Kearsage Food Hub: Creating a Community Space in Bradford!

"Just about 4 years ago I found myself living back home, all fired up about changing the world, with a blend naïveté and fearlessness typical of a 20-something fresh out of college. During my college experience, I had several “aha” moments where my understanding of the world around me really began to take shape. I studied things like animal rights, environmental and natural sciences, and philosophy, all of which brought me back to one seemingly simple thing: food. But the most important thing I learned was that food today is anything but simple. How we produce, distribute, and consume our food is, in fact, at the heart of most of the issues we face globally.

I returned home from school to discover I was not the only one who came to this realization. Several of my old high school friends had all reached a similar understanding. The good news is, after commiserating for a time, we landed on a solution: local food. This epiphany, while certainly not a reinvention of the wheel, did hold significant repercussions for us, for we all landed back in our hometowns in the Kearsarge region of New Hampshire to discover that there was a big need and desire for organization within our local food system.

We started the Kearsarge Food Hub in Bradford, New Hampshire, in the fall of 2014 as a collective effort to help orchestrate and strengthen local food efforts in our area. We wanted to create better access to local food and make local food production more viable. More than that, though, we all had a deep, intuitive understanding that food could be, and in fact always has been, something that brings people together.

Three years later and we’ve made tremendous strides in furthering our mission. We’ve opened a local food retail outlet, Sweet Beet Market, started distributing to restaurants and food pantries, and taken action in our community to promote our cause through community events, partnerships, and educational efforts. Now we have a unique opportunity to help revive the old Bradford Inn, a building that has been sitting idle on the corner of West Main street in Bradford for over 10 years. We are transforming the space into a local food and community resource center, aiming to create a physical representation of the food hub where people can come together to share company, conversation and local food. Specific plans are still developing, but the old Inn needs a lot of work, so we are raising funds to contribute to renovations as phase one of the building’s revival."
Hanna Koby Flanders
Director of Marketing and Outreach
Kearsarge Food Hub

Learn more about the awesome Kearsarge Food Hub cause on their crowdfunding campaign page: