Nadine Dyskant-Miller, Assistant Farm Manager

In addition to the Mobile Outreach Market and Veg Rx programs, we have continued a number of community partnerships to help reach our donation goal for the year.

One of our main partners for donation this season has been the Boston Area Gleaners, who work with local organizations to help close food distribution gaps in the community. In previous years we have partnered with Food for Free, but they recently combined some of their routes with the Gleaners. Since our first donation to the Gleaners in June, we have donated 11,334 pounds of produce, valued at $38,111.

This season we continued our partnership with Waltham Public Schools to provide 700 pounds of zucchini, bok choy, and kale for school lunches. We have also donated vegetables to several Waltham organizations, including Healthy Waltham, Chaplains on the Way, Temple Beth Israel, and Food Not Bombs. And we are looking forward to providing 40 Thanksgiving shares to families at the Waltham Family School. 

With all of these programs combined, our donation totals are currently at 25,089 pounds, which is valued at $80,296.

Jessica Herwick, Director of Education and Community Engagement

This year, I had the pleasure of completing my fifth season with WFCF, and so I began planting my “30 year” seeds 5 years ago. One of the things I like to share with our community of learners is the idea that a single seed carries a whole lifetime within its casing. Each seed has the potential to develop into its own plant once it emerges from its seedcase, provided that it gets the right type of care to thrive. My highlights this evening are fittingly the harvest from many years of planting & tending seeds.

  • We welcomed 2,357 learners of all ages to engage with the land this year, including an increase in our capacity to more fully immerse neurodivergent and differently talented learners of all ages into education programs, workshops and birthday celebrations on the farm. 1855 of those learners being youth under 17yrs. 

  • Our community is growing both locally and internationally!

    • Waltham highlight:  We served 1650 adult & youth Waltham residents across all Education & Enrichment programs., including 21 Bentley interns who helped launch the PG Qr Code Project with Kristin Sopko.

    • 4 International schools visited education programs for farm enrichment from over 10 countries, collectively including France, Amsterdam, Sweden, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Japan.

  • The Acknowledgement of Indigenous Ancestral Lands research and development project has come to a successful conclusion after four years of collective work, made challenging by centuries of systematic erasure. I am pleased to be able to share it tonight: 

Waltham Fields Community Farm currently stewards the ancestral homelands of the Indigenous Pawtucket (puh-TUCK-et) and Massachusett (MASS-ad-CHU-sett) peoples.

I share this to acknowledge the forced removal and impact on the lives and legacies of Indigenous people with a commitment to continue farming & teaching in ways that recognize, honor, and amplify the lived experiences, cultural practices deeply connected to the earth, traditional knowledge, and history of those Indigenous peoples who despite these injustices are still here. 

Keep your eye on our website as we prepare to share more information about Land Acknowledgements, our process, and the full acknowledgement on our website starting in January 2025. 
 

Ana Strayton, Farm Stand & Distribution Manager

CSA Our CSA went back to full capacity this season and we took this opportunity to offer a new “Lil Share”--a smaller, weekly share--in addition to our regular 20- & 10-week shares. It proved to be wildly popular, and in response, we will be increasing the number of Lil Shares that we will be offering next season. Another highlight from our CSA program was the huge increase we saw in new shareholders across all share types. I met so many people who were brand-new to either our CSA or CSAs in general. It was wonderful to see this increased interest in local farms and CSAs.I enjoyed talking to new shareholders about recipe ideas and how they were using the share. On that note, another highlight for me personally was just seeing shareholders each week and building new and existing connections. It is so joyful to see everyone and hear what is going on in your lives, it is always the highlight of my week!

SNAP & SNAP CSAs This year we saw increased use of SNAP by many of our customers, particularly to purchase CSA Shares. We had 8 individuals use their SNAP benefits to purchase summer CSA shares and 9 to purchase Extended Season Shares. Several also purchased Fruit & Mushroom shares with SNAP benefits. WFCF’s SNAP program has steadily increased since I started in 2020, when we had just a single SNAP CSA customer across all our shares.

Work Shares I want to acknowledge the hard work of our CSA work share team this season: Victoria, Leanne, Joy, Mary-Elise, Ethan, Matt, Yukiko, and Lizzy. We had a fantastic team of people in the barn this year, this was a particularly thoughtful, kind, positive group who treated the CSA and our members with a tremendous amount of care - I’m very grateful for all their hard work! <3

Marla Rhodes, Volunteer Coordinator

In 2024 we continued to grow our volunteer base. 

  • We expanded partnerships with some local workplaces, notably ThermoFisher and National Grid. Each corporation arranged multiple dates in advance for their employees to come out to help on the farm for a morning or afternoon. National Grid arranged 12 visits this year!  We are quite excited to grow these partnerships, and are interested in developing other multiple-visit partnerships as well. 

  • As the season comes to a close for 2024, we are implementing some staffing changes with new roles with the creation of a new development position, separating it from the part-time volunteer management role. This is a positive step forward for the organization and we are thrilled to be able to introduce Amanda Smith as our new Director of Development. Marla Rhodes will be taking more of a part-time role with a focus on volunteer partnerships and management. 

  • Our overall numbers: Nearly a thousand volunteers worked over 2500 hours on the farm and at our events this year! This includes a record 45 groups from April through October.

We saw very strong interest in volunteering this year generally, both with corporate groups and with individuals. We expanded opportunities for individuals to drop-in or sign up from Tuesday through Saturday, helping in the fields or in the barn or in the perennial plot. 

Currently we are still welcoming volunteers on both Wednesdays and Thursdays through 12/5 to help our reduced field staff with the harvest. Sign up here: https://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F084DA4A729A6FD0-52822873-wedand

Along with the new recurring corporate groups, we also had recurring help from a group of adults from The Charles River Center, who came out for a weekly visit to help with special projects. This is a mutually beneficial relationship and exemplifies the ways in which we can continue to become more accessible.

Volunteer of the Year For over a decade now we have honored someone with our Volunteer of the Year award. This year we honor Rick Oxner. Rick came to us in spring as a new volunteer, with tremendous carpentry skills and a great willingness to get involved. He jumped right in to help us with our transition to the new greenhouses, single-handedly putting together most of the new large metal tables you see in there today. He improved the shaded rest area for the farmers, located near the wash station. This is where you see the farmers taking their daily lunch break…and sometimes enjoying a soup or stew that Rick would bring in for all. He helped with farm shifts, field work, and on-farm problem solving, including building a rig for our new water recycling tank. We are very thankful for all his time and energy this season. Rick is also the owner of Warm Peet socks; 100% of all profits are donated to mental health and nature conservation non-profits and you can purchase them in our farmstand - or at https://warmpeet.com 

Special Perro del Año Award And a special thank you and award this year to our newest best friend and on-farm care-giver Claudia, El Perro! Claudia is the best in-office dog we could ever hope for. We will honor her with special treats, lots of head rubs, and a heartfelt thank you for all her therapeutic services! A giant shout-out to Marina for bringing her in daily and sharing her joy with us; we genuinely feel like she is helping us through some tough times.

Marina Vergara, Community Outreach Farmer

MOM is our Mobile Outreach Market, which returned to a market-style distribution this year at a new location – First Parish in Waltham. We welcomed all self-identifying low-income residents of Waltham to purchase a share of our vegetables for just $5. Veg Rx is our produce prescription box program. In partnership with CRCHC, their providers have identified 30 patients with a chronic condition that would benefit from more vegetables in their diet, and who are experiencing barriers to accessing that food. Each week, we box and deliver 30 CSA shares to the patients in the program. Thanks to Dr. Shostak’s senior capstone class and all of their work conducting data analysis on the Veg Rx program, we were able to start the season with some of the changes they suggested – a new pre- and post-survey to share with participants and a greater emphasis on strengthening our partnership with the CHWs at CRCHC. Both these programs are working toward addressing transportation and cost barriers to accessing fresh, local produce.

This season, I learned that not only was my job to increase community members' access to local, organically grown produce, it was also to fill the space with the building blocks to foster community with one another and with us at the Farm. Food is supposed to be a social experience: sharing recipes and meals with one another, trying new foods together, and sitting around the table to break bread. The basis of community is trust, and especially for those from low income and historically marginalized communities, trust is not a given, it’s something you earn.

I’m happy to have continued the process of earning the trust of the community members who utilize our food access programs. All I can hope for is to create space for folks to feel in community with one another, and to feel in community with Waltham Fields Community Farm.

Beginning with MOM, over the 13-week MOM season, we distributed 673 vegetable shares to new and returning customers each week (that’s a total of 6,584 pounds of produce!). Our 15 community partners have been sharing nothing but positive feedback. One community partner shared with me the comfort level their families felt and shared back with them after coming to MOM – families felt comfortable coming, they did not feel judged or looked down upon. They felt welcomed in community with the Farm.

Throughout the 20 week Veg Rx season, I could see and feel how participants were growing more comfortable with me and one another. This definitely increased after the PYO orientation, where I guided 9 families through our PYO fields to pick tomatoes, tomatillos and husk cherries, herbs, and chiles. In the box drop-offs following PYO, I could feel the increased sense of community with one another. In the following weeks, some families also shared with me that they returned to the Farm after PYO, showing me an increased sense of community with the Farm. The season ended with a distribution totaling 6,561 pounds of produce to our 30 patient participants.

It’s been a great season of sharing our food with parts of the community who may not be able to access it otherwise, a great start to long lasting relationships across Waltham, and a great first step toward earning the trust of the community I’m working in. 

Trish Wesley Umbrell, Associate Director

It’s my pleasure to say that you’re about to hear from some of the other very talented team members of WFCF. These are the people who work tirelessly to run our exceptional Educational programs, to bring vegetables to our food insecure neighbors with grace and dignity, to seamlessly manage 100,000 complex often conflicting details of CSA and Farm Stand Distribution, to skillfully raise the money that make our organization go, and the ones who somehow, day in day out, manage to work with volunteer groups large and small, in all sorts of weather, to weed, with cheerfulness. 

I’m also wearing a second hat tonight, which is that of Captain for WFCF’s 2024 Ride and Stride for Food and Off the Beaten Path team. I’m enormously proud of our 18 members this year, many of whom are here tonight, and the incredible effort they put forth  to walk, to ride their bicycles, and to put themselves in the not always comfortable position of asking friends, family, and colleagues, to donate to their campaigns. Together, our team raised $21, 324, which WFCF will use to provide food security for our hungry neighbors. Our team is accepting donations through November 30, and I’m already recruiting for next year, so see me tonight for a noncommittal conversation!