Farms To Families
Farms to Families/Fondo de Granjas a Familias is an emergency initiative created by a partnership between REAP, Roots4Change, and Rooted. The program purchases fresh, healthy, locally grown food from regional family farms and small businesses and delivers it to Madison-area Latino/Indigenous residents and families hard-hit by job loss, food insecurity, lack of access to social services, and federal anti-immigration provisions. As the pandemic continues on into the winter, so does our partnership’s work.
The Farms2Families project and Roots4Change have helped support Latino/indigenous families through the crisis of COVID-19 with access to healthy, sustainable food, health resources, and housing assistance and through employment opportunities.
Check out our impact reports!
HOW CAN YOUR SUPPORT HELP?
$50 covers cost of one resilience box of fresh food to a family of 5
$100 buys a month of protective equipment for drivers and food handlers
$350 covers the cost of delivering resilience boxes to the doors of 100 families each week.
Your contribution of any size helps us build a more resilient Dane County for all our residents.
This initiative continues to provide home delivery of a weekly “resilience box” of fresh, nutritious, and locally grown food to serve up to 200 families (up to 1000 adults and children) identified as most vulnerable according to R4C’s screening process and informed by their on-the-ground work with families as community health workers and doulas. These boxes contain purchased and donated produce, and protein and grains from area farmers and initiatives including Artisan Grain Collaborative’s “Neighbor Loaves Program”. In partnership with Rooted, the Badger Rock Neighborhood Center serves as host site for aggregating food and packing the weekly boxes. Community members who have experienced job loss due to the pandemic are paid to deliver the boxes to residents’ homes. Boxes contain printed information about food preparation, COVID-19, and health and support resources developed by Roots4Change to meet language and cultural communication needs. Our goal is to raise funds to continue box deliveries into the spring of 2021.
Mariela Quesada Centeno, Roots4Change Cooperative Manager says, “Our Latino/Indigenous families are uniquely impacted by this crisis – they make up 40% of service workers in the county, and 94% of families with children fall below the poverty line.* Together with compounding factors, including lack of information, social isolation and fears surrounding immigration status, it makes it so that they are among the least likely to seek help from established food and support programs.”
Likewise, small farmers in our region, many of them young, female, and minority farmers, have seen their business impacted by the closure of farmers’ markets, institutions, and restaurants, and are struggling to break even.
“REAP and R4C see in this crisis an opportunity to respond in a way that benefits many.” states Helen Sarakinos, REAP Executive Director. “We are aiming to create maximum benefit for food-insecure neighbors who are the backbone of the food and service industry and for struggling farmers who serve our region.”
All donations will be 100% directed toward this emergency initiative.
“The impact that this pandemic brought to our lives plus the lack of resources, started with lack of work. Without work we cannot get money for the food for our children and to pay rent and the bills. I am very grateful first with God, and with you for all the help you are giving us especially to bring the bread to our table. God bless you greatly.”