In November of 2018, Food Connects moved to a new facility at the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation’s (BDCC) Business Park. This new space offers many benefits—access to a loading dock for our fleet, increased office and storage space, and most importantly, room to grow.
Room to grow is essential to our future as we work towards a centralized facility with adequate storage capacity for all our frozen, refrigerated, and dry product. Currently, we’re only able to house smaller freezer units and dry storage under our roof. As we worked to utilize the current space to maximum capacity, dreaming up designs and wishlists, there was a fortuitous turn of events—we are now leasing our office space as well as the space adjacent to ours.
What does this mean for Food Connects and our Food Hub? Well, we’ve been hard at work on the design, fundraising, and operational implementation of a 1,000 square foot freezer and cooler space!
Richard secured grant funding for us from High Meadows Fund, Sandy River Charitable Foundation, and the You Have Our Trust Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation. These grants provide partial funding for the layout design and construction of the cooler space by ARC Mechanical, coordinated by Alex and McKenna. To raise the remaining funds to pay for the construction, Laura created and is implementing a campaign plan—and we need your help!
We are incredibly excited about what this means for the future of our Food Hub. The new 1,000 square foot cooler and freezer space give us three times more storage capacity. This means that we can increase the number of producers and products we carry, increasing the amount of local food we are able to provide to our community. Operational efficiencies will dramatically increase with our loading docks, offices, and storage space all under one roof—increasing ease of access for drop-offs and pick-ups. And, we hope, that this will aid in our ability to service more producers and consumers in the Upper Valley.
Now we are at an impasse—we are $150,000 into our goal of $200,000 thanks to grant funding and corporate donations. We need to start construction and are still $50,000 away from our goal—and need your help, our community’s help, to get there. We are so close to our goal and thrilled to have the support of so many community partners already.
If you would like to know more about our campaign, please be sure to check our expansion page on our website. We will provide up to date information as often as possible.
And please, consider making a charitable, tax-deductible donation to our Cooler Campaign to make our dream a reality!