National Gardening Association, Inc.

This nonprofit has been guided through significant change in the last several months. While they have struggled financially for several years as many nonprofits do, they are in the process of restructuring and have been able to still directly impact children and educators across the country with school garden grants, direct garden installs, free lessons, and resources while remaining within the industry standard for administrative overhead allocations.

You get very little bang for your buck with this nonprofit, there are many other more efficient ways to help schools implement gardening programs, and many local nonprofits who donate all proceeds to the schools. Notice this place has no Executive Director or President, or anyone in charge who is a credentialed professional with expertise in education and horticulture. Grow To Learn, Food Fight, Green Education Foundation, are just a few worthy nonprofits who will put your donation to good use. Check out 990s, and notice when there is no recent financial statement or annual report available. Red flags! Our children's education is important, please take time to research how much of your money actually goes to the schools.

I love National Gardening Association!! I used to be more involved in our school system and worked closely with them. Great to see them on national news so often recently helping kids.

I recently got involved with NGA (last Fall) as a donor and volunteer. I am really impressed with how many kids and schools they have given gardens to around the US. I have been asked to help introduce the organization to friends and I am doing that because I think they are the real deal.

They had a couple of big lay offs in recent years and all of the educators responsible for much of the content and programming are gone. Revenue has been plummeting, just a sad situation and their governing board seems to be worse than useless in helping to reverse the decline.

This organization is why sites like Great Nonprofits are so helpful and necessary. Their main function appears to be covering payroll as the single largest expense, the next largest expense is buying retail products to sell through their catalog, the 990s available on Guidestar are a bright red flag.

They used to have a lot of grants but now there are hardly any and the few remaining have very small amounts of awards. It looks like they lost most of their major sponsors, wonder why?