Three New Grants Support the Next Chapter of CFFC’s Work
We’re delighted to share some good news: the Community Food Forest Collective has received three new grants that will help us deepen and grow our work across Takoma Park and Montgomery County.
The City of Takoma Park has awarded CFFC an FY27 Community Quality of Life Grant to support our after-school garden club. This funding will give young people more opportunities to spend time outside together — planting, tending, harvesting, noticing what is changing through the seasons, and learning directly from the living world.
David and Arman leading an agroforestry workshop at Montgomery College Food Forest
We’ve also received $95,680 in federal funding from the US Forest Service, via the Chesapeake Bay Trust, through its Mid-Atlantic Community Forestry Fund. This grant will help CFFC develop a new model for community forestry stewardship while strengthening our ability to design, plant, and care for community food forests. It is an important investment not only in growing more trees, but in growing the relationships and shared practices that allow these places to thrive for years to come.
And the Montgomery County Office of Food Systems Resilience has awarded CFFC more than $25,000 through its Resident and Community Food Gardening Grant Program. The grant will support the expansion of our network of school-based and community food forests, increasing long-term access to free, culturally relevant food for neighbors experiencing food insecurity.
These three grants support different parts of the work, but they belong to the same larger story: children learning with their hands in the soil, neighbors growing and sharing food, and communities caring for living places together.
We’re deeply grateful to the City of Takoma Park, the Chesapeake Bay Trust, and Montgomery County’s Office of Food Systems Resilience for investing in this work — and to the many neighbors, students, teachers, volunteers, partners, and stewards who make these food forests living community places.
Every garden tended and every tree cared for gives us another place to practice what shared stewardship can look like — and another place where people can remember how to belong to the living world.