I wish everyone good luck with their proposals and hope that my readers know if I can be of assistance to markets to strategize their proposals or to help to embed metrics for evaluation, feel free to email me.
This report that Farmers Market Coalition did with Market Umbrella in 2013 may be very useful for markets to review to see what other markets have done with their funding and to extract grant writing language used successfully by other markets and food systems.
Also, I am linking the report that I assisted the Real Food Gulf Coast folks with last year. They wanted to collect some simple data on how eaters and producers perceive markets (both those that use markets and don’t use them); the recommendations and marketing strategies will be piloted this year in Mississippi.
Please don’t be afraid to attempt a small grant if you have an idea to build capacity for a market or many markets. The assortment of grant opportunities is wider than ever before and can be the difference between struggling to stay relevant and moving a local food system to the next level.
AND please create an account on grants.gov sooner rather than later; this is the site you use for any federal grant so it takes a step from your later work when uploading a proposal as it takes some time to be approved for an account on grants dot gov.
Helping Public Markets Grow 