Why Sow & Bloom is Committed to NPOs & CBOs: A Gardener’s Guide to Economic Biodiversity
In my garden, the cucumbers always come first. They vine fast, flower early, and fruit in quick succession. Within weeks of planting, they’ve conquered the trellis, their broad leaves casting deep shade over anything slower to grow. The watermelon vines—more intricate in leaf, more deliberate in pace—are left to survive on whatever scraps of light reach the soil.
It’s in this quiet patch of earth that I came to understand what happens when our economy focuses almost exclusively on venture-scale businesses and tech startups.
Venture-backed enterprises are the cucumbers of our economic garden. They're engineered and trained to grow fast, dominate markets, and deliver rapid returns. Their growth is not inherently bad; in fact, it can be spectacular to watch– its ubiquitous fruits enjoyed by the gardener with near instant gratification in comparison to the return on, say, watermelon. But when all our trellises, irrigation lines, and fertilizers are devoted to them, we create an ecosystem where slower growers such as nonprofits, grassroots organizations, cooperative enterprises are permanently shaded out. We end up with a singular crop of fruit with underwhelming flavor and variation.
Left unchecked, the overgrowth creates its own risks. In the garden, crowded cucumber leaves trap moisture, cutting airflow and inviting powdery mildew. Their unchecked sprawl attracts cucumber beetles, an opportunistic pest that thrive where diversity is absent. In the economy, the equivalents are stagnation, market bubbles, and extractive actors who flourish in the absence of healthy competition or complementary growth.
In contrast to the monoculture dominance of the “cucumber” start-up, I consider the Indigenous farmer’s practice of the “Three Sisters” method, where they planted corn, beans, and squash together so that each crop supported the others’ growth. The corn stood tall to give the beans a place to climb, the beans fixed nitrogen to feed the soil, and the squash spread wide to keep moisture in and weeds out. None grew at the expense of the others; instead, they flourished because their needs and strengths were intertwined. In an economy, this is the counterbalance to resource monopolization: when community-based organizations, funders, and innovators share resources and work in complement rather than competition alone, the ecosystem becomes richer, more resilient, and capable of sustaining abundance for all.
At Sow & Bloom, we believe an economy, like a garden, needs biodiversity to be healthy. Nonprofits are the watermelons in our analogy: they take longer to bear fruit, and their yield is less frequent, but when it comes, it is sustaining, sweet, and deeply rooted in community. These fruits do not thrive under the same investment strategies that power a high-speed software company. They need patient cultivation, consistent support, and enough sunlight to grow at their own pace.
Further similar to the holistic communal ecosystem created by the “Three Sisters,” community based organizations (CBOs) provide essential social goods and wraparound services: safety nets, cultural preservation, public health, environmental stewardship.
Our decision to focus on these organizations is intentional. It is not an argument against venture capital or technology. Instead, it is a recognition that without investment in slower-growing, mission-driven organizations, the ecosystem becomes brittle. Just as a monoculture garden is vulnerable to disease and collapse, an economy dominated by one type of growth, especially one that is fast, extractive, and scale-obsessed is far more fragile than it appears.
In practice, this means we direct resources, technical assistance, and strategic partnerships toward organizations that are often overlooked by mainstream capital markets. We help them climb their own trellises, strengthen their roots, and claim their share of the sunlight.
Because if we continue to invest only in the cucumbers, we will wake up one day to find the leaves covered in mildew, the pests abundant, and the sweetness of the watermelon lost to shade. And in that moment, our abundance will prove to have been an illusion all along.
At Sow & Bloom, we sow for resilience, not just for speed. We know the wait for the watermelon is worth it.
Written By: Ogechi Nwoko & Shannell Smith
