Uniting Individuals, Fostering Community, Building Resources

Dear community,

In a recent application for our Meal Site Assistant role, an applicant wrote “food has the power to unite individuals and foster community.” She really hit the nail on the head and got me thinking deeply about the work we are doing at the Franklin County Community Meals Program.

The world we live in was built with inequities and systemic problems that create barriers to accessing resources. Barriers for people we serve include:

• not having a car to get to the grocery store
• being an elderly person who lives alone with a disability
• not having a home and thus no way to cook food
• not having enough money to both buy gas to get to work and buy dinner for your family

Food insecurity isn’t a problem of it’s own. It’s embedded in these systems; in poverty, in barriers, in isolation. As a community, it is our job to help break down these barriers and design new systems by building networks of connection. The ‘Community Meals Program’ lives and breathes community. We serve as a hub for engagement and impact, working with the whole community to build more resources! By joining us you can be part of solving these problems in your community. We connect individuals, businesses, schools, churches, social and mission driven clubs, non-profits, youth and more. We can’t really change the world, we can’t really support each other unless we think of each other as neighbors and partners in solving problems and taking care of each other.

This year we are proud of the connections we’ve made, the resources we have built and the way we have seen our community show up for each other.

2021 Accomplishments

• Expanded the Orange Pantry Outreach Program to include a weekly distribution to the Redbrook Village Apartments, two pantry pop-up tables at our Greenfield and Orange meal sites, and a home delivery program
• Established a home delivery program at our Orange Community Meal site
• Established a 4th community meal- the Northfield Community Meal site
• Purchased FCCMP’s first ever vehicle- a refrigerated Ford Transit 250
• Found a new home and partnership for our Orange Community Meal site at the Orange United Methodist Church

FCCMP 2021 Impact

• Distributed 26,000+ meals across all 4 community meal sites
• Distributed 200,000 pounds of food at the Orange Food Pantry
  • Served 1,500+ individuals in 600+ households over the course of the year
  • Distributed a weeks worth of food (non-perishables, fresh produce, meat, dairy, bread, etc) to people in need over 9,258 times
• Distributed 23,706lbs of food to over 1750 individuals at the Turners Falls Mobile Food Bank

Over the past 2 years, Covid has penetrated every aspect of how we do our work from the variety of people we serve, the amount of people in need, the way that we prepare and distribute food, to the way we organize and more. We have shifted and expanded, developing a response based on the needs of the people we serve.

Examples:

• People unable to leave their homes have better access to food through our delivery programs
• Meal site guests have access to more food through our pop-up pantries

The pandemic also increased the complexity of how we do our work. From volunteer recruitment, to outreach, to adapting our models, we have grown to respond to these changes and needs.

Examples:

• A new refrigerated van increased our efficiency in transporting food across the region AND enabled us to develop delivery models
• Increased staff time has improved our ability to coordinate our programs and ensure meaningful impact

In 2021, we focused on expansion to ensure access. We also assessed our ability to grow and how to ensure this growth would be sustainable. FCCMP is at the forefront of taking on rural food insecurity in our region with programs from Northfield all the way to remote towns in the North Quabbin. We know we need to grow to holistically tackle this systemic problem. We do this by not only providing resources to people in need, but by uniting individuals and fostering community around food! Forging ahead into 2022, we invite the community to continue to join us as we transform our work to be more efficient, effective, community centered and impact driven.

In solidarity,

Rachel Berggren
Executive Director