Healthy Hampshire is an initiative of the Collaborative for Educational Services, and they work to improve the health of people living in Hampshire County. Their work includes partnerships with health care professionals to prevent long term health problems, and support for community design that enables active lives, but the area of their work that we’re honoring with this award is focused on making healthy food more available to more people.

Here are a couple examples of Healthy Hampshire’s good work: they’ve supported SNAP matching programs at farmers’ markets for years, which since 2017 has meant supporting HIP, the Healthy Incentives Program. They’ve set up community gardens near affordable housing complexes, developed and supported mobile farmers’ markets, and, most recently, established the Hampshire County Food Policy Council.

Just looking at this list, it’s evident why this work is valuable in filling hunger and accessibility gaps for so many people around the county. But the thing that makes Healthy Hampshire’s work stand out — and that we especially want to honor — is that it does not happen without the engagement, opinions, and leadership of the people who are most affected by the issues they seek to address.

The Amherst Mobile Market was born out of a planning process that engaged over 25 people with low incomes, many of whom are people of color and/or Spanish speakers, to develop a plan, and then Healthy Hampshire sought out funding to make that plan a reality.

The community gardens project involves setting up structures of self-governance for the residents who use them. The Food Policy Council started out with an ethos of leadership by the people who are affected by the issues the Council is working on, and that includes stipends and other support so community members can participate.

Caitlin Marquis, Program Manager at Healthy Hampshire, says that these programs aren’t just about distributing food — they’re about putting folks who are experiencing the issue at the center of solving it. So, for serving as a model of participatory problem-solving and community leadership on issues of hunger and healthy food access, CISA is honored to present a 2022 Local Hero Award to Healthy Hampshire.

Queen’s Greens, located in Amherst and owned by Danya Teitelbaum and Matt Biskup, is a first generation farm that grows greens that they sell wholesale during the winter months. This sounds pretty straightforward, but this model is the result of years of experimentation, tinkering with different models, and an uncountable number of thoughtful decisions about what sort of farm they wanted to run and what sort of lives they want to have.

Queen’s Greens started out growing winter greens for sale at winter farmers’ markets. They spent the better part of a decade growing mixed vegetables and herbs all year round, mixing in direct sales and wholesale customers, before refocusing on winter greens and making the switch fully to wholesale. All of these changes, and all of this experimentation, has been about focusing in on what will be financially viable for their business and what will feel sustainable for their family, and also about taking a realistic look at their resources—their land, and existing infrastructure like greenhouses—and making realistic and honest choices within that framework.

So Queen’s Greens produces beautiful winter greens, in soil, without additional heat or light, and many of us have savored them during the winter months. But they are also a model of careful discernment, and the choices that farmers have to make to survive, and for that CISA is honored to present them with a 2022 Local Hero Award.

Andy Cox of Smith College Dining Services and Brad Morse of Outlook Farm

Smith College Dining Services stands out among its peers as a dedicated, creative, problem-solving partner to farms around the region.

Their stats are impressive. According to Andy Cox, Executive Director of Auxiliary Services, they spent $375,000 with farms in western Mass and $850,000 in New England in the last year they tallied up. Andy and Chef Dino Giordano can rattle off the names of the farms they buy from the most—including Outlook Farm, Mycoterra, and Queens Greens—because these are real, long-standing relationships. But what really stands out is how Smith Dining Services behaves as active participant in our local food system rather than a passive consumer. This is an institution that has power and resources that can be leveraged to make positive change outside of its own walls, and the staff takes that responsibility seriously.

There are small examples of this, like loaning a delivery van to the Sunderland Farm Collaborative in the early days of the pandemic. And there are innovative, ambitious examples too, including the work they’ve done to source local meat through the Whole Animals for the Whole Region project. In partnership with other local universities, Smith tackled this complicated question: how could they reliably source local meat, pay the farmers a fair price, and manage costs to stay within budget? They did an rfp to find out how much money would work for local farmers, set up contracts, and for the last several years they have been buying whole animals and managing the processing and delivery themselves for cost savings and efficiency. This is not just about bring a good buyer, which is so important by itself, but about being a partner—understanding farmers’ needs alongside their own values, thinking creatively about how they can work together, and putting in the work to make it happen. So for all of these reasons, CISA is honored to present a 2022 Local Hero Award to Smith College Dining Services.