The Marigold Fund for Unincorporated California was formed over 10 years of strategic organizing by agroecology practitioners and farmworker community service providers who seek to repair the harms of agriculture in the Central Valley. It is a participatory grantmaking fund that prioritizes agroecological land stewardship by farmworkers, small farmers, and Tribes who live on and work the land, and whose legacies have built California agriculture.
The Marigold Fund makes grants in unincorporated communities to seed the power of unrepresented agricultural workers and land stewards living on the margins of California’s democracy. These deeply rural, unincorporated, and often impoverished communities have been structurally excluded from access to capital and political representation that would otherwise support their participation in core natural resources governance. These efforts for political and environmental regeneration must be co-located in the Central Valley due to the region’s historic role as the backbone of California agriculture.
In its current race towards carbon neutrality and efforts to protect its remaining precious groundwater resources, California risks repeating its past mistakes by subsidizing the same legacy factory farms who continue extracting from and degrading the land. This looks like turning local agricultural waste into aviation fuel instead of using it to build healthy soil, expanding export commodity orchard cropping that depletes vital groundwater resources, and transitioning acres of spent land to proposed clean energy uses without the promise of benefit to residents of the region.
As a countervailing force, the Marigold Fund supports community-led management strategies that keep natural and financial resources in place. Such strategies include composting and responsible biomass management, nature-based climate solutions for groundwater longevity, and a sustainable green and local workforce that strengthens rural economies. We believe that, like any healthy biological network, the fund will be most successful in re-growing human and soil communities, economies and ecosystems if we start small and decentralized. Importantly, the projects we support are proposed and implemented by residents of California’s agricultural communities.
