This summer and fall, elderly residents of Brookside Apartments in Great Barrington, housing authority homes in Lee, and children at the South Egremont School, along with close to 40 individual South County homeowners, will have an abundant harvest of organic vegetables thanks to the efforts of Greenagers’ Front Lawn Food program. Isamaya Hagstrom, the organization’s Food Justice Coordinator, and her team are approaching the completion of their building and planting for this season. They spent this past Wednesday on new raised beds at two locations. “We’ve got 15 that remain to be planted, and three that remain to be built. I hope to be done by June 12,” she said on her way home for the day.
Front Lawn Food, said Greenagers’ Executive Director Will Conklin, has been going for 11 years, starting out with a maximum of 10 donated beds per year. They connected with WIC and Berkshire Community Action Council to identify possible recipients. “We’ve never asked people to prove income eligibility,” he said. It was through the suggestion of Greenagers board member Ellen Lahr that the organization moved to the model they have now, in which a buyer purchases a garden bed for themselves for $600 but are actually getting two for the price of one; the other bed will be donated to a family or human service nonprofit. For this, the purchasing homeowner will receive a tax deduction and the knowledge that they’ve made an enduring contribution to the health and well-being of their neighbors.
The kinds of vegetables Greenagers plants in the raised beds have changed over the years thanks to lessons learned. They used to allow recipients to pick and choose, but found it inhibited their ability “to keep up to date with what was going on in the beds,” explained Hagstrom. “So now we have two specific garden bed prototypes that we plant out at every home. We have an urban pollinator garden bed, which is primarily edible herbs and flowers, and some non-edible flowers, and then we have a summer salad bed, which is composed of very easy to manage vegetables.” These include pickable lettuce, kale, peppers and tomatoes.
Since the program’s inception, community interest in the garden beds has skyrocketed to a point where they have had to slow things down. “With everyone so fired up on food security, we were up to 80 beds a season, giving away 40.” Thus this year’s 40 garden bed maximum.
In an effort to help meet the rising demand, Greenagers is also encouraging a shared-bed model, such as the one that’s been planted at Brookside, which all residents of the units will be able to access. “Normally,” explained Hagstrom, “the beds are for that particular individual or family. But this year, there’s been more popularity in the shared garden bed in apartments or the housing authority.”
Front Lawn Food is part of a network of efforts striving to provide all locals with access to plentiful, healthy food. On the funding side, Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation (BTCF) and the Jewish Women’s Foundation (JWF) specifically have been forging unprecedented collaborative efforts with agencies like Greenagers, along with the public schools to make food available to students directly, throughout the summer.
Food insecurity, defined as “the state of being without reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food” is not a problem that would likely appear on the radar of the average visitor or newcomer to South Berkshire County. As Robin Weiser, of JWF, an organization that has put the issue on the front burner of their philanthropic giving and volunteer efforts, said, “It’s so not obvious to the casual observer, driving through the Berkshires and seeing the restaurants and Tanglewood and Jacob’s Pillow. Everything looks so upscale and beautiful. These people do not realize what really is going on behind the scenes.” Among JWF’s larger hands-on projects for their nearly 200 members in recent years is Meals of Hope, which last September put together 25,000 meals in one day at Berkshire South Regional Community Center.
Behind the scenes, poverty rates have been steadily rising in the area for decades, as judged, in part, by the rising numbers of students in Berkshire Hills who qualify for free and reduced lunch. This number has nearly doubled in just the past decade, from 23% in 2012 to 42% this year.
JWF initially became aware of the extent of the food insecurity issue indirectly, through their volunteer work providing books and one-to-one reading to Muddy Brook Elementary School students back in 2016. Volunteers were noticing that children were coming into school hungry on Monday mornings. This was brought to the attention of longtime local philanthropist Bob Norris, who serves on the board of BTCF, which helped create the new grant-funded role of Food Access Coordinator, working for the Southern Berkshire Rural Health Network. Jenny Schwartz has been serving in that role since the end of 2019. She said of BTCF, “They developed my role to work to create systems in each school district to make sure families had food.”
Project Connection, Berkshire Hills Regional School District’s federally-funded 21st Century Community Learning Centers afterschool program, has been the vehicle through which the food that Schwartz acquires is distributed to district families. Project Connection coordinators Tom Kelly and Jack Cowles started a food backpack program in 2012, with 12 backpacks sent home with students for the summer.
When the pandemic hit in early 2020, the food service directors in the schools took the lead on organizing their provisions for pick-up and delivery. But it soon became clear, as Schwartz described it, that “One of the gaps was fresh food.” There was a surplus of canned, shelf stable items.” The Great Barrington Farmers Market, Guido’s and Berkshire Bounty created a system to get fresh food into the food boxes. “Guido’s basically said, our cost is your cost.” The Jewish Women’s Foundation, as described by Phyllis Fine, “Provides money and helping hands.”
During the second COVID summer of 2021, the team at Berkshire Hills’ Project Connection packaged between 90–100 bags weekly, a number that represents less than 20 percent of those who qualify for free and reduced lunch through the federal system. (Families are not required to prove a need; the program operates on the honor system.)
With the damage wrought by the pandemic still being felt, and the price of basic goods continuing to climb, local families are likely to continue to rely on creative, collaborative efforts like those of Greenagers, the school districts, food pantries and philanthropists.
“Since COVID,” said Hagstrom, “there has been a very clear need and want in this community, especially for food sovereignty, for growing and having control over our food.”
This story does not contain a comprehensive list of all the local efforts at combating food insecurity in Southern Berkshire County. Two ways you can help are by connecting with Berkshire Bounty for donation and volunteering opportunities, or Isamaya Hagstrom at isamaya@greenagers.org to get on next year’s waiting list for garden beds.
