Choosing to donate allows Farmers To You to deliver the same farm fresh ingredients that you enjoy every week to the Barre Food Shelf, Community Harvest of Central VT and Green Mountain United Way Working Bridges pilot program participants.
Farmers To You uses weekly donations to purchase food in bulk from our regular partner farmers. This food goes to one of our food access partners, where community members can come pick up food, or where the food can be cooked and distributed as meals.
We offer the option to suspend your order at any time and for any length of time. While this flexibility is helpful for busy families, the weekly fluctuations can be challenging for our farmers and producers, as well as for Farmers To You. We have some weeks with much fewer orders... but the cows still produce milk, the lettuce still grows, our warehouse crew is still here packing food, and our trucks are still driving the regular routes to Boston and VT pickup sites. When you donate you are helping our overall system to flourish!
The Barre Food Shelf is part of Capstone Community Action located in Barre, Vermont.
Capstones' Family & Community Support Services helps people with basic needs, such as food, shelter and housing. The food shelf in Barre serves about 850 families every month. The program focuses on fresh foods, giving away hundreds of pounds of produce weekly. They also give out shelf-stable items, frozen meat, bread and dairy.
The Food shelf serves people of all ages and household configurations: working families with children, families receiving TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), retired seniors, people with disabilities, and people experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness. Most of the people who use the food shelf have incomes around the poverty level.
Capstone, in partnership with the Vermont Foodbank, has a program called Community Kitchen Academy. This serves as a training program for entry level food industry jobs; through this program they also process raw materials into meals that are distributed through the food shelf. Thus, food is diverted from the waste steam, used for training, and also feeds people in need.
Community Harvest of Central Vermont (CHCV) is a grassroots, volunteer-driven program that provides gleaned food (surplus food grown on local farms) to those with limited access to healthy, fresh produce. CHCV serves as the connector between 30+ charitable food sites, 50+ farm and food businesses, and close to 1,000 community members engaging with their work as volunteers, donors, or students – all learning and building a stronger community together. Through their work, they help provide nutritious, local food to more than 16,800 individuals in Central Vermont yearly.
CHCV coordinates community volunteers to recover produce from local farmers’ fields after the harvest, and by doing so keeps farm surplus from going to waste. They strive to serve each of their recipient partner site's specific needs, so that each site receives the right amount of fresh, perishable food to meet their demand and preferences.
Through our partnership with CHCV, a portion of the food donated by Farmers To You partner families will be added to the gleaned food CHCV recovers and distributes to Central Vermont food shelves, including the Montpelier Food Pantry and the Waterbury Area Food Shelf. Click here for a full list of recipients in CHCV's network.
Green Mountain United Way (GMUW) fights for the education, health and financial stability of all people within Caledonia, Essex, Orange, Orleans and Washington Counties. Working Bridges is GMUW’s foundational program designed to support the working families within our five-county service area, supporting employees with available community resources by using the workplace as a platform to deliver social services.
The Green Mountain United Way 185 Fund is a small-dollar assistance fund to support Working Bridges participants who fall into the benefits cliff. The benefits cliff is easily defined as an individual or family that does not qualify for any public assistance due to their income being above the Federal Poverty Level by 185%. The 185 Fund was created to fill the common gap that can derail many of our working families when no other alternatives for assistance are available.
The 185 Fund provides immediate support to innovative community partner initiatives like the Farmers To You Employee Food Benefit Program that provides healthy and organic food at a substantial discount for those who could otherwise not afford it and who are living with high food instability. The primary goal of this initiative is to ensure food equity and financial stability for working families. Partners in this work include Central Vermont Medical Center, Green Mountain United Way, and Farmers to You.
