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STATEMENT OF NEEDS SUMMARY: THIS PROJECT CREATES ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND QUALITY-OF-LIFE IMPROVEMENTS FOR RESIDENTS OF KING’S LANDING, A LOW-INCOME COMMUNITY. PROJECT FEATURES include:

• Employment (career training, entrepreneurialism) • Education (soft skills, literacy) • Health (nutrition education) • Hunger relief (food bank, community garden).

PROJECT OBJECTIVES to benefit King’s Landing residents include:

• Facilitate meaningful careers for unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise disadvantaged teens and adults in southwest Florida's thriving food-service industry.

• Teach soft skills and improve literacy among at-risk job seekers thus lowering the education gap to facilitate employment.

• Create a unified community identity and mission statement and promote them with a charitable food-products brand.

• Create entrepreneurial opportunities for low-income residents, allowing them to achieve self-sufficiency by selling locally harvested food items.

• Foster a self-sustaining economic development model by accumulating all profits from community food-product sales as well as from rental fees from the community kitchen and reinvesting them in the community.

• Feed thousands of food-insecure residents annually by canning and preserving healthy fruits and vegetables grown in their local community garden as well as donated by Harry Chapin Food Bank and Winn Dixie Grocery.

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• Improve the nutritional health for all members of the community by distributing healthy foods from the community garden and food bank along with recipes for meals that they can make at home.

• Teach nutritional health to youth, as well as to their parents, using fun, interactive, and kid-friendly cooking seminars that teach culinary arts and nutritional health. ***

PROJECT OVERVIEW This is a collaborative project between Golden Industries of King’s Landing, Inc. (GIKL) and board members of the King’s Landing Improvement Association (KLIA). These two partners, GIKL and KLIA, have a long and successful history of combining their resources while working together to improve the King’s Landing community. KLIA owns and operates the King’s Landing Community Center while GIKL employs the Center's resident coordinator. This project has two main elements, including:

1. King’s Landing Community Garden (KLCG) o Started in 2013, run by KLIA

2. Cooking Training and Credentialing Program (CTC) o Started in 2014, run by GIKL.

These elements, KLCG and CTC are not new, but this project combines them in a new and exciting way. Both KLCG and CTC will take on new roles and responsibilities and pursue new objects, notably nutrition education, hunger relief, and entrepreneurialism. Their scopes will also expand. Use of the KLCG is now limited to 30 households, and the CTC program can only teach 10 participants at one time. This project, however, will affect a much larger portion of the low-income King's Landing community. The CTC education will be delivered using a new format that is

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inclusive of more community residents. Moreover, fruits and vegetables from the community garden will be publicly available for hunger relief. COOKING TRAINING AND CREDENTIALING This is a fairly new program at GIKL that takes disadvantaged teens and unemployed or underemployed adults and gives them the culinary skills and professional certifications they need in order to have meaningful careers in the food industry. Again, and this is an important distinction, we are talking about real careers, not quick jobs. The food industry in Mineral City is growing rapidly at an average of 8% monthly since 2014. This growth is tied to the fact that 35% of our region’s economy dependents on hospitality industries associated with tourism. Because of this growth, there has been a windfall of new food-industry employment opportunities. The problem is King’s Landing residents are excluded from new food-industry careers due to their insufficient soft skills and literacy as well as a lack of relevant professional credentials. Credentials improve career prospects for applicants by increasing their credibility with food-industry employers. All participants in the CTC program earn ServSafe® Food Handler’s Certifications, which New Brunswick laws require for any type of food-industry employment. Furthermore, these Certifications are known among food-industry employers, universally. CTC participants learn fundamental soft skills, including resume writing and interview preparation, as well as job-readiness training, both of which improve levels of literacy. In each 6-week long CTC course, participants receive 180 hours of classroom time, the bulk of which is spent doing hands-on learning in the teaching kitchen in the King’s Landing Community Center. Paulo Rodriguez, an experienced and certified chef, is the CTC instructor. As a former at-risk youth himself, Chef Paulo is a source of both education and encouragement, especially to younger CTC students.

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WHY CAREERS MATTER Our participants' goals in CTC are not food-service jobs, but food-industry careers. Career-employment means self-sufficiency, livable wages, and a higher quality-of-life. It means employment benefits, like health insurance and retirement plans. Most of all, a career means confidence and a sense of purpose, which can be life changing for our participants and their families. Out of the 6 CTC courses GIKL has held so far, 70% of participants, including teens and adults, obtained food-industry careers within 3-6 months. With this new program, we expect to reach 80% in 1-3 months and at a lower cost-per-participant. The CTC program location is a teaching kitchen in the King’s Landing Community Center. The main infrastructure of the kitchen was funded by a Federal CDGB grant, but the kitchen's equipment and materials came from a 2013 grant awarded from your organization. Without the Garnet Foundation, there would be no teaching kitchen at King’s Landing. Now we are asking for your help again. KING'S LANDING COMMUNITY GARDEN The King’s Landing Community Garden was started by KLIA in 2013 with support from multiple grant funders, including Fiskars Corporation, Dardens Restaurants, and the Mineral City Sunrise Rotary Club. The KLCG currently feeds hundreds of low-income residents who manage individual garden plots containing diverse fruits and vegetables, including many species native to New Brunswick. In this project, KLCG will increase its production by consolidating individual family plots into larger sectors of key produce items. This will create a sustainable food-sourcing model that provides nutritious foods to fight community-wide hunger and increase nutritional health community wide. King’s Landing is a food desert where food insecurity, obesity, and malnourishment are far too common. These issues are the partial results of

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poor nutritional education, especially for youth. Another contributing factor to poor community health is the absence of personal or public means of transportation from the King’s Landing community to grocery stores or other places where healthy foods are sold. As a result, residents’ diets consist of low-quality fast foods or processed snacks from nearby convenience stores and gas stations reachable on foot or by bicycle. The King’s Landing Community Center previously tried distributing produce items from the community garden or donated from food banks directly to residents, but the short shelf life of the produce caused it to spoil quickly, leaving much of it inedible and wasted. Our plan with this project is to preserve produce items by vacuum sealing and storing them in large freezers, thus preventing spoilage. We will distribute these healthy fruits and vegetables to thousands of King’s Landing residents annually through the community’s food bank, as well as provide home delivery to elderly residents. One way we will promote nutrition education is by having Chef Paulo develop healthy, kid-friendly recipes that incorporate ingredients from the food pantry and community garden. These will be distributed along with food pantry items. Chef Paulo, along with CTC program participants, will also put on nutrition education seminars and cooking demonstrations on food pantry days that are fun, interactive, and applicable to youth and adults. Example seminar topics include a “beat the heat smoothie day,” where residents create unique juice smoothies with fruits, vegetables, and herbs from the community garden while also learning about nutrition. Unemployment and underemployment are fundamental problems in King’s Landing. In addition to food-industry careers, this project will create entrepreneurial employment opportunities for residents. Excess produce from the community garden will be used in canning and pickling educational seminars for residents. These canned, pickled, and even fresh garden products will then be given a branding label that promotes King’s Landing community and the mission of this project as a charitable brand to promote awareness and raise proceeds outside of King’s Landing. Residents will sell

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these food products at farmer’s markets and flea markets, which are popular in Mineral City, as well as to local restaurants—King’s Landing garden has already a loyal customer for its collard greens in a local barbecue restaurant. King’s Landing entrepreneurs will receive 70% of net profits from these sales, while 30% will be reinvested in the community garden and this project. For another revenue stream, the Community Center teaching kitchen will be made available for daily rental to local food entrepreneurs, such as caterers or food cart vendors. Together, these various revenue streams will lessen this projects dependence on outside funding and make both the project and the King's Landing community self-sustaining. SUMMARY With this project, we will promote economic development in King's Landing by creating a professional workforce for food-industry careers in the growing hospitality sector of southwest Florida. Simultaneously, we will raise quality-of-life levels for disadvantaged families in King’s Landing by improving nutritional health and combatting hunger for thousands of low-income residents annually. *** KING'S LANDING COMMUNITY OVERVIEW King’s Landing is the epitome of a disadvantaged community. Its 3,500-residents include low-income families of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Median-household income in King's Landing is $24,000 for a four-person household. As a result of its widespread poverty, King’s Landing has one of the highest consolidated crime rates in America. Moreover, its residents suffer from low levels of employment, education, and literacy. Residents are also geographically and socially isolated from Mineral City because King's Landing has no readily available public or private transportation. Residents are thus prevented from economic participation

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and social integration in Mineral City, as evidenced by their total exclusion from current career opportunities in the growing regional food industry. King’s Landing has an inordinate number of short-term renters who have low levels of economic stability. Since turnover of residents is high in this community, fostering a sense of communal solidarity and strength is an important objective of this project. The community garden has already begun to improve the unity of King’s Landing because it has created a central location for positive interaction in addition to being a source of community pride. Evidence of the garden's positive affect can be seen in King’s Landing’s crime rate, which has been gradually declining since 2013. In 2012, there were 271 crimes reported in King’s Landing, including 96 assault cases, while in 2014, 162 crimes were reported, a 41% overall decrease. ***VOLUNTEERS Voluntarism is central to the missions of both GIKL and KLIA, and it is also important for this project. For example, GIKL has 800 employees and more than 1,700 active volunteers. Some GIKL programs ask participants for a modest program fee, but this can be waived in exchange for 8 hours of volunteer service. Oftentimes, participants perform their volunteer service in the King's Landing Community Garden. The volunteer coordinator at GIKL, Natalie Tursi, manages a vast network of volunteers. GIKL also participates in court-ordered volunteer programs as well as service learning opportunities for disadvantaged K-12 students and university students studying disability services. For this project, KLIA will use local volunteers from King’s Landing to manage the garden, preserve produce, and create food products. All volunteers will learn soft skills, literacy, nutritional health, and entrepreneurialism. Service learning volunteers from New Brunswick Gulf Coast University will also join in the project, thus giving these university students the opportunity for hands-on training in economic development.

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SUSTAINABILITY STATEMENT GIKL programs served 39,630 people in 5 Florida counties in 2014. Our organization's ability to serve 1 of every 30 people in southwest Florida is the result of a long history of community-based services and programs. Just recently, GIKL was named 2015’s Best Charitable Organization in southwest Florida. We fund 55% of our program costs using the retail revenues from our 30 retail stores while the remaining 45% comes from grant awards from our generous community partners, like Garnet Foundation. In addition to our programs making impacts in the communities we serve, they have also received regional media attention, including recent stories about CTC and King’s Landing Community Garden on News Time and NCR’s local WQCU affiliate. KLIA has been active in King’s Landing for over 30 years, where it has provided services that prevent delinquency among at-risk youth and promote self-sufficiency for disadvantaged adults. Given its proven efficacy as the point-of-entry for low-income or at-risk residents who require services or referrals, KLIA has both the capacity and expertise to manage economic development projects in King’s Landing. *** GIKL uses EPO Data System software from Social Scenes Inc. to record demographic and performance data about participants and program results based on several variables. For this project, KLIA and GIKL will use ETO and other external data collection tools to record demographic data for participants and performance data for individual project elements. Recordable data can include the number of residents who received fruits and vegetables for hunger relief or attended seminars for nutrition education, as well as the pre- and post-program performance results for CTC participants. Employment outcomes for CTC graduates and entrepreneurs will also be

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recorded using periodical follow-up interviews and consultations with program staff. Biographical narratives detailing this project's community impacts and benefits for King’s Landing residents will be recorded. All data gathered will be shared directly with Garnet Foundation. *** We will continue to fund this project long-term using diversified revenue streams, including internal financial support from GIKL and KLIA, grant funds from Garnet and other partners, as well as revenues generated from this project. Our objective is a self-sustaining revenue model, which we hope to achieve within 1-2 year's time. With sincere gratitude for your consideration, Ethan Lazuk Grant Writer Golden Industries of King's Landing Fort Myers, FL 33905