A Pause to Our Seeds to Grow and Pots to Love Programs

Beginning May 1, 2025, Pinnacle Prevention will be pausing our Seeds to Grow and Pots to Love programs for the remainder of 2025.

We use the word “pausing” intentionally, as this is not a permanent discontinuation of these important programs, but space to allow time to strategize. Due to uncertainty in the current funding environment, we must temporarily suspend activity in these programs to support the overall mission of this work. This decision was not made lightly, and we remain committed to supporting the food system, the community, and our shared future. Seeds to Grow and Pots to Love are community-informed programs that represent resilience, care, connection, and growth. Those needs and qualities remain, despite this and any other funding pause.  

Pots to Love began after a call our Executive Director, Adrienne Udarbe, fielded a call from a Double Up Food Bucks Arizona customer. The caller shared his gratitude and enthusiasm for fresh, local vegetables, but needed ideas on how to consume the produce, considering his significant dental challenges and limited resources to prepare the food. He had recently secured housing after a period of homelessness and had very limited cooking equipment. Adrienne thought – ‘What’s the point of ensuring people have access to food if they don’t have the tools to prepare it?’ so she unplugged her own toaster oven from her kitchen and took it to him. When she arrived, she was met by multiple neighbors in this housing unit who shared similar experiences – and from that Pots to Love was born, providing free cooking necessities to seniors and households in transition. The program started in 2019 and has since served 2,002 individuals across Arizona.

Seeds to Grow is also a program born out of a gap identified by our passionate community growers. Seeds to Grow provides annual infrastructure grants to new and emerging growers and producers and in turn, greater access to food in their communities. The program started when a friend and farmer from the Navajo Nation shared disappointment after not receiving funding from a national and competitive funding source. They voiced frustration at the lack of funding opportunities that would help support the needs for new farm businesses. The fact is, there are very limited funds available that help new farmers develop the capacity to grow.  Seeds to Grow helps address that gap for Arizona farmers. Many programs and communities need local, fresh produce and we have plenty of farmers that want to meet that demand; however, without the tools for streamlining their operations many are unable to bridge the gap. Since starting in 2020, Seeds to Grow has provided infrastructure funding support to 36 farmers for tools such as walk-behind tractors to streamline tilling by hand, hoop houses to address weather threats, cold storage systems, and more which has in turn resulted in increased revenue for farmers, increased food for community, and improved land use.

We know these programs are critical and they are unique in how we have funded them over the years. While other initiatives of ours have dedicated multi-year program funding, Seeds to Grow and Pots to Love have been supported by a combination of one time donations from organizational partners combined with supplemental funding from our organizational general funds. For transparency purposes, we can share that we are experiencing a decrease in general funds as a result of freezes and discontinuation of federal grants and a decrease in our indirect revenue which already operated at the lowest possible de minimis rate of 10%. We remain committed to finding new solutions to address these gaps and support the many others we hear about every day. We are actively seeking long-term funding solutions to support all our collective work.  In the meantime, we continue to be a resource to hear your needs and concerns, provide referrals where we know they exist, and reimagine together. Making space for this pause is hard for us. We will learn and evolve from this to see a future of new possibilities. We will keep you informed as the path forward emerges.

If you want to be part of the solution that revitalizes these programs or if you know funders with a shared interest in meeting the needs that Seeds to Grow and Pots to Love support,  you can donate and dedicate your donations specifically to revitalizing these efforts.
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With love – The Pinnacle Prevention Team