Become a Volunteer Gleaner

Get outside, meet your neighbors, reduce wasted food, and learn how local food is grown all while helping everyone in the community have access to healthy, fresh local food.  

1 million pounds of produce in Washington County goes uneaten each season.  

Help CHCV recover some of that food that is not able to be sold, but is still fresh and nutritious to eat.

Deliver

Help deliver the produce we recover to area organizations - food shelves, senior meal sites - feeding our neighbors.

Enter Data

Help track all the pounds of healthy fresh local food that local farms donate. 

Glean 

Work with us to harvest from local farm fields, pick up after farmers markets produce that is not able to be sold, etc.

Clean & Sort  

Visit with other volunteers and help get produce ready to deliver.  No lifting, bending, standing or walking required.

Outreach & Education

Hang posters, talk to others about our work out in the community. 

In case you are wondering

The registration link takes you to the Vermont Gleaning Collective's site. As a member of the Vermont Gleaning Collective (VGC) CHCV registers all our volunteers through the VGC site. To glean with CHCV, choose Washington County as the county you want to volunteer in. Or pick other counties and other VGC member organizations from around VT will contact you about opportunities to get involved.

Here’s How Signing up to Volunteer Works

One-Time Projects

Volunteers registered through the Vermont Gleaning Collective (VGC) will receive email invitations to all of our volunteer projects. These emails will let you know when and where projects are happening. You can then RSVP, via a link in each invitation, for just the projects you would like to join.

On-going/Regular Volunteer Opportunities

In addition to the event invitations we send out via VGC, there are some regular weekly and/or monthly volunteer opportunities that might be of interest. Below is a list of our current openings for regular volunteers. If you are interested in learning more about any of these opportunities, please email us at CommunityHarvestVT@gmail.com.

• Regular Box Gleaning – Help us collect used waxed produce boxes from local grocery stores which we use to gather gleaned food. This is a flexible task at the Berlin Shaw's that you can do on your own schedule. Time commitment is roughly 30 minutes to an hour, once a week, one or more times a month.

• Facility Cleanup – Assist CHCV staff with weekly cleanup at our facility in Berlin. There is some flexibility with day and time, but Tuesday late morning 10am to 12noon is a likely time that could work. There are always buckets and crates to wash, boxes that need cutting, as well as other cleaning and tidying projects around the facility. Time commitment is roughly an hour or two weekly.

• Friday Afternoon Sorting – On Friday afternoons we sort through all the food we have gleaned that week, and get boxes ready for distribution to food shelves and free meal sites early the next week. We have openings for 2 or 3 volunteers to join us at the facility in Berlin for 2-3 hours on Fridays starting at 1:30pm.

• On- Call Computer/Technology Wizard – With a small staff, and no IT department, we could use a volunteer that is computer and tech savvy to help us problem-solve and deal with tech issues. Ideally this person would be - on call for when issues arise, maybe a couple hours a month, on average.