Who We Are

We are a group of Central Vermonters who are committed to bringing our community together through gleaning to recover surplus food produced on area farms to feed those with limited access to nutritious, fresh local food, and in the process help the community to gain a greater awareness and appreciation of the local food system, healthy eating, and waste reduction.

What is Gleaning?

Gleaning is the practice of walking farmers’ fields and gathering usable food after the farmers have finished the regular harvest. At CHCV we consider gleaning the recovery of any surplus food from local farms that would otherwise go to waste.

How Much Food is There to Glean?

Research shows that during each growing season in Vermont, there are 14.3 million pounds of edible vegetables and berries grown that are not sold by farms. There is about 2 million pounds of this surplus just in Washington & Orange Counties that could be gleaned for people to eat. CHCV and the many other gleaning programs around Vermont are making progress in recovering some of this surplus, but at this point, only a small portion is being gleaned each season.

What We Do and How We Do It

CHCV is a local grassroots volunteer-powered community service program focused on utilizing surplus food grown in Central Vermont. Through gleaning, we work with local farms to reduce the amount of food that goes to waste and help provide nutritious local food to organizations that are addressing hunger in our community.

We utilize food grown on local farms that would otherwise not be harvested and sold to enhance the health and well-being of the Central Vermont community. In this way we serve as a connector between the local for-profit and charitable food systems. Our program brings together community volunteers to do this work. The fresh gleaned produce is donated to Central Vermont community members with limited access to nutritious, fresh local food. Check out the step-by-step visual guide, Our CHCV Process here.

CHCV’s volunteers do virtually all of the gleaning in addition to the sorting, cleaning, weighing, tracking, and delivering. We provide a diverse group of community volunteers opportunities to help their neighbors, build community, and gain greater awareness and appreciation of our local food system. We engage all ages and economic groups, in particular children and recipients of the gleaned food.

CHCV promotes community connections and involvement with farms by bringing people out into the farm fields to work together and learn how and where fresh food is grown in their community.

Our recipient site partners, all of whom serve individuals experiencing food insecurity, include food shelves, afterschool and early childhood education programs, senior and community meal sites, and Farm to School programs. CHCV’s recipients report that our regular weekly year-round deliveries are critical to their success, as they see a continuing need in our community. CHCV provides a unique service that programs cannot get anywhere else.

Our busiest season for gleaning is in the late summer and fall – August through November – when we are storing up as much as we can to be distributed to recipient sites over the winter months as they need the food. However, we do field gleans and pick-ups year-round from packing houses, markets, greenhouses, and other places where local food is being produced.

We receive a significant portion of our funding from individual donors. We also receive donations from recipient and community partners, as well as from businesses and foundations. We welcome your participation.

We welcome your participation!