September Newsletter

As visions of pumpkin spice lattes dance in our heads, we check the weather and whoops there’s still a few more weeks of warmth coming our way! The tomatoes may be slowing down and it’s time to get those kale seedlings in the ground, but before we do, let’s thank our wonderful donors and volunteers for their help in the month of August. Last month we received $6,220 worth of partner contributions and we in turn donated an incredible $8,561 worth of meals and goods, for a grand total of 1,551 fresh and delicious ready-to-eat meals. Thank you all for your hard work in the hot kitchen, on the road making deliveries, and harvesting squash after squash from the garden, we truly could not do it without our community members.

Funding set to improve first state food supply chain.

A recently approved grant from the First State Food Supply, Department of Agriculture will allow us to build and improve a community garden space for the Milton Food Pantry. This will add more fresh produce to the shelves of the pantry itself as well as supplement our supply of produce for creating meals.

“Access to local fresh foods is a key to sustainability not only for humans but for the planet,” says our Executive Director Teresa Ripley to the WMDT news team. “Delaware is rich and abundant in agriculture.”

And with this grant, our agricultural abundance just got a little closer to home. If you would like to learn more about volunteering with this new community garden project, we can always use extra hands to swing a hammer, make a delivery, harvest the veggies, and cook with love, no experience necessary, simply reply to this email.

To hear more from Teresa, watch the video HERE

Technology

Every purchase has a carbon footprint. With the Commons app, discover the environmental impact of your purchases and find easy ways to make low-carbon choices. Commons lets you browse hundreds of brands that are supporting low-carbon business models. Track, act, and off-set your carbon emissions in one handy app!

The Monarch Autonomous Electric tractor has finally hit the terrain. This driver optional vehicle allows farmers to spend less time cutting more weeds, by doing it by itself. Why is that important? Because when you use fewer pesticides and herbicides in your growing, the tradeoff is unfortunately, more weeding. Well, that won’t be a problem for long with this new tractor which will encourage more farmers to use fewer chemicals. That’s a win for everyone.

Community as a Verb

Finn was student body president at Hazen Union High School in Vermont, and in the months before he died he heard a story about a bell. This old bell used to hang in the belfry at Hardwick Academy in the middle of town before the school was knocked down in 1970. He heard that they would ring this bell when Hardwick teams won away games so that the whole valley knew about the win all together.

So Finn ran for student body president on a platform of bringing back the bell. But he didn’t want it just to be for sports, he would make it so that if someone won the spelling bee, a new baby was born, or any reason to celebrate as a community, the bell would ring. He felt community was something inclusive and participatory—a verb, even.

When Finn took his own life in the first week of January, his passing rocked the community. Suffice to say that not a single person in his life predicted this. There were no signs. The community was in shock for quite a long time, and this memory, this dream that he had about the Hardwick Academy bell began to resonate with people. 

“We’ve just had a terrible thing happen to our community. It’s really big, and we gotta step into this and figure it out.” said David Perrigo, the local high school principal. But Finn’s family were generous with their grief, and the people rallied around them with meal trains, house essentials, an offer to mow the lawn, or just a hand on their shoulder. 

Then came a call from the nearby town of Greensboro, they had a beautiful sounding bell in their town square that they would like to donate to the town of Hazen in Finn’s honor.  

“A dream first articulated by our former student body president Finn Rooney” said Finn’s mom Tara at the donation ceremony, “to bring a working bell back to Hazen to once again ring out over the hills and the valleys of our community, to inform, to celebrate, to unify and to heal—a theme that is a tremendous part of our beloved student’s legacy.”

To help someone who is hurting in the smallest way, is sometimes the biggest thing that we can do. Everyone is fighting their own battles, some more difficult than others, some more visible than others, but that will not stop us from leading every action with love and celebrating every spelling bee, every new baby, every team win. Community, as a verb, will lead us to a better tomorrow together. And as for the TAPTF Society, we work one meal at a time.

Visit the link below to listen to the full Peabody Award winning story
‘Finn and the Bell’ by independent producer Erica Heilman of Rumblestrip.