Hawthorne Valley Association Inc

On January 23, 2023, the Hawthorne Valley Association (HVA) Board of Trustees adopted a resolution formally committing the organization to the pursuit of “Net Positivity”. Our aspiration is to work towards a Net Positive future, which means we aim to provide a living model for our students and our community that gives more to the environment than it extracts. We have set an ambitious goal of raising $250,000 to help us implement transformative change via our three Net Positive goals:

Net Positive Education: This encompasses vital aspects such as Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB), as well as Climate and Eco-Literacy.
• DEIB training and workshops.
• Class trips that provide students with immersive, hands-on experiences encompassing DEIB learning goals.

Net Positive Employment: By supporting us, you help us provide living wages for our dedicated teachers, allowing them to focus on their calling with a sense of security and purpose.
• Teacher development to provide our dedicated faculty the ability to pursue personal and professional enrichment.

Net Positive Campus: Your generosity aids in the development of a campus that is not only safe and healthy but also sustainable. Through initiatives like zero-carbon buildings, we aim to reduce our ecological footprint and set an example for responsible stewardship.
• Installation of solar panels on our outdoor pavilion.

As an organization situated on 900 acres that include diverse ecosystem habitats and species taxa, a working biodynamic farm and dairy, a K-12 Waldorf school, a retail Farm Store and a Farmscape Ecology research center, Hawthorne Valley is uniquely positioned to engage a broad spectrum of staff, students and visitors in a place-based experience of Net Positive.

Net Positive Strategy & Opportunities

● As we are defining and collecting data to establish the Net Positive baseline, we are running a concurrent participatory design process with internal stakeholders to surface Net Positive ‘opportunities’ that can address identified baseline hot spots and key issues and/or leverage Hawthorne Valley assets in ways synergistic with the mission and vision. An overview of the design process, key activities/milestones, and artifacts can be shared with others to utilize and replicate.
● These opportunities range from close-in, ‘low hanging fruit’ actions such as creating a biodiversity trail on campus to aspirational and more complex activities such as partnering with ecosystem players to advance agrivoltaics research and possibilities. Close-in actions are defined as generally achievable with the current capacity of the organization, while aspirational ones will require additional time and funding resources, dedicated personnel to shepherd them, and partners, funders and/or investors.
● Key milestones to date have included ideation workshops around a Net Positive Farm Model, Net Positive Education (with a focus on high school level) and Net Positive Organization (with an emphasis on employment and org culture). The ideas arising from these workshops are currently going through a process of prioritization based on funding viability and executional feasibility.
● The prioritized opportunity concepts will be featured dynamically in relation to the baseline ‘tracker’ (still being evolved) on a website for informational and pedagogical value. We also hope that highlighting the efforts we hope to invest in as an organization and community will mobilize a larger ecosystem to move with us - and draw fundraising support and partner interest. Key quantitative goals and accomplishments will be represented in a central ‘dashboard’ that may be updated on an annual, biannual or quarterly basis, depending on their availability.

Under the current executive leadership, Hawthorne Valley has a solid track record of planning and executing on complex capital projects. In 2022, Hawthorne Valley constructed a 56’ X 90’ open air pavilion to cover an exis8ng basketball court, providing sheltered play space as well as a venue for assemblies, concerts, and events for HVA and the wider community. This pavilion is the site for planned solar panels.

In 2020 Hawthorne Valley erected four 2300 square foot green houses that served as classrooms for the school during the pandemic and that are now part of farm opera8ons. A fifth greenhouse was erected in 2022 specifically for the school to use as a middle school classroom and gathering space.

In 2018, with the support of a local foundation and in collaboration with other partners, Hawthorne Valley led an initiative to open Rolling Grocer 19, a mobile market and retail grocery store in Hudson to address issues of food access and food insecurity by using a tiered pricing system. In 2021, Hawthorne Valley turned this over to the community of Hudson while still providing services that include the purchasing of inventory through HVA’s established distribution channels.

In 2011, Hawthorne Valley built a 2,000 square foot practical arts building, HVA’s first net positive building on campus capable of generating more electricity than it uses. In addition to the projects listed, in the last 20 years Hawthorne Valley has built a 10,000 square foot Arts Wing on the school, an 8,400 square foot retail grocery store (with NYSERDA support), a 3,000 square foot duplex residence for farmers, a 3,840 square foot maintenance shop with1,520 square feet of heated shop space, a 14,000 square foot loafing barn, two hoop houses for animal husbandry (4,300 square feet) and hay storage (6,500 square feet), a 2,400 square foot manure handling facility, a new CSA washroom, as well as a host of renovations and capital improvements to existing buildings. In that same timeframe, HVA purchased an adjacent property and renovated the exis8ng house as a permanent home for HVA’s Farmscape Ecology Program. HVA also purchased a 104-acre farm and renovated the existing house and barn to
launch Place Corps, a Gap Year Program.

The first step toward our baseline was a participatory, stakeholder-led process to develop the org’s Net Positive framework. This process was inspired by the traditional ESG ‘materiality assessment’ typically conducted for a corporate organization, but it was adapted to the small organization in a way that allowed for more democratic ownership, transparency and values/philosophy/activities alignment. Through one-on-one and small group interviews with leadership of the major program areas, departments or functions, critical issues across categories spanning ecological, social and economic were qualitatively surfaced and synthesized as elements of a representative framework.

The next step was a reconciliation of this framework against relevant sustainability and impact standards - e.g. Net Positive Project, Nature Positive, B Corp, ILFI, GRI, UN SDGs, Demeter - to participate in the frontier of the ecological and impact conversation, identify missing elements or perspectives, and source potential definitions and metrics.

Finally, baseline definitions and goals were then co-developed with internal owners of issue areas in a subsequent round of one-on-one or small group meetings.

To date, HVA has raised over $800,000 for our Net Positive campaign and has received several grants for Net Positive Projects. We are in the running to receive a major grant from NY State Consolidated Funding which would enable us to use our Emergency Assistance to Nonpublic Schools Program (EANS funding) which covers installation costs for some of our Net Positive projects. We also received a grant from NE-DBIC to build a biofilter to recycle our creamery waste water and return it to the aquafer.