Our Tuition Model

Your contribution to FSNYC reflects both an investment in our programs and an investment in your own learning and growth. This ripples out into the community through the spiral model and we are honored that you choose to share resources with us so that we continue to provide urban agriculture programs across NYC.

Farm School NYC’s mission is to get urban agriculture training into the hands of NYC residents through a popular education model. In order to achieve this and sustain the expertise and logistics of educational programming, we aim to be transparent about course costs and participant contributions. We will continue to update payment options for our different offerings as they vary in length.

FSNYC programs were tuition-based for many years and during the COVID-19 pandemic (ongoing), FSNYC offered programs at low-cost and/or through a gift economy option. Due to the number of people we serve, the gift economy blossomed. Folks offered a variety of bartering and ‘gift’ options that were at once beautiful and unmanageable for our small staff. Given the diversity of gifts, it pulled at our capacity to track and activate the resources that were offered in exchange for programming.

Using an honor system, FSNYC encourages participants to read through the payment scale options to see what is the best fit. FSNYC calculates costs for each programmatic offering based on payments to farmer-facilitators, sites that host our programs, materials, curriculum development, coordination, and administration. Costs are not the same for all offerings due to variations in length, materials, and complexity.

Continuing to lean on solidarity economy principles in 2025, FSNYC returns to a sliding scale model to sustain our work.

Word Bank:

Sliding Scale: a scale that indicates prices which vary according to other factors such as income, expenses, and/or cost of living

Gift Economy: a system of exchange where things are not sold for money and instead are exchanged with other valuables, resources and may be given at a later time

Solidarity Economy: originating in Latin America this system prioritizes people and planet over profit by having community needs (housing, education, land, food, energy etc.) controlled and governed by the people