Picking up where we left off in our last post, this week we’re highlighting more of our community partners. These orgs and initiatives are part of what make up the Rock Steady ecosystem, and allow for us to grow veggies for food relief efforts throughout our communities (beyond our sliding scale CSA model).

One of our key local partners is North East Community Center, which is just down the road from us in Millerton.

NECC offers social, educational, recreational and cultural programs and services to help meet community needs. We work with them in a few key ways: first, they coordinate a weekly low-income CSA program with our produce, distributed to three food pantries in the area. We move a ton of veggies through these efforts! In addition, we partner with NECC on their youth job training program. Past seasons we’ve hosted a group of 10 high school students, but due to COVID this year we are working with two individual youths who will have paid internships on the farm for the next six weeks. A big welcome to Edwin and Jordan!

Also local, we’ve been working with Neighbors Helping Neighbors (Ancramdale) since the beginning.

It’s always felt important to us that we are working with our NYC communities as well as our closer-to-home rural neighbors. NHN is a small grass-roots, volunteer-run organization, providing direct aid, door-to-door, to local families struggling to make ends meet. In addition to food assistance, they organize heat assistance, education scholarships, and a trust-based network of support for things like unexpected car repairs. For our fifth consecutive season, we provide weekly produce to 16 local families!

One of our new partnerships this year was initiated by Ruby Olisemeka.

Ruby is a Farmer/teacher/organizer/healer and a long time friend and fellow Farm School NYC teacher. She’s organized an effort to support community members in her home town of Mt. Vernon, in Westchester county. This community was hit very hard by COVID, much because of the historic structural racism within our society and our food system. We send 24 veggie boxes every week, which is an important start to meeting a much larger demand. These boxes were made possible through the delivery and fundraising of our friends at Good Food Farmer’s Network as well as through the fundraising efforts of the Wespac Foundation. We’re excited to continue building this collaboration in the seasons to come!

In addition to our weekly food access CSA programs . . .

We continue to shift more and more wholesale vegetables to hunger relief partners.

In the last few weeks, we’ve sent 400 pounds of kale to People’s Place (Kingston) and a van full of veggies to Family of Woodstock (Ulster County). Those two connects were made possible through Farm Hub Hudson Valley.

We also sent a big order to a new partner in the Berkshires- BRIDGE - a multicultural, women and BIPOC lead community center. This partnership was made possible by a local grocery coop, Random Harvest, who raised funds to subsidize food for them. Right on.

Food Access collaborations like all of these meet two important needs:

1. Access to local fresh produce to low-income, often majority BIPOC communities experiencing food insecurity

2. Paying small scale farms like ours fair prices to produce this food

This model is so important to us, because it centers both low-income consumers and low-income marginalized farmers. There’s more and more understanding within organizations around the need for this, which is huge. In the past, we’ve noticed there is often the expectation or hope that the farmers could donate or subsidize the food, however the tiny profit margins of small-scale farms do not make this possible. If we want local food to be accessible to all, we’ve got to be taking care of small farms and marginalized farmers as part of it.

A massive THANK YOU to our financial supporters!

We are grateful to individual donors and organizations who contribute the necessary funds to make this model work. It would not be possible without them.

In addition to those we’ve named so far in this post, special shout out to Broadway Cares / Equity Fights Aids, Glynwood, Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and 100+ individual donors with contributions ranging from $10 to $5000!

Another final piece to highlight is that these partnerships are not just a COVID response.

We know the structural inequities and racism that create food insecurity have been around for hundreds of years and will still be here on the other side of this pandemic.

The key is to make sure this important work is continued next year, and years to come, until more economic stability can reach those most marginalized.

It takes all of us to create a new paradigm in the food system. Thanks to all who have joined this fight with us.

Onward!

Love and solidarity,
Rock Steady farmers