Growing With Grumblethorpe!

Dear Friends,

Labor Day weekend wrapped up the end of the season for the Grumblethorpe Youth Farm Stand. The farm and gardens are still producing, and I am in touch with some neighboring schools about helping us to harvest and distribute produce that grows here. A volunteer from Penn Charter has already joined me once to help get some tomatoes, peppers, and figs to a neighborhood fridge. A group of students from Penn Charter will also help do some harvesting for community distribution later this week.

Our partnership with John Wister Elementary School has been fruitful too. A small team of us from PhilaLandmarks was present during part of the school's family orientation on the days before classes started. We were able to distribute a decent sized stack of donated shirts, pants, and shoes for uniforms, along with chocolate chip cookies and lemonade. Additionally, we were able to make a purchase of $4,300 of uniforms elements, all of which have been delivered to the school. Thank you to all of you who made donations of clothes or cash to help us help our neighbors. We are talking with the leadership of John Wister about ongoing partnership, including looking at lessons we can learn about this approach to Wally's Closet. Thanks, too, to our neighbor on Germantown, Ave, Crystal at Perfectly Flawless Boutique, who put out the call for clothing donations, and was able to add to our big pile of uniforms!

Over the spring and summer, a major preservation project has been underway at Grumblethorpe. The big house has a new cedar shake roof, repairs have been made to the tenant house next door, and a great deal of exterior masonry has been repointed. This past week, exterior lighting has been installed on the house and in various places around the garden. This kind of once-in-a-generation project, which cost nearly $1.5 million, frees us from substantial worry about the integrity of the historic building, and allows us to focus more on mission.

The coming of fall has brought our Youth Farm Stand program to an end for the season, and brings an opportunity for us to do some high-level thinking about the mission of Grumblethorpe, as we look to connect more intentionally to our community and to have a greater social impact in our neighborhood. Some unexpected staff changes mean that we need to come up with a short-term plan for the care of the green spaces while we also spend time consulting with friends, neighbors, and partners about what our mission can look like going forward. In doing so, I am especially hopeful that we will explore what it could mean for Grumblethorpe to be a place of abundance in a community where there has historically been a significant amount of need. I strongly suspect that Grumblethorpe has a great deal of undeveloped capacity as a resource for this community, and I hope the discussions we have in the coming months will help us to find ways to develop that capacity. Soon I hope to be able to let you know of opportunities to add your voices to the conversation about how we'll do that.

In recent weeks I have conversations with some helpful friends and partners, including the Mastery Charter School folks, leaders at Penn Charter and Germantown Friends School, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Erdenheim Farm, the Welcome Center at Saint James School, Baynton HIll Neighborhood Association, and Vetri Community Partnerships. The perspectives brought to us by these voices are tremendously helpful as we consider a clearer definition of the mission at Grumblethorpe. I hope that our discernment will be guided by a sense of abundance, for Grumblethorpe has shown itself to be a place of great abundance over many generations.

If you haven't yet become one of a hundred people to support Grumblethorpe with a gift of $100, there's plenty of room on the list for your name to be counted. Donations can be made on the website at www.PhilaLandmarks.org/donate, and choosing to contribute to the GrumbleFund in the dropdown menu.

It's such a joy that fig trees thrive in Philadelphia, even though we often associate them with more Mediterranean climates. The fig tree at Grumblethorpe is bearing fruit right now. If you've ever had a fig tree, you know that once they start putting out figs, it's hard to keep up! The squirrels and the birds will get some because there are just so many! They are sweet and delicious! We'll be sending figs out to community fridges later this week: another sure sign that Grumblthorpe is, indeed, a place of abundance, where good things grow!

Thank you for your interest in and support of this special place!

Warmly,

Sean