Page 26 - BusinessWest February 3, 2025

Educational programs, both for children (pictured) and adults, are a key part of Grow Food Northampton’s mission.
Photo courtesy of Grow Food Northampton
(including four farms owned and oper- ated by farmers of color, including a collective of 20 Somali Bantu refugee families);
• Runs a 320-plot organic commu- nity garden for more than 400 commu- nity members, more than 35% of whom receive subsidized plots to grow food for themselves and their families;
• Operates a ‘giving garden’ that grows thousands of pounds of food annually for donation to local food pan- tries and community meal sites;
• Conducts collaborative research projects with academics and others on sustainable agricultural practices that enhances climate resilience; and
• Provides extensive land- and food-
based educational programming for children and adults.
In addition, GFN conducts free mobile farmers markets that support more than 65 local farms by buy-
ing their produce and delivering it to community members experiencing food insecurity, while also conducting healthy food knowledge and nutrition programming.
“I realized how incredibly important it is not only that we eat food that doesn’t have pesticides on it, but that we are utilizing growing practices that aren’t using harmful chemicals.”
Meanwhile, the organization stag- es year-round farmers markets that offer more than 30 local farms and other food vendors a venue to connect directly with customers, and also runs a SNAP match program to double the spending power of SNAP recipients on nutritious, local farm products at its farmers markets.
It does all of this while ensuring
that all its food-access programming is guided and steered by an advisory com- mittee staffed by individuals with lived experience of food insecurity.
“Food should be a human right,” Klein said. “More and more in the field of food justice, we’re talking about something called food sovereignty, which is one more step in the direction of really empowering people to not just have access to fresh, healthy food, but culturally appropriate food, so they can make decisions about what they want to eat, and giving farmers the decision making to control the food system so we’re not reliant on corporations. That’s what we are looking toward at Grow Food Northampton.”
Community Minded
“Grow Food in Northampton” was originally the name of an online listserv created to give Northampton-area food activists a means of quick communica- tion about issues they were concerned with, especially farmland preservation.
In 2009, upon learning that the city had signed a purchase agreement to buy the Bean Farm in Florence for the purpose of creating sports fields, the members took actions to preserve the land for agriculture, including petitions, historical research, public advocacy, and engaging the Trust for Public Land (TPL) in an effort to save both the Bean Farm and the nearby Allard Farm.
“People in the community got really concerned because, in Massachusetts, since the 1940s, we’ve lost over 75% of the farmland in the state,” Klein said. “If you lose farmland, you can’t grow your own food, and you become depen-
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