In Celebration of May Day

May is the time to celebrate the awakening of the earth after winter’s long slumber, signaling the beginning of the bright half of the year. It is also the time of year when the richness of our imaginations and spirits are reawakening. And so, with a bit of spring fever, I offer an update on our winter activities, and share with great anticipation the prospects for another trailblazing year of milestones for Salvation Farms.

I want to highlight a few of our 2012 successes contained in our Annual Report where we also thank all of our financial contributors and active partners. We look forward to everyone's continued support in the coming year.

Our new website has been in the making since late last summer when we met with representatives from Mad*Pow. That meeting has resulted in a beautifully designed webpage layout by Mad*Pow employee Scott Sonia who volunteered his talents to assist us in sharing our vision and mission with the world. We also established a relationship with Great Big Graphics, who took Scott’s design work and worked their magic into the site we now proudly call our own. Check it out!

We are pleased to share that our year-end fundraising appeal generated more than $4,500 from individuals and businesses.

And we are grateful to have received generous grant support from the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the Harris and Frances Block Foundation, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and the Vermont State Employee Credit Union.

Our work with the Vermont Offender Work Program at the Southeast State Correctional Facility has continued. Since January, a small inmate crew supervised by Salvation Farms, has cleaned and packed more than 33,550 pounds of donated potatoes from Tuberville and surplus potatoes generated from a few Vermont farms. Potatoes from our most recent packing were delivered to several community sites in the Windsor region - just outside the fence of the Correctional Facility. An additional delivery was made to Salvation Farms’ hometown food shelf, the Lamoille Community Food Share while the remaining tons where provided to the Vermont Foodbank via our relationship with Black River Produce.

These local deliveries would not have been possible without the generous contributions of individual donors, business donors and the Vermont State Employee Credit Union who all provided funds specifically for Salvation Farms to invest in a truck to carry out many facets of our mission. Thank You All!

As we process the last of the potatoes to be donated this spring, we are looking forward and steadily preparing for continued activity at the Correctional Facility. What does this mean? We have been working with representatives from the state and an architect to guide us through the planning process to retrofit a building at the Correctional Facility.

This will allow Salvation Farms to bring in larger volumes of more diverse crop surplus for the inmate work crews to process for vulnerable populations statewide. Another post will be coming soon about this with much more detail!

Earlier this year Mr. Wiffin, an instructor at Crossett Brook Middle School in Duxbury VT, approached Salvation Farms interested in assigning his students a final project for a segment he was doing on food that could highlight some of our work. After a few conversations the topic of state farms and prison farms came into focus... a nice connections was made between the fact that the middle school sits on old state farm property and that the Southeast State Correctional Facility use to be a high functioning state/prison farm and is beginning to revive its agricultural roots. We send a very special thank you to the students whose diligent research and thoughtful presentation resulted in the Fresh Start Video.