Brooklyn Seeds is growing!

At Brooklyn Seeds, we teach kids about native and endangered wildlife, organic food, and appreciating nature while working for social justice! We have redefined how businesses should do business - for people, not profit by paying our staff thriving wages (25% higher than living wages), focusing on native wildlife gardening, practicing compassionate communication teaching methods, and empowering and supporting public schools we work in by training parents and kids to identify and sell native plants as a way to fundraise for their schools. To continue to grow and make this happen, we just rented our very own space! And we need your help!

Please give what you can, whether it's $25 or $25,000. We are not fundraising for executives. We are fundraising for our kids, our staff, for our programs in schools and parks and for the native and endangered plants and animals that desperately need us.

We want people to thrive- whether you graduated from high school or Harvard. So we at Brooklyn Seeds pay our staff great wages! ! After training, our parents and lead instructors are paid $35/hour. Our starting pay for most staff is $27 an hour. We focus not just on growing food for people, but growing food (native plants) for wildlife, including many native animals often labeled as pests by big agribusiness! These animals are crucial in the food chain, and many other animals will not survive without them. Nor will we!

Kids are NOT treated like money-making machines, but human beings who need to be seen and heard and validated. This is crucial to the social-emotional well-being of kids, who are often herded into large groups. Large numbers ensure more money, but our ratio in our after-school nature program is generally one adult for every 2 - 5 kids instead of the typical one adult for every 8 - 10 children. We get to know our kids, and we often end up being their safe space.

Brooklyn Seeds empowers public schools we work in. We train parents and kids to identify and sell native plants as a way to fundraise for their schools. After all, why would you compost a plant growing in the path when you can sell it and help raise funds for your school? Many of these plants are often identified as weeds and we teach school garden committees how to recognize their value to native wildlife. This supports native and endangered wildlife and educates the public while fundraising for public schools, which are always under threat of budget cuts.

We strive for economic diversity, so 25% of our kids are on scholarships. Think about what this means! If a child needs to be picked up from a school by one of our staff and spends 2.5 hours in our program, we STILL have to find a way to pay our staff, even though parents have paid ZERO. This allows struggling families to enroll their kids in a nature and gardening program, which leads to happy, well-adjusted kids who run around in nature while learning about the flora and fauna that surround them- instead of being on screens. Please help us keep this going!

We teach kids about the connection between appreciating nature and working for social justice. Kids learn about kindness -not just to people, but to plants and animals which we are often taught are pests or weeds. We teach about the link to today’s movements for climate and environmental justice, racial justice, Native American history and rights, and justice for incarcerated people.

Now we've taken the next step as a growing organization- we've rented our own space! Eman has housed the gardening and nature supplies IN HER APARTMENT for the last 15 years and there is NO MORE SPACE! This is an expensive endeavor! It requires paying rent, fixing the place up, and paying someone weekly almost full time to sort through and organize and prepare the hundreds of supplies for various schools and all of our programs.

This space also allows kids a respite from thunderstorms or wildfire smoke or below freezing temperatures while they continue to learn about nature outdoors.

In order to KEEP paying our staff thriving wages, to keep teaching kids about native and endangered plants and wildlife and work for social justice (not just growing food for ourselves!), to give kids a healthy ratio of adults so they can get the kind and compassionate attention they need, to keep supporting and training public schools in native plant fundraising, to pay for a space to give kids a respite as they study nature - in order to do ALL this in 2023-2024, we need to raise $87,000!

Every contribution will help us continue our work until we officially become a nonprofit!

We are not fundraising for executives. We are fundraising for our kids, our staff, for our schools and for the native and endangered plants and animals that desperately need us. Help us do good. Please give what you can, and tell at least one friend, a parent group, your church, mosque, synagogue or garden group about us.