The Guilford Food Hub: Growing Community Resilience One Lemon Bar at a Time
In the Spring of 2020, through the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, grocery store shelves sat empty while local farms had plenty of lettuce growing in their fields. The disconnect between food growers and locals begged the question: Could there be a better way to get local food to the wider community?
Five years later, the Guilford Food Hub has become a model of community resilience that has kept $204,000 in the local economy over the past four years. Here, customers can buy grocery list staples—potatoes, yogurt, cheese, tomatoes—from a range of vendors, including farmers and locals growing produce like shiitake mushrooms on a small scale.
As early as 2014, Hanna Jenkins, Guilford’s then Farm to School coordinator, had been running a buying club out of the Guilford school, aggregating orders from Food Connects, a regional distributor. Co-founder Anna Klein recalls that it wound down as Jenkins focused on growing her own farm business.
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Read the full article on Resilience.
