There are a lot of ways to talk about company culture. What actually defines it, though, is what people choose to do when nobody’s asking them to.
This month, JK Moving Services and CapRelo employees volunteered, ready to get their hands dirty, and helped plant 60,000 seedlings at the JK Community Farm’s annual Plant-A-Thon. And they were in good company: Approximately 350 volunteers total gathered at the farm just outside Round Hill, Virginia, for what has become the nonprofit’s biggest event of the year.
What the JK Community Farm does
The JK Community Farm is a nonprofit that grows fresh, chemical-free produce and donates 100% of it to local food pantries across the Washington, DC region. It runs on a small team of just three full-time staff members and depends on the generosity of volunteers to make each growing season possible.
This year’s crops include jalapeños, poblanos, bell peppers, acorn squash, butternut squash, tomatoes, and more – all of it destined for neighbors around the region facing food insecurity. By the end of this season, the farm expects to donate approximately 285,000 pounds of produce to local food pantries.
Since its founding, the JK Community Farm has raised more than 1.5 million pounds of food for the community – a number that keeps growing because of events exactly like this one.
The day in action
The Plant-A-Thon is organized into time slots, with corporate and community volunteer groups rotating through assigned rows and planting tasks. It’s organized, it’s purposeful, and it moves fast, because with 60,000 seedlings to get into the ground, it has to!
“A lot of corporate teams, mostly, but some community members too, will join us in each time slot, and they each have a task of a certain number of rows that they’ll get planted,” said Samantha Kuhn, JK Community Farm Executive Director.
For the JK and CapRelo team members who participated, it was a chance to step outside of the day-to-day and contribute something tangible to the community. There’s something uniquely grounding about working alongside your colleagues in a field with no screens, no meetings, just the work in front of you and the knowledge that it’s going somewhere that matters.
Why this matters to us
JK Moving Services and CapRelo have deep roots in the Northern Virginia and Loudoun County communities. Giving back to those communities isn’t something we think of as separate from who we are as a company – it’s part of it.
The food pantry need in our Loudoun County is real and growing. As Jennifer Montgomery, Executive Director of Loudoun Hunger Relief, which serves as a distribution hub for the farm’s produce, put it: “Having thousands of pounds of fresh produce locally grown is just such a gift to our neighbors here in Loudoun who are facing food insecurity.”
Volunteer-powered growing also stretches donations significantly further. Because the farm doesn’t pay for labor, every dollar donated translates to roughly three times as much food as it would if used to purchase produce at retail. That’s an efficiency story that any business-minded person can appreciate. But more importantly, it means more healthy food reaching more families.
Get involved
The JK Community Farm relies on volunteers year-round, not just during the Plant-A-Thon. The more hands on deck during the growing season, the more produce the farm can harvest. And the more it can send to the families who need it most.
If you’re interested in volunteering or supporting the farm with a donation, visit jkcommunityfarm.org to learn more.
We’re proud of our team members who showed up this spring. And we’ll see you in the fields next year.