How Growing Places is keeping Mass. communities fed — even in challenging times

For this week’s Joy Beat, we turned to our listeners. Here’s what one listener had to say in their nomination:

“Feeding people in need, supporting farmers, connecting with schools for healthy foods — I can’t speak enough wonderful things about her. I call her the ‘ever-ready bunny.’ She has, for each time there’s been a clawback for monies — federal grants and stuff — she has managed to find other ways to support the organization. I think she doesn’t stop. She is just wonderful.”

That was a message about Ayn Yeagle, the executive director of Growing Places, a grassroots nonprofit based in central Massachusetts that’s all about growing healthier communities and a healthier planet.

Ayn joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to share more about the organization’s work. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.

Arun Rath: Let’s start with the nomination. Tell us, how did you feel hearing that nomination from someone in the community?

Ayn Yeagle: It feels amazing, and it feels as if all the work that we’re doing is finally visible. I think we’re a small nonprofit, and oftentimes I wonder if people in our community — we have a large geographic footprint serving 27 communities in north central Massachusetts, it’s 800 square miles, and we have 12 adult staff and seven youth staff. We’re not very big in order to make a huge impact in our region, so when I hear things like that and hear that our community knows who we are — that brings me joy.

Rath: That’s brilliant. Before we dive into the work right now, give us a quick history lesson. Tell us how Growing Places came to be.

Yeagle: I would love to. Growing Places was founded in 2001, and it’s a very grassroots story.

There were two women in [the town of] Harvard, Cindy and Kate, and they read an article in a magazine that a group in Oregon was building backyard gardens for food-insecure households. They thought, “We can do this!”

So, they started Growing Places. They started to build and get donated materials for backyard gardens.

How it’s evolved is through community context and always listening to the needs of our community in the solution to food insecurity and a lack of healthy food access.

It would take an hour to talk about the whole story, but kind of where we are now and how it’s evolved is: We’ve gone through building backyard gardens for individuals to leveraging the 180 farms that we have in our region and actually purchasing food from the farms — using a values-based purchasing system — and getting that food out to our community, either through home deliveries or through our institutions — restaurants and other food-serving organizations — really to lift up our agricultural system.

Photo courtesy of Ayn Yeagle

Rath: Wow, that’s amazing. Walk us through all the things that are going on in a typical day of the mission right now.

Yeagle: I’m happy to. We actually started doing food access when we were managing the Fitchburg and Leominster farmers markets. We purchase food for the purchasing price that the farmers ask for, and then we’re able to accept payment from our consumers through SNAP and the Healthy Incentives Program — a state-funded program that adds extra dollars onto your SNAP card. You get reimbursed for purchasing local produce.

It’s an incentive because Americans do not get enough fruits and vegetables, and that is one of the major contributors to nutrition-related chronic diseases. This is something that is really important not only at a health level, but at an economic level. By lifting up the community, creating jobs and purchasing food from our farmers, we’re able to infuse money into the economy.

It’s really diversified over the last five years as we’ve been able to build capacity. We still support farmers markets, but we have built a mobile farmers market. We’re able to bring that food to different locations in our region [where] people have a lack of access or transportation. In north central Massachusetts, we really don’t have much in terms of public transportation. It’s very, very limited, and so that’s the way we get food out to people.

And then, the coolest thing that we’ve done — we have built a local food processing center in Gardner, Massachusetts. We were running the farmers markets, and some of the farmers were cutting up things on site, which you cannot do. It’s not food safe. So, an older adult would come and they’d say, “I just want a quarter of a watermelon.” And a farmer took a machete out one time and tried to cut it, and we had to stop them!

We really realized that in order to make the food truly accessible to our community, we had to likely process it. When you go to different supermarkets, a lot of people gravitate towards those ready-to-eat things. In order for us to do that, with the HIP program, you can’t add any additives to produce. So, we had to come up with ways to make this product in a way that doesn’t add salt, fat, sugar and typical additives so it could still be purchased with HIP benefits.

The other thing we needed to do was figure out: What those institutions need? Because they don’t have a lot of money when it comes to labor. Their margins are really tight. So, how do we create products that are accessible and affordable to them, like coined carrots for schools, carrot sticks, or diced potatoes, or a ratatouille — things that are easy to prepare for them but aren’t too labor-intensive on either end?

That processing center is doing just that. It’s really exciting, Arun.

Rath: That’s wonderful and genuinely joyful. As we were saying, this is the Joy Beat, but as we heard in that tape about your nomination, we’ve been facing some not-so-joyful things lately.

You talked about the clawback of federal funds — and that’s something that we’re quite sympathetic to. We’re on day three of doing this show and everything on GBH without federal support.

I’m curious, though, with that, you’ve kept going on. In these kinds of times, how do you keep the joy going?

Yeagle: I think I always go back to why I’m doing this work. When I started, I was an outpatient dietician, and I used to counsel people on what they should be eating. A doctor would refer them to me — it was in a hospital setting, and I would then meet with them for an hour and share what they could do.

I then realized that, if people don’t have access to things, they’re not going to be able to do what I advise them to do, so I wanted to work more upstream. I wanted to look at health through a public health and nutrition lens, and that really drives me. It really brings me joy.

When I think about what we’re doing, why am I doing this, and what is it doing? I think of the different stories that I hear from my staff, the farmers, the consumers and the institutions. It really is joyful to listen and hear from our users about how this is making a difference in our community and in individual lives every single day.

If you’d like to make a nomination for the Joy Beat, leave us a voicemail at (617) 300-BEAT [2328].