Dear Friends,
I was able to participate in a glean of summer squash with Salvation Farms’ staff and volunteers, my first glean as the new board president. As usual, we gleefully gathered this abundance to get this late season squash into our local food system. Summer squash– in October! In the words of the farmer who was orienting us in his fields, “I guess the only thing constant is change.”
The past year has been one of significant change for all of us and especially for Salvation Farms. Our new Executive Director, Kelly Dolan, has successfully taken the helm and is thoughtfully navigating our course in partnership with the staff, board and broader community. I’ve found Kelly to be a gifted, facilitative leader who is balancing preservation of our past work while also ensuring we are collectively adapting in response to the world around us.
Together, we are busy planning beyond the next glean. We’ve started to explore long-term strategic visioning for the future of Salvation Farms. We’ve also started to discuss how our new facility in Morrisville will serve our community to make surplus produce available for a greater portion of the year. We have worked to establish organizational goals focused on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. All of these efforts help us continue to tackle the systemic injustices that make our work urgent and impactful.
Of course, amidst these changes we continue to do what we’ve always done at Salvation Farms; fostering active partnerships with farms and charitable food sites to gather and distribute surplus food in order to reshape the food system so it is more just and resilient. Our vision is a system where we all belong to and are bound up in the land, the tenacity of plants and farmers, and the care of our neighbors. While we’ve done good work, there are still many questions to be answered and challenges to overcome.
Like the plants that continue to provide summer squash in October, our work is tenacious, ever-changing, and bold. The idea that was sown 20 years ago to leverage abundant surplus and normalize its use to feed neighbors has borne so much fruit– but there’s still so much left out there to glean. And we can’t do it without your support.
Donors like you are how we make this transformative change possible. When you give to Salvation Farms, you become a dedicated steward of this systemic transformation, beyond the land and the food and the people– you’re helping us bring into being a future we at Salvation Farms know is within reach.
I like to think of donors as part of our team and I hope you feel the same way. We depend on your support and need it now more than ever, in this time of significant change. I hope to meet each and every one of you at a Salvation Farms event in the coming year.
With gratitude,
Chris Callahan
Board President