KGI Annual Report - 2010

KGI 's activities in 2010 fell into the following three categories

1. Education: teaching people nationally and internationally how to grow, preserve and cook their own healthy and environmentally-responsible food through courses, presentations, traditional and new media.

2. Networking and partnership: helping gardeners and food/garden projects and causes to connect with each other in order to build their capacity, dig more gardens, and feed more people healthy, environmentally-responsible foods.

3. Public relations and advocacy: working to promote the role that kitchen gardens can play in a healthy and sustainable society and raise their profile through media outreach and creative advocacy campaigns.

Here are some of the year's highlights:

January	KGI launches new logo and look in preparation of new website built on the open-source Drupal platform. Open-source is to software what open-pollinated is to seeds, i.e. an important step in the direction of self-reliance.
February	KGI featured in Fast Company magazine which names KGI founder, Roger Doiron, one of the "10 Most Inspiring People in Sustainable Food"  in the good company of Michael Pollan, Jamie Oliver and Robert Kenner.
April	KGI's composting video featured in Bill McKibben's best-selling book Eaarth. The excerpt: The big land-grant colleges have ag schools, but most of these might as well be subsidiaries of Cargill and Monsanto; they teach corporate-scale farming. So: it's a very good thing that when you google "how to compost video" you get about 1.7 million responses. There are thousands of films, many of them excellent. (Many of them dull, also, but earnest.) Myself, I like the one from KitchenGardeners.org, with its companion presentation, "Our Buddy Bacteria."  In the comments section, someone has written "Very good delivery of information. I shall act on it," which is precisely the response any of us communicators would yearn for.
	KGI releases "Havana Homegrown" video about Cuba's urban agriculture revolution and the lessons and inspiration it offers to other cities looking to become more food secure.
May	KGI partners with the Organic Agriculture Centre of Kenya to carry out organic gardening trainings.
June	KGI partners with Gundbala Welfare and Education Trust to dig a school garden and carry out nutrition education programming in Southern India.
July	KGI Celebrates its Second Annual "Food Independence Day" Celebration with local food feasts across the country and media coverage in the Huffington Post.
August	Kitchen Garden Day is celebrated by people and groups around the world.
	KGI featured in the San Francisco Chronicle's Financial Section:  KGI's Founder Roger Doiron, who has argued for a taxbreak for home growers, envisions domestic gardens playing a large-scale economic role in a future marked by big-picture issues like climate change and peak oil. "When you have some 90 million households in the U.S. with a yard of some sort, Doiron says, the potential for monetary savings and food-output from kitchen gardens "can really add up." He anticipates another economic benefit to home-growing: "To the extent that we do become a nation of gardeners, we will really be reviving a whole sector of our economy as (garden-related) businesses crop up as a result."
September	KGI partners with Nomadisch Grün and Prinzessinnengärten of Berlin, Germany as part a workshop on urban gardens.
October	KGI participates in Terra Madre in Turin, Italy.
November	KGI members organize seed drive to help Pakistani gardeners and farmers whose crops were washed away by catastrophic floods. What starts with one KGI member from the UK quickly multiplies into several members sending hundreds of seed packets which will, in turn, help feed hundreds of people.
December	KGI launches new monthly online poll, the first one on the topic of the amount of time spent gardening.

Financial Report

Revenues
Foundations and institutional donors 72,000
Individual donors 8,529
Other 313
Total revenues 80,842

Expenses
Program-related costs 67,196
Administrative costs 5,999
Total expenses 73,195
Change in Net Assets 7,647
Net Assets, Beginning of Year 49,462
Net Assets End of the Year 57,209

Institutional supporters:
In 2010, KGI received the support of the Amy P. Goldman Foundation, the Quimby Family Foundation, the Orchard Foundation, the Helianthus Trust, the Johnson Ohana Charitable Foundation, and the Well-Fed World Foundation.

Board, staff and volunteers:
KGI’s board consisted of Jan Maes (New Hampshire), Sunita Rao and Preeti patil (India), Roger Doiron (Maine), David Buchanan (Maine), Kate Flint (Australia) and Maya Howard (Maine). Roger Doiron continued to staff KGI in 2010 on a full-time basis. KGI enjoyed the support of volunteer writers, bloggers, photographers, computer whizzes, and event organizers from around the globe.