Full Circle Farm is a sustainable, educational farm bringing integrated farm-based education to the students of Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD). Located on 11 acres of district land, Full Circle Farm will serve all 14,000 district students with hands-on education, a deep personal connection to fresh healthy food, and creative leadership opportunities. Our students will develop critical life skills of communication, teamwork, leadership, decision-making, and problem-solving through practical, hands-on agricultural experiences.
We also bring our neighborhood together to do meaningful physical work (and play!) as they reconnect with the natural world and one another. As a public and educational open space we allow kids to grow up in the sunlight and dirt, with an understanding of what it takes to produce the food that they eat and what it means to feel healthy and connected.
Project:
Full Circle Farm Building Designs
Location:
Sunnyvale, CA
Date Posted:
July 31, 2008
Project Partners:
Aditya Advani and Nathan Lozier at RHAA have been working with us for several months in creating amazing landscape design plans for us to use as capital campaign materials. As a public open space, it's very important for our farm's environment to be both usable and beautiful. They suggested we contact Arkin Tilt about our building designs because they felt that our vision of buildings that demonstrate beautiful, sustainable design in a public space would be right up your alley. We would love to be able to work with you to incorporate designs for our farmstand, kitchen and community meeting rooms, worker housing, and farm outbuildings into RHAA's designs.
Project Timeline:
We hope to have the designs of all of our major buildings complete by the end of 2009, and construction completed by 2012.
Design Services:
Capital Campaign Materials,Healthy & Sustainable Environments
Funding Sources:
We are actively fundraising for our capital campaign and have raised well over $400K to date for our start-up phase. We will need to continue to fundraise heavily to create the space as we envision it, but are confident in our ability to raise the needed funding.
Stakeholder Involvement:
The school district, while they have no ability to contribute funds directly to the farm, are donating the 11 acres of district land to our nonprofit. Our partnership with them is to bring environmental and nutrition education to SCUSD students, and to provide 50% of the farm's produce to district cafeterias. We are thrilled to be putting fresh, local produce in a district where 45% of students qualify for free or reduced school lunch.
