any kind of revenue-generating partnerships, such as sub-leases with urban growers and other nonprofits.

It’s springtime, Cunningham acknowledged, and the nonprofit still needs to raise at least $475,000 to keep basic growing and distribution operations afloat this year. It would take another $60,000 to restart educational programming and community outreach in earnest.

“We have a handful of grants that we’re in the process of securing right now,” Cunningham said. “At this point, we have a deficit of at least $150,000.”

Cunningham’s professional background includes combining globally-inspired cooking with social justice work through ventures like her Healthy Roots Institute, a food education initiative she launched in 2018, and her catering and restaurant consulting business, Chelle’s Kitchen. Neither of those ventures involved mastering the art of soliciting donations.

“We really need more technical assistance — strategic planning, fundraising,” she acknowledged. “My background is not in fund development. We’re looking for help anywhere we can get it, as far as financial support, or advisement or connection with other funders. We have a very unique situation that doesn’t really exist in too many areas around the world in farming on public land.”

New faces

When Cunningham was hired in July, the nonprofit had only one salaried employee — a farm manager who handled everything from payroll to social media.

Frogtown Farm now maintains a small staff with two salaried employees — a farm manager and administrative manager — and four temporary contract staff, including Cunningham, a program manager, communications manager and farm operations adviser.

There are no Asians on the nonprofit’s board. Given the long history of immigrant farmers in the neighborhood, even some longtime supporters of the concept of a park-based urban farm have found the disconnect with the surrounding area striking.

Asians — mainly Southeast Asian immigrant families from Laos, Thailand and Myanmar (formerly Burma) — make up a third of the neighborhood, followed by Blacks at about 26% and Caucasians at 24%, according to the Wilder Foundation’s Minnesota Compass Project. It was unclear what percentage of the neighborhood hails directly from Africa, but about 43% of the neighborhood speaks a language other than English at home, and 28% are foreign-born.

“In its early years, Frogtown Farm was on its way to becoming a community hub, with carefully tended fields, regularly scheduled community festivals, volunteer opportunities, educational programming and more,” said Ohmans of Frogtown Green. “Its decline over the past several years has been a tragedy. But that doesn’t mean that its successes can’t be recreated. It needs coherent leadership that harnesses technical skills in farming, nonprofit management and community organizing, and that recognizes Frogtown as a place of many diverse cultures, all of which must be included.”

Cunningham said she’s had meetings with Asian growers, but no success in recruiting them to the board. Recognizing a growing disconnect with neighbors, she launched a radio show on WFNU Frogtown Community Radio, “Voices of Frogtown Farm,” and has hosted two “community conversations” focusing on how the farm could better meet community needs. The board is also recruiting residents for a new advisory committee. It’s been slow going.

“Last year, we had over 500 volunteer hours, but we need a lot more than that,” she said. “We’ve been promoting on social media and through the newsletter, but we haven’t necessarily gotten the response that we need.”

An online listening session scheduled for March 28 on the topic of park safety was rescheduled to April 18 to allow time for an emergency board meeting.

Cunningham said it’s not uncommon to arrive on the site and find produce stolen or witness illicit behavior in the parking lot. Someone once set a bale of hay on fire adjacent to farm equipment.

“We have issues with safety and security in the park, with vandalism and encampments,” she said. “We can’t build a giant fence. It’s a public park.”

She added: “When we have to deal with these safety issues, that’s taking away from our ability to just build and grow.”

Partnerships and land investments

Cunningham, who recently hosted two members of Frogtown Green on her podcast, acknowledged that it will take time to build bridges with community groups it may now need to rely upon for survival.

“There’s other organizations that have a spotty relationship with the farm because of things that have happened in the past,” she said.

In addition to its hoop house and physical structures, Frogtown Farm has invested heavily in the soil, making improvements known as soil amendments and growing cover crops that improve soil fertility, investments she’d hate to lose.

Among repeat supporters, the nonprofit has received grants from the United Way, the HRF Family Foundation, the Patrick and Amy Butler Family Foundation and the St. Paul Foundation. Grant applications have been sent off to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, the Otto Bremer Trust and others.

The nonprofit may need all of them and more to stay afloat, said Cunningham, who sent out a mass fundraising call for help via email on a recent Friday, and on the Friday before that: “Frogtown Farm faces a critical juncture that demands immediate financial assistance to continue our valuable work. … Without it, we risk discontinuing our efforts, depriving our community of essential services, fresh produce, and a space for social unity. We do not ask lightly.”

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