Feeding Our Communities

The spread of COVID-19 and the insufficient response to it, has made it much more difficult to access safe and healthy food, especially for those most vulnerable among us. Feeding Our Communities features Harry MacCormack from Sunbow Farm in Benton County, Oregon and Martina LeForce with Berea Kids Eat in Madison County, Kentucky. Both Harry and Martina have worked to fill gaps in access to food whether it be through making free meals for children or supporting organic food producers through a host of different methods. If you are interested in connecting with rural Oregonians to work on organizing for food access in this pandemic moment and beyond, head to www.rop.org to learn more about Rural Organizing Project (ROP) and how you can get involved.

Download this episode’s transcription at ruralrootsrising.org Transcripciónes en Español también sera disponible pronto.

More on what you hear in this episode:

Harry has played a key role in creating collectives and organizations vital to local food access, including Ten Rivers Food Web, First Alternative Natural Foods Co-Op, Corvallis-Albany Farmers Market, and Oregon Tilth! He has shown a decades-long commitment to growing and distributing food in rural communities across the Willamette Valley and beyond. 

As part of Grow Appalachia, Martina heads Berea Kids Eat in Berea, Kentucky, which provides free meals and snacks to anyone in the community under the age of eighteen. As the Coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and workplaces across the country, Berea Kids Eat adapted quickly and creatively to continue providing food to children who needed it most.  All across the country, programs like Berea Kids Eat have accessed federal funding through the USDA Summer Food Service Program to provide free meals to low-income young people.

ROP has held four online rural strategy sessions since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to strategize with people across the ROP network about responding to this crisis moment and organizing for the long-term changes we need. Watch the recording of the strategy session focused on food access, Feeding Our Communities Through Pandemic here. For recordings of other strategy sessions click here.

Did you like the music in this episode? Listen to more Oregon-made music by The Road Sodas, and Kentucky-based artists Sam Gleaves and Deborah Payne. 

Rural Roots Rising is a production of the Rural Organizing Project. Thank you for listening!

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