Harvest VISTA Lynsey Horne is wrapping up two years of service with Slow Food SW WA & Urban Abundance in Vancouver, WA in February. As her term comes to a close, she’s been reflecting on what the organization has accomplished and how it changed over the course…
Welcome our newest Harvest VISTA!
During the first week of March, Abigail was eager to present a lesson on food security to students at Chautauqua elementary as they kicked off their March Food Drive. A week later the schools closed down, and on March 25th Governor Inslee announced the stay at home order, and all non-essential businesses and activities were prohibited.
Welcome our newest Harvest VISTA!
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..
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.
As a VISTA about to end my service year, this was supposed to be an exciting time – moving on to the next phase, going happily forward into the next chapter. It’s still exciting, but in more of a horror movie ‘don’t open that door’ kinda way. All the things I had planned are now on hold or canceled, and the future is uncertain at best.
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.