Blooming Health Farms to launch Egg-To-Table program after Weld Community Foundation grant ...Saudi Arabia

Throughout his work with the Weld Judicial District, Sean Short has seen the impact working with chickens can have on young people.

For a few years now, the Blooming Health Farms co-founder has helped juveniles in the criminal justice system satisfy community service requirements and learn a few skills along the way.

Some who have spent time with Short even returned to the north Greeley farm for more.

“I’ve had several of those kids — several being three — say, ‘Can I come back and help you out when I’m done with my community service hours?’ ” Short said. “I was taken aback. … It was the buy-in that I saw from those youth I only had a few hours of contact with that showed me I need to be developing a program that integrates this.”

The Blooming Health Farms Egg-To-Table Program aims to be just that.

“It’s a 16-week program that’s going to teach the youth everything from hatching chickens to how to take care of them to selling their eggs,” Short said.

Blooming Health Farms began in April 2019 as an aquaponics farm focused on bringing sustainable agriculture to the community while providing counseling and job skills training to at-risk youth.

In 2022, the farm added chickens to the mix. It started as simply selling eggs, but quickly ballooned into a handful of programs focusing on chickens — including the “Hatch The Chicken” program, in which people can rent all the equipment to hatch chickens of their own, and the “Rent the Chicken” program, in which people can rent egg-laying hens and all the supplies to enjoy fresh eggs daily.

The next iteration of what the farm calls “chicken pimpin’ ” — a phrase they’ve adopted to reflect their approach of pushing boundaries and driving change — is the Egg-To-Table program.

Short is planning a pilot run for the program over the summer. From there, he hopes to take what he learns, adjust accordingly and officially launch the program next spring.

Short said he chose the 16-week curriculum so, once up and running, it can mirror a traditional school semester. When adding in the standard breaks students get from school, Short said the final version of the program will span 20 weeks.

“The idea is a de facto after-school program with about three hours of contact time,” Short said. “The idea is twice a week so we can essentially split up some of the focuses. One of the days will be more farm work and farm job training, and the other will be more life skills, mental health, therapy and support.”

The split, two-day schedule also fits perfectly into the bigger picture of Blooming Health Farms with its motto: “Growing food, growing people.”

“Literally one day will be growing food, and the other will be growing people,” Short said.

Though the program will not be specifically for juveniles needing to fulfill community service hours, Short knows those young people will make up at least a part of every class. So he’s designing the program to be able to serve as many needs as possible.

Alongside standard community service hours, certain juveniles are assigned mental health therapy or therapy for substance abuse depending on their circumstances.

“I’ve woven those into the program so we can serve that need as well,” Short said.

And while the idea for the program had been floating around his head for a while now, a $12,500 grant from the Weld Community Foundation earlier this year expedited the timeline.

Short says the grant — which the Weld Community Foundation awards to nonprofits with programs aimed at benefiting county youth — will be used primarily to hire two peer mentors and an assistant to help him run the course.

One mentor is already penciled in. He is a teen Short has been working with in a number of different capacities.

For the second, Short is looking outside his typical ecosystem.

“I don’t know if this is the right answer, but I’m looking for kids in FFA or 4H to fill that other position,” he said. “To kind of show, ‘Hey, I may not necessarily been in trouble, but agriculture has influenced my life.’ ”

While the Littler Youth Grant came from the Weld Community Foundation, Short said the Egg-To-Table program, and many other things Blooming Health Farms has been able to do, wouldn’t be possible without support from the community and area nonprofits.

“We wouldn’t be here without the community support,” Short said, acknowledging both private donations and partnerships with other nonprofits.

Since the people each nonprofit is trying to help are pretty specific, Short says there’s never any sort of competition, only more collaboration.

“People are stepping up to say, ‘OK, this is what I’m doing. I’m curious what you’re doing. Where are the gaps?’ ” Short said. “Those conversations are going on consistently.”

For more information about Blooming Health Farms, including how to donate, go to bloominghealthfarms.com.

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