Tikkun Farm
Tikkun Farm (TF) offers opportunities for meaningful work and spiritual practices that address trauma in individuals and communities.
Greg York
P&G Alumni Grant Champion
Greg York
Greg is a Tikkun cofounder. In addition to leading and mentoring various groups of volunteers, he coordinates all farm maintenance and building management.
Additional (2) Alumni involvement from Barbara Fillion and Becky Savage (Board member) who advocate for Tikkun, fundraise, manage volunteers, and help forge partnerships with local school districts.
In his letter of support, Greg describes the work our grant will support: “Tikkun Farm’s job training program provides much-needed skills like carpentry, electrical, agriculture, and culinary arts. Potentially more important, Tikkun teaches skills that will serve its graduates for their entire careers like accountability, respect, and ownership.”
Like so many of our Grant Champions, Greg acknowledges the strong leadership and management skills formed at P&G in his letter of support. He writes, “I retired from P&G after a 24-year career to help start and fund the work that Tikkun Farm is doing in the world. I’m extremely grateful for the entrepreneurial, planning and people skills I learned during my career at P&G. I use these skills daily to help grow Tikkun Farm.”
During 2023-2024, TF will combine its expertise in providing trauma-informed care experiences with teaching technical skills in Environmental Care, Building Trades and Culinary Arts. The Environment Care track teaches urban farming and environment restoration. The Building Trades groups will serve as a pre-apprenticeship program for electrical, plumbing and carpentry trades. The Culinary Arts track mirrors the Cincinnati Cooks training program at the Freestore Foodbank (a prior PGAF awardee) in a place accessible to Mt. Healthy youth. Participants share meals together building community across cohorts and addressing food insecurity many participants face.
Each apprentice receives 250 hrs. of training. All trainees also participate in 50 hours of trauma-informed care experiences that include yoga, pottery, writing and group coaching to address stressors such as ACEs and improve participants’ chances of success. Participants receive a stipend for their time. Most participants are male and female youth between 17 and 21.
The $10,000 PGAF grant will allow Tikkun Farm to expand the training program from 50 individuals in 2023 to 90 in 2024. It will help support salaries for the program director and instructors, compensation for trauma-informed programming specialists, PPE equipment including gloves, shirts, and work boots, farming tools, seeds and starter plants, plants for environmental restoration, clay and glazes for pottery sessions, cooking ingredients, and costs for Certifications in OSHA 10, Chainsaw Safety, and electrical, plumbing and carpentry pre-apprenticeships. 40 are expected to be employed as a result of the program.
Though we usually provide a ‘success’ story in this space, Tikkun provided a sobering rationale for their training program. They said in their proposal “Our job training program emerged from tragedy. After graduating from high school, Monie came to Tikkun Farm as a camp counselor. He thrived in that role. But his home environment was challenging, and he became homeless after a domestic violence situation with his mother’s boyfriend. He worked the night shift at a fast-food restaurant to have a place to go at night and found refuge at the Farm during the day. We were unable to offer Monie a job or job training, and he fell in with the local drug culture. Six months later, Monie died from gun violence. His death motived us to develop the job training program described in the proposal.”