Simple Sparrow
Simple Sparrow Care Farm is a trauma-informed educational care farm on four acres in Hutto, Texas, northeast of Austin. Founded by ordained pastor, hospice chaplain, and Army veteran Jamie Tanner, it began as her family’s two-acre hobby farm. Today it is a 501(c)(3) where people of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities heal by caring for the gardens and animals. The farm serves an average of 4,000 individuals each year — without spending a dollar on marketing. 16 partner therapists, two paid staff, and dozens of volunteers help make this happen.
Simple Sparrow's Mission
Simple Sparrow Care Farm collaborates with community partners to provide trauma-informed educational and therapeutic care farm programs and services for all ages, backgrounds, and abilities to Learn + Grow + Heal.
Several evidence based methods, including TBRI (Trust Based Relational Intervention) and NMT (Neuro-Sequential Model of Therapeutics), are integrated into practical farming lessons for rich somatosensory experiences, relational connections, and meaningful education.
They consistently evaluate their programs and services to determine the efficacy of their care farm model, which contributes to national and global care farming research.
Farm Snapshot
Location
Hutto, Texas (central Texas, Williamson County)
Founded
Began as a hobby farm opened to the community; incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 2017
Farm Size
4 acres, which includes the founding family’s 2 acres plus 2 adjoining acres (home to “The Bird House”) rented to the nonprofit since 2021
Business Structure
501(c)(3) educational nonprofit (not a therapy clinic), overseen by a seven-member board
Staffing
2 paid staff (executive director and operations manager), contract education staff, 16 independent partner therapists, 20–40 regular weekly volunteers, and 2–3 interns per semester
Operating Budget
$350,000 a year is the baseline to cover existing salaries and costs; a separate “opportunity” budget of $650,000 accounts for additional projects and staffing if growth funding is secured
Programs & Services
On-farm sessions with licensed partner therapists; office and flex-space rental for therapists; Book & Bunny preschool story time; First Saturdays open farm; seasonal festivals; care farm camps; internships; an online trauma-informed care farming course; consulting and coaching
Who They Serve
About 4,000 people a year of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, including foster and adoptive families, children in state care, survivors of human trafficking, veterans, at-risk youth, preschoolers and their caregivers, and neurodivergent children and adults
ORIGIN
Simple Sparrow’s roots run back to Jamie Tanner’s own childhood. Raised by a single mother who worked full time, Tanner spent her summers on family farms and ranches, where she came to feel as at home with livestock, porch cats and farm dogs as she did in the city. When the effects of her own childhood trauma began to catch up with her, she found that being outside—gardening, caring for animals, and teaching her kids to do the same—measurably improved her mental health. “It honestly helped me be a better mom, a better friend, a better wife,” she said.
Tanner convinced her husband to trade their suburban home for a two-acre hobby farm. When friends mentioned wanting to garden or raise backyard chickens, her answer was simple: “Come out and I’ll teach you!”
Tanner’s earliest partners included organizations supporting survivors of human trafficking who needed a safe place to reconnect with community. Soon foster and adoptive families arrived. Advocates told Tanner that children who had been through significant trauma needed a safe space, and her fenced property full of animals fit the bill. Agencies began hosting events at the farm, and Tanner taught the children to hold baby chicks “gently and kindly, with self-control.” For many, especially kids from the inner city, it was the first time they had ever touched an animal. As the chicks settled into their hands, she would ask about the people who made them feel safe—a coach, a pastor, a foster parent.
A few days after an event, a foster mother called. Her daughter, who struggled with rage that sometimes ended in holes punched in walls, had started to escalate. Then her daughter stopped, took a breath, and said, “Miss Jamie taught me I could be kind and gentle and self-controlled.” Tanner, who is not a mental health professional, knew something had shifted for the girl.
Word spread. Local therapists kept hearing about the farm from their clients and called to ask whether Tanner was a therapist herself. “I’m a weird goat woman with a hobby farm,” she told them, “and I’m just opening it up to the community.” Therapists began bringing clients out, and fellow veterans learning to milk goats and make cheese told her it was better than any therapy they had tried.
The push to formalize came from a friend. Tanner, then in seminary preparing for church ministry, had “zero desire” to start a nonprofit. But Sarah mapped out what it would take in Texas, connected her with a nonprofit attorney who drafted the bylaws at a reduced rate, and paid for it herself. “The door opened, and I had a choice to either step through or not,” Tanner said. Simple Sparrow became a 501(c)(3) in 2017, with Sarah as co-founder.
The organization’s name carries two reminders. “Simple” is a call to live simply — for Tanner, to love God and love others. “Sparrow” comes from the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” a favorite of her great-grandmother Helen, the person who made her feel safe, seen, and known. “I want to make people feel that way,” Tanner said.
From the start, Tanner treated the farm as a pilot. With no U.S. care farming network yet in place, she drew on studies and models from European care farming researchers and focused on developing and evaluating trauma-informed programs.
Tanner’s doctoral work later analyzed years of Simple Sparrow’s programs to identify the most budget-friendly and impactful ones, then trained 10 care farmers to replicate and customize the model. Sites ranged from an adolescent residential treatment facility and a dementia care home to a Montessori school and a 10-acre care farm on a 6,000-acre property in New South Wales, Australia. Each measured mental health and quality-of-life outcomes in its own population.
PROGRAMS, STAFFING & OPERATIONS
The Farm and the Bird House
For its first several years, Simple Sparrow operated entirely on the two acres where Tanner’s family still lives. Visitors used the family’s kitchen and bathroom, and children occasionally broke or took the Tanner kids’ belongings. Renting nearby houses for events helped for a while. Then Marty Smith, an occupational therapist specializing in trauma and sensory work, and her husband donated an RV that became the farm’s first office and public restroom — a welcome spot for nursing mothers and toddlers, too.
In 2021, Tanner’s in-laws bought the two acres next door and began renting them to the nonprofit. The house there is called The Bird House—partly because Tanner’s mother-in-law goes by Bird, and partly because of what it stands for. “Like a bird, when they live in a birdhouse, they don’t move in permanently,” Tanner explained. Therapists, clients and interns come for a season, grow strong, and fly away. The Bird House holds therapists’ offices, flex rooms, classrooms, event space, and restrooms. It is deliberately modest: “This isn’t some big fancy multi-million-dollar facility. These are things you can replicate yourself.”
The farm is laid out in regulation zones grounded in the neurobiology of trauma. Chickens and geese anchor the up-regulating, alerting zone; goats and pigs sit in a middle zone; and rabbits rest under shade trees beside hammocks in a calming, down-regulating zone. A roughly 65-pound tortoise is the most down-regulating resident of all. Matching an activity to a person’s energy helps clients feel seen, heard, and safe. The farm’s animals also include sheep, turkeys, ducks, guinea fowl, honey bees, dogs, cats, and Jacopo the llama, who guards the herd. Most were donated.
Staffing
Simple Sparrow began with an advisory board. During the pandemic, when the farm could stay open while schools and churches could not, demand and volunteer interest surged. Some board members shifted to a working role and built out a volunteer program. “When you have a robust volunteer program, it means you save a ton of money on staffing and payroll,” Tanner said.
Staffing has ebbed and flowed with funding. At its peak, grant-funded work-study partnerships for trafficking survivors and at-risk youth supported eight staff. Today, the farm runs with two paid staff: Executive Director Judy Holcomb and Operations Manager Liberty Smith. Tanner serves as volunteer president of the board. An education lead is paid hourly on contract when care farm camps fill—a model Tanner recommends for any role an organization can’t yet reliably sustain.
The rest of the work is carried by 20 to 40 regular volunteers each week, mostly doing groundskeeping. Two to three high school and university interns per semester help with animal care and nonprofit administration. Training them is intentional. “What can I do today to replicate myself later?” Tanner asks. “You teach other people to do what you’re doing today, and then they do it for you tomorrow.”
Partner Therapists
Sixteen licensed professionals are trained and certified in Simple Sparrow’s trauma-informed care farming model and vetted to meet clients on the farm. This includes recreational therapists, licensed professional counselors, social workers, speech therapists, and occupational therapists. When The Bird House opened, there were two therapists; demand has grown so quickly that scheduling now takes careful management.
Each therapist runs a private practice and rents space from Simple Sparrow. Working side by side, they offer families a collective-impact, wraparound model much like a hospital care team. This is especially valuable for families caught in multigenerational cycles within the court system. Tanner provides spiritual care when a family requests it. Therapists can also hire Simple Sparrow staff, or a community volunteer trained by the farm, to help with larger family or group sessions.
The organizational structure helps manage risk. Simple Sparrow is an educational nonprofit, not a therapy clinic, which keeps insurance costs and prices low. Texas requires each therapist to carry their own liability insurance, so responsibility for an incident rests first with the family, then the therapist, and then the farm’s own general liability and directors and officers (D&O) coverage. Every visitor signs a waiver drafted by a litigation attorney, and the farm posts Texas’s required agritourism liability signage.
On-Farm Programs
Alongside therapist-led sessions, Simple Sparrow runs its own educational programming. Programs are designed to introduce the community to care farming and trauma-informed care:
- Book & Bunny: A six-week story time for preschoolers and their grown-ups, offered twice a year. It is one of the farm’s longest-running programs.
- First Saturdays: Open farm from 9:00 to 11:00 A.M. on the first Saturday of every month.
- Chick-a-Palooza: A spring outreach festival where the farm sells chicks and local small businesses set up vendor booths.
- Fall Fest: A November festival, organized with the judicial system, for children in state care who rarely have the opportunity to attend festivals.
- Farmiversary: The farm’s anniversary open house each December.
- Care farm camps, internships, and space-sharing: Seasonal camps, semester internships, and free use of the venue for community groups and small businesses that lack space of their own.
Across every program, the farm incorporates opportunities for connection. Children cut flower bouquets for their caregivers, and clients who graduate from therapy can keep coming as volunteers. “We want to facilitate that healing journey and be a part of their community long term,” Tanner said.
Why a farm instead of an office? Tanner’s hypothesis, now under formal study, is that working outdoors with voice and choice—Does your body feel like pulling weeds today?—lets people tune into their own nervous systems and practice mindfulness in real time with a trusted person. Therapists tell her that rapport and breakthroughs that took 8 to 10 office or telehealth sessions now come much sooner on the farm.
Business Model
Simple Sparrow builds two budgets each year for board approval. The baseline covers rent, feed, vet bills and two paid staff — about $350,000 for 2026. A separate “opportunity” line, shown in its own color, lists the projects and positions the farm would add if funding came through, bringing the total to about $650,000. Grants are always treated as a bonus, never relied on. In 2026, new grants funded several programs, but a director of development and a salaried education director remain on the wish list.
Revenue comes from several streams:
- Training: An online trauma-informed care farming course, plus consulting and coaching from Tanner.
- Therapeutic tools: Sales of the Sequential Relational Path, a therapeutic tool that reinforces trauma-informed principles.
- Space rental: Therapist offices (from 10×10 to 12×15 feet) rent for $1,000 to $1,500 monthly depending on size, and à la carte rooms rent for $25 to $40 an hour on a sliding scale. As of October 2026, offices are fully rented.
- Farm products: Steady egg sales. The gardens and cut flowers are reserved for client activities, not income.
- Grants and donors: Foundation grants and a growing individual donor base.
Affordability for clients is built into the budget. Most partner therapists offer sliding-scale fees, some accept insurance, and a family resource fund provides scholarships so cost never turns anyone away. Local churches have covered a share of sessions for some families. Tanner and the executive director also won a grant to take a nonprofit management course at the University of Texas, where they learned to write grants themselves.
Outcomes are tracked through participant surveys, grant evaluations, regular therapist check-ins, and research—including a current intern study on how settings affect rapport and breakthroughs, and an earlier study with Southwestern University on cortisol levels in people holding rabbits.
10-minute virtual tour of Simple Sparrow:
Successes
- Community-powered growth: Simple Sparrow spends nothing on marketing, yet serves an average of 4,000 people each year. “You find people that share your passion and they come alongside you in this work,” Tanner says.
- A growing therapist network: Partner therapists grew from two when The Bird House opened to 16, offering clients coordinated, wraparound care.
- Faster breakthroughs: Therapists report building rapport and reaching breakthroughs with clients sooner on the farm than in office or telehealth settings.
- A replicable model: Tanner’s doctoral research showed that 10 care farmers—from a Montessori school to a 6,000-acre Australian property—could scale and customize the model and measure mental health and quality-of-life outcomes. Her book, Trauma-Informed Care Farming, shares the approach more widely.
- A lean, resilient structure: As an educational nonprofit with layered liability coverage, two paid staff and a strong volunteer corps, the farm keeps prices low and adapts as funding ebbs and flows.
- Investing in the next generation: A steady pipeline of student interns learns animal care and nonprofit administration, and some, like Operations Manager Liberty Smith, have grown into leadership roles.
What's been challenging
- Separating family and calling: Running a nonprofit from the family’s back porch meant visitors in the house and children’s belongings broken or taken. An RV and later The Bird House created needed boundaries.
- Sustaining staff: Staffing has dropped from a peak of eight to two as grants and partnerships ended, and key roles like a development director remain unfunded.
- Losing animals: Animal deaths are hard on staff and clients alike, though they can also open important conversations about grief.
- Being a good neighbor: Event parking has required improvements, and the farm sends treats to neighbors after big events. It helps that one neighbor is now the executive director!
- Limited capacity: Offices are fully rented, therapist scheduling is tight, and financially assisted therapy has at times had a waitlist.
Learn More
CFN Virtual Deep Dive: Watch the recording of the discussion and presentation
Simple Sparrow website
Contact Jamie to inquire about care farm consulting and coaching
Case study prepared by Care Farming Network, with support from Simple Sparrow.