Coastal Roots Farm (the Farm) envisions a world in which people in every community come together to grow and share healthy food, care for the land, help their neighbors, and strengthen the connections they have with each other. Its mission is to seed, grow and share: seed new ideas around sustainable farming and Jewish life; grow healthy food; and share the harvest with the local community.
The Farm is an ambitious undertaking that has already received significant attention and enthusiastic interest in its activities. As a new organization, its program design is still in development, with active projects in various stages of piloting. The innovative and emergent nature of the Farm’s projects provides a unique opportunity to use evaluation in the process of testing, adjusting and learning from its many experiments. The evaluation proposed in this document is intended to provide the Farm with information that will help it continue to refine its strategies through regular feedback loops, as well as generate evidence to demonstrate both local and far-reaching impacts.
This evaluation plan outlines six key questions that address the intended outcomes in the Farm’s Theory of Change (Appendix A). It also provides an initial set of indicators to measure progress toward these outcomes, as well as proposed methods for measurement (Appendix B).
The primary audiences for this evaluation will be the Farm’s staff and Board of Directors, as well as its current and potential funders. In addition, Jewish innovators, the Jewish community more broadly and those interested in the power of community farming will likely be avid consumers of aspects of the Farm’s evaluations over time.
