On Monday, the Teak Media + Communication team spent our annual volunteer day at Natick Community Organic Farm (NCOF), trading our desks for a sunny morning in the fields.
For the past 50 years, NCOF has been a fixture in Natick and the surrounding community. What started as a jobs program for local young people has grown into a farm rooted in education and environmental stewardship. Today, people of all ages come to NCOF to work, volunteer, learn, and pick up locally grown organic food.
In 2024 alone, volunteers gave more than 2,100 hours to the farm. And good news, there are plenty of ways to pitch in beyond a group day like ours. Individuals 18 and older, as well as school, business, religious and community groups, can sign up for activities ranging from seeding and harvesting to animal care. NCOF also relies on volunteers to help with their special events such as Maple Magic, Farm Fest and the Harvest Dinner.
The farm’s programming goes well beyond volunteer days, too. NCOF offers school-year and summer programs for kids, a Forest Gnomes outdoor classroom for preschoolers, teen jobs and volunteer opportunities, adult workshops and farm tours, and CSA shares for vegetables, flowers and meat.
We started in the flower fields, harvesting zinnias alongside NCOF’s flower manager and other volunteers. We then arranged the different color flowers together and trimmed the stems, bunching them to be sold to CSA members.
NCOF staff then gave us a tour of the rest of the farm, including the flower gardens and greenhouses, the post-and-beam barn, and the animals. We met baby turkeys, bunnies, baby bunnies, chickens, pigs and sheep. We also met the farm’s barn cats, placed through the MSPCA’s Barn Cat Program, which finds working homes for cats that aren’t well-suited to be indoors.
At lunch, we sat down with NCOF’s farm staff to talk through their communications challenges and create a more targeted comms strategy. We discussed their existing practices, from media story ideas and the annual appeal to donor asks, influencer engagement and their newsletter. A working farm has an abundance of content, but it’s important to prioritize stories and make an annual appeal to push the organization’s mission forward. Our advice, for a farm or any other small nonprofit, is to look for stories that tie to a bigger conversation, milestone moments, and tangible ways to show the mission in action. Stick to a few key stories, and when something is genuinely newsworthy, pick up the phone or send an email directly to a reporter to see how it lands. We talked about how to create more engaging and active social media platforms and how to reach donors through direct content and fundraising campaigns.
Before heading out, the team took a walk together on one of the farm’s trails to close out our experience.
It’s always a good day when we spend time together as a Teak Media team and give back to a nonprofit doing good work close to home. It also reinforces something we believe in: staying focused on the stories that matter most helps even a small organization’s communications team make an outsized impact. Thank you to Natick Community Organic Farm for hosting us. To learn more about the farm and get involved, visit www.natickfarm.org.
