CABOT – Four Hazen Union students and their teacher, Leanne Harple, volunteered at the Greensboro Food Share, Wednesday, Dec. 18, where they assisted 15 Greensboro volunteers with handing out food boxes for 56 individuals in 25 families.
courtesy photo
Greensboro Food Share is a new outreach program established by Neighbors in Action (NIA), a Vermont organization centered in Cabot. Greensboro has been operating as a satellite site to NIA since the beginning of September. The Greensboro group hopes to continue bringing the convenience of this location to more families who are currently traveling to Cabot for their food boxes.
NIA receives private support from donors and funders, as well as donations from Vermont’s Food Bank. “We are now providing over 1,000 boxes of food a month to families in need through our locations in Cabot and Lyndonville. This is a 25% increase in one year,” according to the NIA website.
Cabot alone serves over 300 families and those numbers have been increasing due to the growing need of local families. Judy Dunnan, chair of the NIA Board of Directors explains further, “It is a drive-up distribution where all recipients are provided with a box of food, including frozen meats and produce, that is prepared the morning of distribution based on the number of people in each household. We then carry the boxes out to the recipient’s car.”
A federal program known as The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), helps supplement the dietary needs of people experiencing unemployment or low-income, providing them with emergency food assistance at no cost. Through TEFAP, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) purchases a variety of nutritious, high-quality USDA Foods, and makes those foods available to state distributing agencies.
At the NIA building in Cabot, on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month, starting at 6:30 a.m., volunteers, including homeschool students and local adults, congregate to plan the day. Over 300 boxes need to be filled with donations from local farmers, the Vermont Food Bank and other donors. Boxes are filled and organized according to family size from one household member to nine.
“It seems to work magically,” stated Skip Hoblin, who, with Tom Guare, picks up the boxes in Cabot, then transports them to the Greensboro site, “but it actually takes lots of collaboration behind the scenes with many caring volunteers to make it all work.”
Once the boxes arrive in Greensboro there is a well-organized system, learned from those at the Cabot site.
The students from Hazen Union helped on December 18, from checking in each preregistered car, to greeting and confirming family size, then loading the boxes into the cars.
As a bonus at the pre-Christmas Food Share, Chloe Dyer and Cilla Bonney Smith shared balsam Christmas wreaths, gifted by the Sisters at the Green Mountain Monastery. Greensboro homeschoolers and their parents under the direction of Emily Purdy, Children’s librarian, also contributed by sharing holiday greeting cards to go in each of the boxes.
Harple explained that this group of four students is from her “Reading and Writing in Nature” class at Hazen Union School. They had recently read a book titled “Into the Wild,” in which a character gives all his life savings to an international group that helps people across the world with food security. “We thought that it would be fitting as a final project to this book and a tribute to the person’s legacy, to contribute to a cause that meant something to him so we signed up to volunteer.” She said she would love to see more service opportunities for her Hazen students and hopes more high schoolers have the opportunity to join the Greensboro Food Share next semester.
For those who would like assistance, please call Cindy Brown, Cabot Food Share coordinator with NIA, at (802) 563-3322 to find out if you qualify and register. Only preregistered cars can be served in Greensboro.
To learn about becoming part of the volunteer team at the Greensboro Food Share site, reach out to Anne Stevens or Mimi Benedict at greensborofoodshare@gmail.com
Mimi Benedict
