VT: Community Harvest of Central Vermont [Covid Response, food]

COVID-19 Emergency Response Essential Needs Effort

Community Harvest of Central Vermont, the area’s gleaning program, is pivoting our focus during this emergency to support our food distribution and senior meal site partners and others as they work to keep feeding and caring for the most vulnerable members of our community during this unprecedented time. We are putting our systems to work to engage volunteers wanting to help feed and care for our neighbors. We are supporting all our 22 partners and others in Washington and Northern Orange County who are still distributing food and other essential services, including most food shelves and senior meal sites, Capstone Community Action, the Vermont Foodbank, and the Central Vermont Council on Aging.

We are working in partnership with the Washington & Northern Orange Counties Regional Response Command Center (WNOC-RRCC) leading the volunteer effort and are using our normal gleaning volunteer management site to connect volunteers with the needs of our neighbors.
Please sign up to be a volunteer to help safely provide food and other essential needs to our most vulnerable neighbors and those who will need to stay home.
Register to Volunteer for Emergency Response

When you register please indicate in the Additional Information box that you are signing up to help with the COVID-19 Emergency Response.

After you register you will be emailed when volunteers are need for particular activities at designated sites throughout Central Vermont and beyond, depending on what counties you picked when you sign-up to help. You can then decide if you are able to help with the particular request after you read about what it would involve. YOU ARE NOT COMMITTING TO ANYTHING WHEN YOU REGISTER.
Likely Ways Volunteers Will Be Asked to Help Feeding our Neighbors

Delivering Meals on Wheels - back-up drivers need to be trained and ready for when people are needed to fill in. Delivering will likely require picking up meals at Senior Centers etc. and then leaving them at the doors of recipients.

Delivering food, medicine etc - this will likely require picking up items at food shelves or store and then leaving them at the doors of recipients.

Pre-bagging food - small groups of volunteers of maybe 5 or less would work on shifts to bag food at the Foodbank or other sites for later pick up or delivery.

Receiving hotline calls from home - staff the call center, receive phone calls from the community seeking support and provide them guidance through the challenges of COVID-19. Training provided.

Cooks to help make meals for distribution in the community - to fill in when meal sites (Meal on Wheels, Shelters, churches, schools, etc) need more help, as people are out sick etc.

And more... as days go by it will become more clear. So register to hear about all the ways to help and then you can decide what you are able to and comfortable doing.

If volunteering is not a good option for you consider a donation. Your support will help us focus on our current efforts and prepare us for our increasingly important work on the other side of the pandemic.
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.

pre-covid:

What is Gleaning?

Gleaning is the practice of walking farmers’ fields and gathering usable food after the farmers have finished the regular harvest.
How much food is there to glean?

In Vermont each growing season, research shows, there is 14.3 million pounds of edible vegetables and berries grown that are not sold by farms. There is about 1 million pounds of surplus just in Washington County that could be gleaned for people to eat. CHCV and the many other gleaning programs around Vermont are making progress in recovering some of this surplus, but only a small portion is being gleaned each season at this point.
What We Do and How We Do It

CHCV is a local grassroots volunteer-driven community service program focused on utilizing surplus food grown in Central Vermont. Through our gleaning, we work with local farms to address food waste issues and help provide healthy food to organizations that serve community members in need.

We use food grown on local farms that would otherwise not be harvested and sold to enhance the health and well-being of the Central Vermont community. The program brings together community volunteers to recover produce from local farmers’ fields after the harvest and by doing so keeps farm surplus from going to waste. The fresh gleaned produce is provided to disadvantaged Central Vermont community members, making healthy fresh local food available to more of our community.

CHCV’s volunteers do virtually all of our gleaning. We provide a diverse group of community volunteers the opportunity to help their neighbors in need and gain a greater awareness and appreciation of our local food system. We engage all ages and economic groups, in particular children and recipients of the gleaned food. CHCV promotes community connections and involvement with farms by bringing people out into the farm fields to work together and learn how and where fresh food is grown in their community.
CHCV volunteers glean beets that will be donated

CHCV volunteers glean beets that will be donated

Our recipients, all serving food insecure individuals, include food shelves, senior meal programs, afterschool and early childhood programs, community meals, and schools with free meal programs. CHCV’s recipients report that our regular deliveries – weekly during the harvest season and beyond – are critical to their success as they see continuing need in our community. Our donations are predictable and can be counted on by recipients as they plan their meals and budgets. CHCV provides a unique service that programs cannot get anywhere else.

Throughout the harvest season – June through November – CHCV’s weekly deliveries distributes the fresh produce that our volunteers have gleaned from our farm partners. Deliveries of stored gleaned produce continue into the winter and early spring months.

We receive a significant portion of our funding from individual donors. We also receive donations from recipient and community partners, as well as from businesses and foundations. We welcome your participation.