Viral Online Talk Helps Yield a Bumper Crop of Resources for New Garden Grants Program

**R* D* <r*@kitchengardeners.org>**

Dear Garden Writer Friends,

We're really excited to announce this new grants program. Feel free to
glean and reuse any info you want from the article below.

If you're on Twitter, you can help out by retweeting this:
https://twitter.com/rogerdoiron/status/278554066861293568

Many thanks,

Roger Doiron
KGI

---

*Online Talk Helps Yield a Bumper Crop of Resources for New Garden Grants
Program*

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's the going rate for a video?
 In the case of the Maine-based nonprofit Kitchen Gardeners
International<http://kgi.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=3f073a2f8b&e=2d56e50e69>
(KGI),
it's $30,000 which the group will soon give away via a new national grants
program designed to plant more vegetable gardens.

The grants program called Sow It
Forward<http://kgi.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=47d752e7ab&e=2d56e50e69>
is
open to schools, community gardens, food pantries and other community-based
groups interested in starting or sustaining edible garden projects.
According to KGI's founder, Roger Doiron, the resources for the new program
started flowing as the result of a video-taped talk he gave last year in
Portland, Maine. Doiron's talk entitled "A Subversive
Plot<http://kgi.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=b9e5d8af06&e=2d56e50e69>"
makes the health and environmental case for why the world needs more
kitchen gardens. The Portland event was organized by TEDxDirigo, the Maine
affiliate of TED.com, a global platform for spreading innovative ideas.

Over the course of a year, the 18-minute video garnered over 400,000 views
online and media coverage in the Washington Post and New York Times which
in turn helped catch the attention of a Pennsylvania-based vegetable seed
company which offered to donate seeds to KGI for redistribution to worthy
garden causes working at the local level.

With that first pledge of seeds, the seed of the idea for the Sow it
Forward program was planted in Doiron's head.  "As someone who is usually
on the requesting side of the grant application table, I knew there was a
strong need for resources for food garden projects," says Doiron. "I
decided to try to leverage that first gift of seeds to secure donations of
other things that could help new projects take root".

The seed apparently fell on fertile ground. Doiron has been able to secure
pledges of supplies, books, garden planning software as well as cash from
the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, the California-based foundation of
singer Jack Johnson.

This latest success adds to a growing list of online accomplishments KGI
has achieved over the past five years. Recently, it has mobilized its
25,000 members to defend the right to grow front yard food gardens in a
number of high profile cases where that right has been threatened.
 However, KGI is best known for having led the successful 14-month campaign
for a new kitchen garden at the White House, a campaign that attracted
global media coverage and over 100,000 petition signatures.

Looking ahead, KGI hopes that Sow It Forward will be its biggest
achievement to date. In all, it will be offering 50 grants worth $600 each
and is already busy raising funds to scale up the program for next year.
"We'd like to offer 150 grants in 2013," says Doiron. "There's a whole
world of problems out there. Whether it's obesity in wealthy countries,
food insecurity in poor ones or climate change all over, kitchen gardens
are part of the solution and we're excited to be able to sow more of them
through this new program."

*The deadline for applying for a Sow It Forward grant is 11 January 2013.
For more information, see:
SowItForward.org<http://kgi.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=6bcdbaecb6&e=2d56e50e69>
*

----

*Photos: *

Sow It Forward program promo image for blogs and newsletters:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogerdoiron/8262362266/<http://kgi.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=a1b66ba9a8&e=2d56e50e69>
Credit: KGI.org

Roger Doiron giving his Subversive Plot talk at TEDxDirigo:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/54746833@N04/6138527827/<http://kgi.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=611c997020&e=2d56e50e69>
Credit: Jason Esposito

Seed sowing image for newspapers:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rogerdoiron/8262367620/<http://kgi.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=8b0ca4b64558ef6c805814e19&id=687e583c9d&e=2d56e50e69>
Credit: KGI.org
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