Regeneration, Equity and Justice 2024 Financial Statement
What We’ve Done in 2024
Our focus in 2024: In the summer of 2024 we published our first book as an experiment in the gift economy. Food Freedom is an empowerment manual for liberation through food and is available to all! Sharing this book to help others to reconnect to Earth through their food, is currently our main initiative. Along these lines we also did a second printing of Be the Change: Robin Greenfield’s Call to Kids―Making a Difference in a Messed-Up World and are distributing this to children across the nation freely.
In the first half of the year much of our resources went into Seeds for the People and Seeds for Schools. We have also been in service through the Food Forest Starter Bundle program, Grow Your Own Toilet Paper Initiative, producing a film on simple living. For the rest of 2024 our focus is on producing educational videos and articles as Robin walks from Canada to Los Angeles sharing the message of simple and sustainable living.
Food Freedom Book
In 2024 we started our grassroots publishing initiative, Robin Press, and released our first book: Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food. This book is an experiment in the gift economy, available to all with money as no barrier. This book was a huge endeavor that took hundreds of hours and the collaboration of many people. We printed and published the book with the highest level of integrity we could find, sacrificing as little as possible.
100 percent of profits from this book – after book distribution – are donated to Gardens of Liberation, supporting Indigenous and Black-led food sovereignty initiatives.
We ordered 5,000 paperback copies to start and by doing so we got the cost per book down to $3 each. We also published as an ebook. We are experimenting with distributing the book through an ambassador program.
See the financial transparency here.
Be the Change Book
Our children’s book, Be the Change: Robin Greenfield’s Call to Kids―Making a Difference in a Messed-Up World, was released in 2022 with Greystone and in 2024 we reprinted the book to offer it freely in the gift economy. We ordered 2,000 books and by doing so got the cost per book down to $2 each. We are experimenting with distributing the book primarily through an ambassador program.
See the financial transparency here.
Seeds for Schools
We launched Seeds for Schools in 2024 to help children, parents, teachers, school administrators and community members grow food at their schools. We provided seeds to over 1,400 seed packs to schools, homeschool families and community organizations. Learn more about Seeds for Schools here
Seeds for the People
Our focus through Seeds for the People this year was Seeds for Schools, but we also provided hundreds of seed packs to people around the nation to help them grow their own food through Seeds for the People. Learn more about Seeds for the People here.
Community Fruit Trees
In 2023 we launched the Community Fruit Trees Micronursery initiative. We planted about 2,000 trees from seed in the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024 at our first micronurseries in the Washington D.C area and Asheville, North Carolina. We are working to distribute these tree in fall of 2024 and spring of 2025! Learn more about Community Fruit Trees here.
Nonviolent Communication (NVC) / Compassionate Communication
NVC is a language that helps us to break free from the dominator structures and build healthful, nourishing, resilient communities. We had limited funds this year, but managed to provide scholarships to 10 individuals to take the 7 week NVC course with facilitator Steve Torma. Learn more here.
Food Forest Starter Bundle
We launched the Food Forest Starter Bundle program in 2023 to assist the growing movement of people turning their yards into food forests. The Food Forest Starter Bundle is a package of cuttings and seeds of plants that we send in the mail to assist recipients in starting their own food forest gardens. We designed this bundle with the most productive, easy-to-grow foods for Florida from seeds and cuttings. We provide the bundles on a donation basis with the aim to support the community while also creating financial sustainability for our organization. We developed an extensive resource guide and video series that shares step by step how to create a food forest in Florida and similar climates. Along with the program we helped to launch the Deuces Food Forest in St. Pete, Florida and provided plants to many people in the community. Learn more here. This took place primarily in 2023, but the program continued into 2024 and was part of our service to the community this year.
Grow Your Own Toilet Paper Initiative
In 2022 we launched the Grow Your Own Toilet Paper Initiative with a mission to support thousands of people in breaking free from toilet paper by switching to homegrown toilet paper! Robin traveled the state of Florida, setting up a compost toilet on the streets of many of the major cities of Florida, teaching about the issues behind flushing our poop and pee down the drain and sharing sustainable alternatives. We provided cuttings of the Toilet Paper Plant to over 1,000 people along with detailed resource on how to grow the plants and begin the journey of composting humanure. Learn more here. This took place primarily in 2023, but the program continued into 2024 and was part of our service to the community this year.
School Lunch Film / Minimalism Film
We put hundreds of hours of work into developing the School Lunch project in which Robin was to embark on a month of eating school lunch and only school lunch – for breakfast lunch and dinner. The purpose was to create a nationwide conversation around school lunch. This project fell through, but we already had the team together and the funding so we pivoted to creating a film around minimalism and simple living. We also created a School Lunch Resource Guide to help parents, educators and children who are seeking to have more wholesome and nourishing food in their schools.
FindaForager Database
We have created the largest database in the world of foraging instructors. The purpose is to help people who are interested in learning to forage, to find opportunities to learn in their area. We have over 500 foraging instructors in our database. We’ve been building the platform since 2021, and this year we grew the database substantially and fully updated and organized it.
Creating an Ecommerce Platform
We created an Ecommerce platform to distribute our books, plants and seeds. Our intentions of creating this platform were to be used as a tool for distributing the Food Freedom book as well as making our organization financially self-sustaining through offering plants and seeds (which even without the generation of funds, also carries out our mission). Creating this platform turned out to be a substantial challenge, filled with technical difficulties. We spent about $2,000 on this and were plagued with technical difficulties through much of 2024, sinking much of our time and energy into this. We put substantial time creating systems that would allow the Ecommerce and customer service to be managed by a teammate. This whole Ecommerce platform has turned out to be a very ineffective usage of our time.
Bringing the Website and Online into Integrity
Over the last years we’ve had substantial issues with our organization emails being marked as spam. This has made communicating and carrying out our work extremely challenging because many people did not receive our messages and we would often not know that this was the case. The biggest issue was that it was not uncommon for our emails to go to spam when we were responding to someone who wrote to us or to people we’d had communication with in the past. We also were having issues with email deliverability of our newsletters. We hired someone to try to solve this once and for all. We put a fair bit of time and energy into this and we improved it, but have continued dealing with problems all year.
Our founder, returned to Robin from Rob in 2023, and with this name change came updating the website URL, social media, accounts and much of our content. This was a substantial task for us and we sunk some of our funds and much of our time on this.
We put a good amount of effort into improving the SEO and Domain Authority of the website which we had neglected for years due to limited funds and time. With the website domain change, this SEO work was very necessary. We were quite effective with the time and resources we put into this task.
The majority of the Ecommerce and bringing the website and online into integrity was managed by Rikki, who we hired in the early spring of 2023, with very high hopes. We put a lot of our eggs into this basket. In addition to the Ecommerce and website integrity Rikki’s tasks also included:
- Setting up our Google Ads Nonprofit Grant to aid in generating donations through the distribution of Food Freedom and seeds. This work yielded no donations.
- Generating Ecommerce sales. This work yielded little to no sales.
- Seeking funding for our books through grants. This work yielded no funding.
- Creating a fundraiser via raffling off some of Robin’s possessions. We had high hopes for this fundraiser and put in a substantial amount of time. It only raised $1,400 and a good portion of that ended up being payroll just to create and manage the fundraiser.
- Creating systems for maintaining our online presence with high integrity.
- Tech support for our never ending technical difficulties
With Rikki we created substantial systems that we intended to have in place for years ahead. We put a lot of our hopes into Rikki and had a really beautiful relationship flowing. Unfortunately she suffered from an unrelated mental health crises and disappeared in the midst of the work and much of what we had built crumbled. This was a big hit to our finances.
Payroll
As shared above, much of our payroll went into technical support and getting our online presence into a higher state of integrity and functioning.
Our teammate Miranda’s main work for 2024 was Seeds for the People. She managed the Indiegogo fundraiser. We raised $7,000 through this fundraiser, and found that a good amount of time went into managing it, eating up a portion of the funds.
Our teammate Nathaniel has been working with us for one year and he takes on all tasks that we need support with. He is located in Nigeria and started working us because he sent us an email desperately seeking a job. He asked for $1/hour and said it would change his life. We gave him paid job training, got him a computer, solar panel and wifi and he’s been working with us since. We’ve accomplished a lot together and with his earnings from this job he has entered into a state of much more security and stability. He even managed to move into a safer apartment and buy 3 acres cash with his earnings, where he plans to build his home.
Financial Transparency
Our objective is to practice full transparency with our finances. This link takes you to a spreadsheet that is our central and only location for recording and tracking our finances. With this, the public has full access to our records of our financial transactions. We have designed this spreadsheet to be easy to understand for the public. However, our time and resources are limited, so it may not be as optimized as it could be. We request your compassion and patience with us. We are doing our best. The top of the sheet shares every transaction, row by row. By scrolling down you will find the 2024 Summary for REJ which lays out out our financial year by categories.
For a deeper analyzation of whether we have been effective with our service, read this letter written personally by Robin: Have I Effectively Been of Service with Regeneration, Equity and Justice?
Financial Summary
Note: We have a $16,250 loan to pay off for the purchase of 5,000 Food Freedom Books. We have a current balance of $14,500 and hope to pay off this loan by December 1st.
We are hopeful about the experiment of distributing Food Freedom and Be the Change under the gift economy and hope that much more funds will come in. So far it has been slow to generate donations. Creating the book turned out to be much more time intensive than we expected so because of this we are in the negative still.
Note: From 2018-2023 we partnered with the Live Like Ally Foundation, who provided much of the funding for our work as well as a fiscal sponsorship of sorts. In the fall of 2023 we ended our partnership in good terms. You can read the summary of our work together here.
| Expenses Categories (updated to 11/01) | |
| Food Freedom Book (including FF payroll) | $11,748 |
| Be the Change Book | $5,015 |
| Zero Waste Kids Book | $568 |
| Seeds for the People and Seeds for Schools | $6,236 |
| Food Forest Starter Bundle Program / Grow Your Own Toilet Paper Initiative | $1,314 |
| Minimalism Film (expenses) | $24,150 |
| Payroll (excluding FF payroll which is listed as FF expense) | $16,555 |
| NVC Scholarships | $500 |
| Video production | $50 |
| General expenses – website | $187 |
| General expenses – newsletter | $670 |
| General expenses – bank fees | $205 |
| General expenses – Fundraising costs | $335 |
| Miscellaneous expenses | $751 |
| Total | $68,284 |
| Revenue Categories (updated to 11/01) | |
| Income – Ecommerce (includes donations through Ecommerce platform) | $25,670 |
| Income – Be the Change book | $3,074 |
| Income – Seeds for Schools/General 2 large donations | $7,880 |
| Income – General Fundraiser (via indiegogo) | $7,051 |
| Income – General Fundraiser (via Raffle) | $1,377 |
| Minimalism Film (income) | $25,000 |
| Income – Speaking events by Robin | $1,395 |
| Income – Selling items no longer in use | $240 |
| Income – Miscellaneous | $228 |
| Food Freedom Reimbursements | $1,427 |
| Total | $73,343 |