Planet

In 2023, Community FarmShare started a “True Cost of Food” Match program to raise awareness about urgent need to support, develop and sustain our local food system, and at the same time, find a way to bring the most nutrient dense produce to people living in under-resourced communities.

The purpose of the "match" pilot program is to help expand the buying capacity of community based organizations (CBOs) to purchase from local small scale farms. Many Community Based Organizations that have food assistance programs want to serve their communities the best food possible, but are constrained by limited nonprofit budgets.

We understand that fresh produce from local small scale farms using organic, healthy soils practices generally costs more than produce from the industrial food system transported in from far away states and countries.

We also understand that our local small scale farmers and their produce is what it takes to create physically and mentally healthy communities and regenerate the earth for future generations.

And we want to do something about this.

By developing a cost share program, we not only enable limited-budget non profits to buy local sustainably grown nutrient dense produce for their communities, but importantly, we have the aspiration that this is also an awareness-raising campaign about the True Cost of Food. As community based organizations raise funds from their donors and funding community about the True Cost of Food campaign, our hope is that person by person, choice by choice, awareness is raised about the importance of a sustainable local food system.

To help community based organizations with the campaign, Community FarmShare is currently developing a marketing toolkit that may be used help CBOs raise funds from their donor network.

Likewise, Community FarmShare raises funds to provide the match to the CBO’s dollars raised. In this way, CBOs can still purchase the same quantity that they would have without the match, but will be empowered to access higher quality, more nutrient dense produce and without the health and social costs that are missing in industrial food system low prices.

We are currently actively fundraising for our True Cost of Food campaign; we will update this site when more matching funds become available.