At the Vashon-Maury Community Food Bank, the Harvest VISTA, Abigail Findley, is creating an equitable and transparent Farm to Food Bank purchasing system.
The seed campaign morphed into developing a program around “Resiliency Garden Kits,” where folks could send a photo of a location on their property that they wanted to cultivate into a publicly accessible vegetable garden..
The idea for a refugee community art project focuses on art functioning as a proud representation of refugees in the Tucson community and a platform to express creative, mental, and emotional wellness.
The Palouse region of eastern Washington and northern Idaho grows lentils and wheat of international demand, and is also home to countless small farms who work with local restaurants and farmers markets. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many avenues for distribution and income have disappeared or have been severely constricted.
After a number of planning conversations, the cross-organizational team decided to carry out distributing the funds through “CSA-style” contracts, an approach which some KCFS agencies used last year.
No one prepares to be a Harvest VISTA during a pandemic. That wasn’t in the online AmeriCorps training manual. Not many people think volunteer work is going to be exciting. What an extraordinary time to be a volunteer!
Food accessibility and sovereignty is crucial during this because convenience has dissipated and overridden the average individual’s ability and knowledge to produce and prepare their own food. A large number of individuals haven’t been exposed or taught traditional means of cooking or growing.
At this point, there isn’t a soul in the world who hasn’t heard of COVID-19. The novel coronavirus has taken the international community by storm in the past month infecting, at the time of writing, over 420,000 people and killing over 18,000. The world, collectively, is dealing with something that the majority of people have never seen in their lifetimes and figuring out how to proceed in this time of uncertainty has not been easy.