East-side community garden adjusts to federal funding delays

A community garden on the east side of Springfield continues to deal with the fallout of delays to federal funding that the nonprofit had counted on to expand its capacity. Democrat Congresswoman Nikki Budzinski (IL-13) was on hand at Motherland Community Project on Tuesday afternoon to speak with the organization’s founder, Yves Doumen, during the campaign season ahead of the midterm elections.

The Motherland Community Project grows “pumpkins, bell peppers, mustard greens and anything that you can count as vegetables,” Doumen said. 

The organization received nearly $100,000 from the Illinois Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure program after more than a two year delay. The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds the program and the Illinois Department of Agriculture distributes the funds.

The grant helps small and mid-sized farmers expand their capacity and improve their access to the market. The program, launched under the Biden administration, is a reimbursement grant in which recipients get paid back for the equipment they purchase for certain projects.

While Doumen is relieved to have received the funding, he said the hold up was difficult. 

“We had to scale back certain projects,” he said. Some land, usually occupied for farming, went unused. 

“It’s like a little forest now,” he said of one of the plots. “We couldn’t grow anything on it.”

Doumen said the garden has the potential to produce 10,000 pounds of vegetables, but this harvest season it only grew 3,000 pounds.

The garden had hoped to sell some of the produce, but had to abandon that plan since the nonprofit was “without the funding for cold storage equipment and a proper van to transport the produce to market,” Doumen said.

And the delay in funding also meant Motherlands Community Project wasn’t able to hire people for its training program to help people become farmers.

“Every time you lose one thing like a grant, or a grant getting delayed or the payment getting frozen, it’s like a cascade of things that you’re going to lose,” Doumen said.  “It threatens the whole success of the project and the stability of what we’re doing here.”

The organization was finally able to purchase some of the planned items, but Doumen said he faced higher costs due to tariffs, logistical issues and inflation.

“Between the time that the grant got delayed, frozen, and the grant came back, that same walk-in cooler’s price went 50% higher,” he said.  

The long-term impact of the delay is that some components of the project had to be surrendered.

“You have to reshape the project and be able to salvage what you have and keep moving forward,” Doumen said.

He said the organization is now turning to foundations and community support to help fund its mission.

Budzinski said, “That level of uncertainty is wreaking havoc on some really great programs.” 

Budzinski is running for reelection and faces Republican challenger Jeff Wilson, a former member of the Champaign County Board and a U.S. Navy veteran, in the midterm election.

She said if Democrats win the majority of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, they’ll be able to hold U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins accountable and ask her why a grant that has already been appropriated would be pulled back.

“I think that’s illegal,” Budzinski said.

“I don’t think they’re able to do that, but, I think at this point right now, when we don’t have the gavels in committee rooms, we’re not able to compel her to come and testify and answer these questions.”

Budzinski said the delay in dispensing funding is a tactic by the Trump administration. Funding that doesn’t get spent by the end of the U.S. Congress’ fiscal year on Sept. 30 goes back to the U.S. Treasury, she said.

“They’re coming up with all kinds of reasons why money can’t move out the door before Sept. 30, and then they end up with money unspent,” she said.

“Those are dollars that need to be put to work in our communities,” she said.

Democrats have criticized the Trump administration for its maneuver leading to $810 million in federal funding cuts among several agencies, according to news reports.

Budzinski sits on the Agricultural Committee along with two other Illinois Democrats and Republican Reps. Mike Bost (IL-12) and Mary Miller (IL-15).

She said some of the issues the committee will have to address or remediate in the next Congress is the lack of a farm bill, the loss in conservation funding and what experts say is the largest-ever cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which helps low-income people purchase food.