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Several �鶹�� Extension programs are demonstrating that meeting the nutritional needs of neighbors can also build community, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and promote a feeling of dignity.

The Gardens of Berlin

A couple of years ago an elementary class in Berlin, New Hampshire, reached out to an Extension educator for help with a class gardening project. A grandparent of one of the students heard about it and asked if Extension could help start a vegetable plot at their senior living facility. And then a food pantry wanted to know if they could grow some produce in an underused city park next door.

What’s blossomed since then is not just vegetable plants but a sense of togetherness: Neighbors and friends work together to plan and tend gardens, a shared resource that provides both sustenance and social well-being.

Mandy Bernd is a steward with the Community Builders Hub, a nonprofit that fosters collaborative problem-solving and is one of several local organizations that has joined the garden project. She says the project is succeeding because of an element that’s hard to measure but would be noticeable if absent.

“We bring the fun,” Bernd says. “It’s not just ‘Come with a shovel.’ It’s also ‘Let’s have lunch together.’ We have music blasting; this year we have kids coming with their parents, too.”

The newest garden is in Friendship Park, on the corner of Granite and Mason streets. Cindy Lapointe, recently retired, was the program director for day services at Northern Human Services, an organization that assists people with disabilities. She says she agreed to help start the gardens last year despite her initial doubts.

“We did not think this was going to work; there were too many barriers,” Lapointe says. There was no water

 at the park, the garden boxes were dilapidated, and nobody knew how they were going to organize labor. But Zeanny Egea Alvarado, then the Extension educator working in Berlin, brought an infectious kind of optimism. Someone at City Hall knew how to get new garden boxes built. A contractor donated a cistern for watering, and the fire department agreed to keep it filled. Several other people joined in their own ways, such as building adapters so hoses could be fitted to the cistern or donating seedlings they had grown at home.

“Everybody just pitched in. It was fantastic,” Lapointe says, noting that on some days there are more than 30 visitors from various organizations and from the neighborhood, all brought together by the shared project.

The Feeding Hope Food Pantry was one of the first organizations to join the garden project. Director Sarah Swift says she was motivated by a desire to see her clients eat less canned food and more fresh vegetables.

“The fact that prices have all gone up makes it more difficult for people to get fresh produce,” she says, noting the excitement that shoppers at her pantry showed about the availability of crisp vegetables. “They were surprised, because they didn’t know anybody would do this kind of thing in the community. But when they found out we were doing it in a local public park, that’s what really stirred their interest.”

Swift says that many of her clients are elderly or disabled, or for other reasons might not feel capable of growing a garden alone. But many of them have the capability to help. 

“The volunteers I have, they really feel connected,” Swift says. “They like to feel that they’re providing [food] as well as benefiting from it. They feel like they’re helping provide for other people. It’s the power to help. It’s knowing that they can be a part of the help, too.”

Nutritious Pantries

Operating a food pantry is challenging in many ways, and one of those ways is helping people who have had a complicated relationship with food. They might have limited experience with certain ingredients, chronic health problems that are tied to diet, or trauma related to food insecurity.

The Nutritious Pantry Program, a menu of services provided by Extension, is there to help. 

Several pantries have engaged in the program, each identifying an area in which they’d like to improve. One participating pantry is Twin Rivers in Franklin, which serves 16 communities and around 800 families each month, according to its director, Alison Jones.

“Extension helped us reimagine our pantry,” Jones says. “It’s very expansive, this program. We’ve been

 working on it for more than two years.”

The partnership with Twin Rivers started with a survey of shoppers, which resulted in some easy changes, such as providing water for shoppers during the warm months and adding margarine to the butter case. But it also revealed just how many of them were living with cardiac disease, diabetes, or other conditions that put higher stakes on their eating habits.

With that information in hand, the food pantry began sharing its expected deliveries with Extension, which responded with healthy recipes that use those ingredients. The pantry often prepares those dishes and provides samples to shoppers, who can also take a copy of the recipe home if they like it.

The Extension recipes are collected in a pantry cookbook that is given to new families.

There are changes visible inside the pantry, too. Twin Rivers now has electronic display monitors and clearer signage for shoppers looking for low-salt and low-sugar foods. During the growing season, the pantry accesses grant funds to buy directly from local farmers.

Swift says she’s proud of what her pantry has become.

“A woman in her 60s, who came back to get more fresh vegetables, said she had never eaten healthier in her life,” Swift says. “We are making a real impact on the health and well-being of our shoppers.”

Food Access Networks

Across the state, food access networks are either starting up or getting organized. In both cases, they are intended to replicate the structure and efficacy of the Carroll County Food Access Network (CCFAN), which Joy Gagnon, an Extension educator on the Food and Agriculture Team, started several years ago.

Gagnon works in Carroll County, a large geographic area filled with small towns. It’s a county marked by rural beauty, recreation hubs, and pockets of isolation and poverty.

The CCFAN was needed because local assistance for those struggling with hunger was often as isolated as the clientele, unconnected to or unaware of similar efforts happening in the next town or valley.

Gagnon started attempting to organize the network during the COVID pandemic, but she encountered an initial reluctance. She established momentum in 2023 after completing a needs assessment. She interviewed all the agencies she thought should be part of the network, compiled the results, and then returned the results to the individual agencies. The data clearly showed that problems in one community were also encountered by their neighbors, and that dozens of small organizations were struggling with a common challenge.

“That’s what inspired a lot of participation in the group,” Gagnon explains. Some of her member agencies consist of just a handful of local volunteers, while others are school districts or hospital organizations. “It’s a network of at least 25 organizations working together to solve the issue of food access,” she says.

Members are kept engaged, Gagnon says, because CCFAN is focused on goals and results. Each year, goals are established and the members organize around the specific objectives that make sense to their organization’s mission and capabilities. Sometimes, surprising partnerships emerge.

In one such example, the New Hampshire Food Bank was setting up its yearly effort to provide food for schoolchildren during the summer. As part of CCFAN, they were in a working group with Tri-County Transit, which offered to provide delivery as an option for participating families. That collaboration led to a tenfold increase in participation, because the Food Bank started reaching families that didn’t have the means to travel to a weekly distribution point.

Heidi Johnson, SNAP outreach and application assistance senior coordinator for the New Hampshire Food Bank, says the success of CCFAN is due to its champion: “Joy is well organized and a very good leader, pulling together the necessary people to identify and focus on the priorities in the area. She’s an inspiration to the members and a model for other regional coalitions.”

Considered together, these programs show that the work of nutrition access means more than distribution of food, says Amy Hollar, state specialist and professor of nutrition and food access for Extension.

“Extension's nutrition and food access initiatives are increasing access to fresh, healthy, local food, but they are also doing more than that — our programs stimulate community conversations and strengthen relationships,” Hollar says. “If we want to eliminate a complex, social issue like hunger in NH, we need whole communities working together. This is how Extension approaches our nutrition  and food access work: By bringing a community together to grow a garden, by guiding a food pantry to learn from and respond to their guests, and by creating and sustaining communication and support systems that enable community coalitions to act together to ensure that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible.”