The Somerville Community Growing Center, a nonprofit offering green space and community programming, has struggled to generate enough fundraising revenue amid competitive grant applications and lessened individual donations. More nonprofits are vying for the same grants due to decreases in federal funding, operations and volunteer manager Betsy Larkin said.
The Growing Center’s staff and board have been in a constant state of brainstorming, searching for creative ways to make enough money to scrape by, Larkin said. In 2025, the center generated $43,876 in revenue but had $56,638 in expenses, meaning it had a $12,762 loss, according to federal 990 filings.
By the time the Growing Center’s annual Salvage Sale fundraiser came around this past Saturday, it had implemented Instagram techniques, bake sales and port-a-potty posters into its fundraising repertoire. While those efforts have helped, there is pressure for each future event to be successful enough to generate much-needed funds.
“People are really tightening their purse strings this year, and maybe even kind of holding their breaths to see what happens with the election,” Larkin said. “Maybe they’re just plain not focused on the community organizations around them because they’re focused on their own livelihoods.”
Larkin said despite doing three times as much advertising and promotion for this year’s Salvage Sale, the total income decreased by 13 percent compared with the previous year. There were 15 percent fewer attendees, she said.
Board president Sasha Rollinger, who works as a financial officer at MIT, pointed to a larger problem: lessened federal funding. A survey of 380 organizations by the Center for Effective Philanthropy found that 57 percent of nonprofit chief executives have found it harder to secure grant funding since January 2025.
“My diagnosis is because there are fewer government dollars for certain programs, there are more nonprofits approaching the same number of foundations, so there’s just less money to go around as a result,” she said.
Board treasurer Sarah Moylan, who works as director of accounting for Boylston Properties, further explained the current funding landscape.
“What happens is that organizations that do rely on that [government funding] and aren’t getting it are now competing for the same grants that we are,” she said. “Even individual giving – people are like, ‘Oh my god, where do I give my money?’ There’s just less in the pot and the same amount of organizations to give it to.”
The Growing Center, a short walk from Union Square, has been around since 1993 within a fence and trees on Vinal Avenue.
Salvage Sale visitors walked through the gate to a greeting from a volunteer and could continue on into the clearing where several artists and makers formed a semicircle. Ben Johnson, a Somerville marketing writer, sold his art on prints, bookmarks and greeting cards.
“I do my art alone in my little basement studio,” Johnson said. “It’s fun to be out in the world and actually see people come and look through my art and engage with it and smile and laugh.”
Behind the maker’s market, volunteers set out clothes, decor and household items on tables under a wood shelter.
Hadleigh Nunes, who just learned of the center and started volunteering in the past few months, helped maintain the area during the sale, shifting items to fill gaps as shoppers made selections.
“I like the sort of excitement of rummaging through things, and I like to kind of be able to help people and solve problems,” she said.
This year’s event featured a bake sale for the first time. Volunteers sold muffins, cookies and apple fritters, asking shoppers to pay what they could to support the center.
Adding bake sales to community events was one of the first initiatives Larkin brought to the table last winter as a solution to gaps in fundraising. She said the pay-what-you-want model is “a heck of a lot less expensive than any of the coffee shops or cafes.”
Megan Mathieu, a board member who volunteered to work the bake sale, said this year’s Salvage Sale was especially important through the lens of maintaining community events amid fundraising struggles.
“It’s a moment to turn to community and see how we can offer support in the best way, how we can still have programs that serve people the best with slightly more limited resources to do it,” Mathieu said.
Rollinger said building community and fundraising go hand-in-hand.
“We’re trying to not only think about how do we fundraise creatively, but friend-raise creatively, to keep people involved, because I think once people come back one, two, three times, then they’re more likely to regularly check … volunteer opportunities that we might have coming up,” she said.
This exposure is key to a strategy of finding individual donors to fill the gaps left by grants.
“It’s sort of a holistic approach to fundraising in the sense that it’s not just about asking for money, it’s also just getting more exposure,” Rollinger said.
Rollinger said the Growing Center just received its first city grant a few weeks ago; normally it would have three or four at this point.
With only two paid staff members, both part time, the center is already lean with spending. It relies almost entirely on volunteer work.
Ultimately, the decrease in income from this year’s Salvage Sale was “disapointing, but not surprising,” Larkin said.
Despite the changing funding landscape, board member Rachael Brady, a 28-year-old Harvard graduate student, said the Growing Center’s mission and community presence has stayed the same.
“We continue to keep growing and having new and different types of events,” Brady said. “The Growing Center has been a really good constant.”
This story is part of a partnership between the Cambridge Somerville Independent and the Boston University Department of Journalism’s Newsroom program.
