On an afternoon in late July, Jamie Stark (Journalism/Poli Sci ’12) was scrambling to host a special visitor to Farming Hope, the non-profit he co-founded in 2016 with Kevin Madrigal.
The visitor was Dan Bernal, Chief of Staff for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco office. Bernal had dropped in along with some other folks to hear more about the job training Farming Hope provides to formerly incarcerated and homeless people.
“It was such a cool thing to have the Speaker’s office interested in what we’re doing,” says Stark.
Farming Hope offers an intriguing model for those interested in solving intractable social problems. Founded on the principles of restoring human dignity and building confidence through work and a paycheck, the start-up venture has evolved to offer much more to the formerly incarcerated and housing insecure people it serves. Life skills courses, community events, a safe, welcoming support network, groceries and meals, and a prevailing sense of being needed—all of these build resilience and staying power in people trying to get back on their feet.
“You can’t design a life for someone else,” says Stark. “But you can build a healthy environment where people can hopefully pick up the tools they need to build the life they want to live.”
Farming Hope started with Stark’s dream to connect housing-insecure people to the food system and provide job training in both gardening and the culinary arts. But the seeds of the idea were actually planted well before that, in a poor area of San Salvador. Stark, who grew up in Green Bay, WI, had moved there in 2013, a year after graduation, to volunteer as a translator for the Salvadoran Lutheran Synod, inspired by people he’d met at church during his time as a student at UW-Madison.
He ended up serving as an assistant and translator for Maria Trinidad, who managed an urban soup kitchen for homeless people, as well as a permaculture farm. He observed how she trained and provided for the basic needs of people who were sleeping on the street but wanted to transition to work and a better existence.
“She saved a lot of lives,” he says. “She was mostly serving and employing men, but she had also started a co-op for women who were transitioning out of homelessness. She taught me that the first and last thing is to get to know people as equals—to just have a conversation. I soaked it all in.”
At the end of two years, Stark left El Salvador and entered graduate school at Stanford, pursuing a master’s degree in journalism. When he graduated, he was ready to make a difference. The housing insecurity he had witnessed in the Bay Area seemed, to him, to be worse than what he saw in San Salvador. He’d spent two years observing someone—Trinidad—who seemed to have found the key to getting people back on their feet. He wanted to try that in the U.S.
“There were plenty of non-profits that specialize in helping the homeless population,” he says. “I tried to work for some of them, to bring some of what I had learned in El Salvador about the farming-cooking-back-to-work model, but none were interested in hiring me.”
So Stark teamed up with Madrigal, a friend in the Bay Area, who had similar values and goals. The two found mentoring within the Stanford Feed Collective, and before long, had landed a grant to bring their first idea to life—a pop-up farmers market in San Francisco staffed by housing-insecure “Apprentices.”
From there, the venture grew.
Farming Hope now guides 30 Apprentices every year towards greater security, working closely with caseworkers, parole officers and other partners in a diverse ecosystem of support services. Apprentices receive on-the-job culinary and hospitality training in Farming Hope’s kitchens and garden. They “pay it forward” by cooking for food-insecure neighbors (more than 90,000 meals to families, so far, in 2022, says Stark) and assisting in food recovery (which means sourcing “cosmetically imperfect” product through Farming Hope’s network of farmers and suppliers. More than 15,000 pounds of food will be saved from the landfill and used for cooking, instead, this year). Apprentices are paid for every hour they spend at Farming Hope, including for the life skills courses they take.
“We try to develop skills and habits transferable to any workplace,” says Stark. “We’ve had folks graduate to work full time in landscaping, janitorial, grocery stores, security, and driving. We have a food focus, but we are not a culinary school. We’re more like a school for the self.”
Stark still thinks about El Salvador. He pulls out a photo of some people he knew there – Maria Trinidad, some of the homeless men from the soup kitchen, a few grandchildren.
“The constant challenge for everyone, everywhere, is remembering that there’s a whole person there and it’s not about ‘fixing’ or ‘changing’ them,” says Stark. “I guess the simplest way to say that is just, ‘Love people.’”
Stark has transitioned this fall into a senior advisory role with Farming Hope. He’ll be moving to Texas where he hopes to get involved in immigration and climate issues.
“Those are the things, besides food and homelessness, that I care about the most,” he says. “I am going to take the next year or so to process what I’ve learned and think about the people I’ve met, and how I might serve or contribute in the future.”