A New Day for New Roots

As many of you have heard, October 15 was the last day of Catholic Charities involvement with the New Roots program. After 17 years of shared responsibility, Cultivate KC is now the primary organization responsible for providing farm training, technical assistance and business development support to our refugee farmers in training. If you’ve been a supporter or partner of the program, including those of you who support by being a CSA or farmers market customer, you might be wondering what comes next.  

The team at Cultivate KC recently held a Town Hall to discuss next steps and our vision for the program in 2026 and beyond. You can view an abridged recording of this presentation HERE.  

In the immediate future, we are putting a pause on inviting new farm families to the training. It is our hope that this will be a one-year pause while we focus on securing additional resources to sustain the program – most of these are human resources in the form of new staff with specialties previously held by our friends at Catholic Charities. We are proud to commit to continuing to serve the farm families in their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year of our program and be with them through their graduation. We will honor, to the best of our ability, the promises made to these farmers when they joined the program. 

In addition to adding staff, we will be working towards integrating farmers-in-training into the management of the CSA. This will both reduce staff workload and provide additional income for farmers who are interested in learning these skills. We heard overwhelmingly from customers that they enjoy the traditional CSA model we have used in recent seasons, so we will stick with this model in the future. However, we will offer one or two new options next year to help customize the share to meet our customers’ needs.  

We have found ways to integrate the New Roots program into other CKC farmer development services. In particular, services offered by our Urban Farmer Development team (land linking, business planning, farm finance, etc.) can be customized for the New Roots audience. Additionally, we are eager to pursue new partnerships in wholesaling local food, business planning, securing farmland, employment skills training, recruitment of both volunteers and farmer participants, and of course, we still need customers!

If you are interested in learning more about how you can partner with New Roots, please reach out to rachel@cultivatekc.org.