Summer is in full swing here at CFI as we collect and share produce, host growing and cooking workshops, and fill the community gardens with plants and activity!
Earlier this year, CFI’s School Garden programming wrapped up the school year with a beehive of wonderful events celebrating our natural world! At the end of May, almost 200 students participated in our Sprouts first grade field trips and got to spend a day outside on a local farm. Students planted marigolds, made native wildflower seed balls using freshly harvested clay, hunted for bugs, inventoried pond life, tested their coordination and spirit with an obstacle course, made fruit kabobs, crafted their own seed packets, and in general got to use their whole self to engage with their environment. Experiences like this are fundamental to our mission because they help our future community leaders learn to value collaboration and understand that healthy food depends on a healthy and diverse natural environment. While Sprouts is on summer vacation, the Gardens Education team is keeping busy with lots of workshops, camps, and events, and running two community-based garden clubs for youth and adults.
Meanwhile, our daily work to build food security and equitable access continues. CFI’s Veggie Van mobile market is on the road bringing fresh local food to communities throughout our region using a pay-what-you-can, donation-based model that makes beautiful produce accessible to everyone. In addition to its regular weekly market stops, Veggie Van is reaching out to new areas and hosting “pop up” markets in various towns to serve more people throughout the region.
The CFI Donation Station maintained strong, stead distributions over the past few months with an average of 20 pantries participating every week. Donation Station has also been partnering with a local farmer who is donating use of their land and volunteering their time and expertise to help us grow some of our own crops, increasing the amount of variety of fresh food we can provide to our pantry partners. This partnership also builds more farming and gardening knowledge among our staff and volunteers that we can share with the community.
Speaking of sharing knowledge, our work to share the CFI Donation Station model has been gaining momentum over the past several months, as we’ve had conversations with organizations interested in developing a similar program. Since our last project update in March of 2022, we’ve supported a partner organization to pilot their own Donation Station in another part of Ohio, and we’ve provided initial consultation for additional groups in Ohio, Indiana, and Vermont. While we remain committed to our local, community-based work, empowering other communities helps to achieve long-term, systems-level change.
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Dear friends,
2022 is off to the races and spring is popping up everywhere here in Appalachian Ohio! As we prepare for another busy growing season, we’re ever grateful for our amazing family of generous donors like you. Thanks to your support for our mission, in 2022, we are gearing up to serve 45 partner agencies with our Donation Station, deepen community relationships with our community gardens, and continue to develop Veggie Van programming, returning to Coolville and Glouster on a weekly basis and exploring new opportunities for pop-up sites.
Working for equitable access to a thriving local food system in Southeastern Ohio means working with the seasons and the shifts in produce availability. Many farmers pause production during winter months, but Donation Station continues to operate its weekly distribution. One of Donation Station’s key efforts has been working to mitigate the gap in our produce supply by contracting farmers for winter food, whether through extended season growing or proper storage. Thanks to your support we have made continuous progress on this goal, and contracted 7 farmers this past winter.
Another component of working for food access during winter months is ensuring that individuals have recipes for utilizing seasonal produce. Our Discovery Kitchen has been hard at work developing and fine-tuning recipes that go out with our distribution each week, and that we share on social media. Seasonal eating means knowing lots of different ways to prepare winter squash! We are in the process of putting together a seasonal cookbook as a resource for all of our pantry partners as well as the general public, and as part of this process are recruiting a crew of recipe testers. Inviting feedback on recipes will help us create a resource that is truly for and by the community. Your support ensures that individuals know how to cook healthy meals with nutritious food they can easily grow on their own.
Working for food security also means supporting gardening, and our biggest projects right now are our garden giveaway events. Every spring we host a seed potato giveaway, seed giveaway, and plant start giveaway, and we just wrapped up our seed potato giveaway last week. These events are free and open to the public, providing gardening resources for anyone interested in growing their own food.
Before you know it we will be back to our summer schedule, attending the Athens Farmers Market twice every week, Chesterhill Produce Auction twice every week, hosting garden work parties 4 times every week, distributing fresh produce at least twice every week, and taking the Veggie Van out at least twice a week. This is all possible because of YOU! Thank you!
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We at Community Food Initiatives are so grateful to generous donors like you who make our work possible. We’d like to share some of the ways your contributions are supporting our team to Feed Families in Appalachian Ohio!
Did you know that every year, donors like you empower us to distribute 100,000 pounds of local produce to families in need? It takes a lot of hands to move all that food! From coordinating our produce purchases at the Athens Farmers Market and Chesterhill Produce Auction, to working the donation plots in our community gardens and bringing local food to folks in need through our Veggie Van, our COMCorps service members work tirelessly to turn your generous donations into food in the hands of our community! This year, we’re so grateful that we had the opportunity to host Raya Abner, Alex Armstrong, and Sonya Ferrier for their COMCorps term of service. Together, this amazing crew served 5100 hours over the course of 11 wild months. They joined CFI in August of 2020 (mid-pandemic), and their laughter, energy, creativity, sweat, muscle, smiles, knowledge, love, and compassion got us through the year! Though we’re sad to say goodbye to Sonya and Alex, we’re excited to share that Raya will be spending another year with us as the Garden Programs Coordinator! Check out some snapshots of this wonderful crew below as we celebrate their year spent growing and sharing the harvest in Appalachian Ohio.
After spending the winter months planning, organizing and surveying community members, our Veggie Van mobile market is up and running on a new, expanded schedule! This summer, the Van is making weekly stops in Glouster, Coolville and Nelsonville, as well as pop-up stops in Amesville, Chauncey and Trimble! Operating on a pay-what-you-can model, folks living in these rural communities can receive fresh, local produce at little to no cost. In addition to healthy food, we are also providing recipes to help folks utilize the produce they pick up at the Van! All local tomatoes, sweet corn, peaches, beets, strawberries and blackberries are just a few summer favorites that we feature. Check out some photos below of the beautiful produce and delicious recipes you can find at the Veggie Van this summer! Our expansion of the Veggie Van would not have been possible without the generous donations of people like you - thank you!
This summer has been one of joy in sharing the bounty with our community, and I hope this update has given you a glimpse into the multitude of ways you are supporting us to Feed Families in Appalachian Ohio. Thank you.
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