Not Just A Gleaning Program

Our aim is for Community Harvest of Central Vermont (CHCV) to be the proverbial stone soup of Central Vermont, a vessel that makes it possible for people to come together to create a magical, nutritious feast that all can share. With your help, CHCV is weaving together a more resilient community, using our three-part Recipe for Resilience – gleaning, reusing, and connecting us all more deeply to one another.

The first ingredient to our stone soup of resilience is, of course, GLEANING nutritious food that would otherwise go to waste. Hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, in fact. This food that would otherwise go into the compost or the pig bin (or just get left in the ground) goes on to feed thousands of food insecure people around central Vermont.

But we don’t stop at gleaning food -- we also glean boxes, field supplies, and furniture, and REUSE all the supplies we can, from printer paper (use both sides!) to label backings (which work amazingly well for making notes, as long as you write with a Sharpie). If it has more life in it, you can bet we’ll make use of it before it hits the recycling bin or the trash.

Why? Because these acts reduce waste and keep our expenses down – which in turn make our community (and CHCV) more sustainable. When we train our eyes to see the abundance that is already all around us, and then collect it, store it, and put it to good use, we become more resilient in the face of things like supply chain disruptions, economic downturns, or natural disasters.

Finally, none of this could happen without community, and CHCV is built on the concept that to build a truly supportive and nourishing community you need real, in-person CONNECTION. The kind you can’t find online, but readily grows over conversations between rows in farmer’s fields and in work circles at our distribution facility. It’s why we have thoughtfully decided to not have a presence on Facebook or Instagram, choosing instead to invest our time and energy into communication through in-person connections. This is the key ingredient in our recipe for resilience.

It’s the connection that deepens every time we provide the crucial link between food shelves and tomato farmers, or between local schools and the apple orchard down the road. When we choose to send individual emails to connect with recipient sites rather than rely on an impersonal ordering system. When we make a phone call to check on a nearby grocery store to see if they need to borrow cooler space after a power outage.

And as we continue to experience, this deep connection is what gives us strength and resilience in the face of big challenges.

That’s why building a resilient community is our number one priority here at CHCV. On paper we are a “gleaning program,” but in some ways, the hundreds of thousands of pounds of food donated every year is just one beautiful byproduct of the strong relationships we cultivate every day between farmers, food shelves, community kitchens, volunteers, schoolteachers, senior centers, and beyond. This is the magic of stone soup, and the magic of CHCV.

Will you join us to help create a more resilient Central Vermont?
Volunteer or donate today!