2024 Impact Report

Community FarmShare

Past, Present, & Future

Since Community FarmShare (CFS) was founded in 2020, we have worked with Montgomery County farmers and local communities to achieve our mission to meet our communities' healthy food access needs while also creating a market space for small scale farmers, resulting in increased local food production and a strengthened local food system for all.

In 2024, we grew significantly, working with new partners, clinics, and schools, expanding our Farm to School and Food Is Medicine programs. A few key highlights include:

We established our 4 mobile markets to provide affordable nutrition access where residents live.
We streamlined inventory management and wholesale work by utilizing online market platforms.
We became a SNAP vendor, enabling benefits purchases at our markets, and deepening outreach.
We initiated our “True Cost of Food” campaign, which is both a subsidized/matching funding mechanism to facilitate organizations to buy local produce and an educational campaign to raise awareness about the value of local farms and the risks to human and planet health resulting from the broken “industrial” food system.

In 2025, we plan to run 8 mobile markets and hire a Nutrition Educator to expand our Food is Medicine work with clinics and schools. Additionally, our new refrigerated market truck will greatly improve efficiency, keep produce fresh and safe, and reduce food waste.

None of this would be possible without our fantastic group of dedicated volunteers, community partners, and local farmers working together.

Programs

Local Farm Support

Our Aggregation Hub is central to CFS’s operations. We buy produce from many small farms to aggregate to larger volumes that together meet program demands and create sales channels for farmers. Central aggregation also helps resolve challenges around the limited cold storage capacity of farmers and partners, addressing timing differences from harvest to food distribution day. CFS uses an online farm market platform where farmers upload available produce each week. This improves CFS’s operations and logistics efficiency and increases local farm produce visibility and accessibility to the public.

CFS works with farmers to grow the produce most desired by the communities served. Contract purchasing positively impacts farms, enabling them to expand production, knowing they have a guaranteed market to sell to.

$340K

13 140K lbs

Invested in local farms

Local Farm Partners

of local produce bought

and distributed

Farm to School (F2S)

CFS works with MCPS Community Schools, in communities facing high barriers to accessible healthy food. School partners refer families to our Farm to School program based on their needs. Families enrolled in the program receive weekly fresh produce bags delivered to their homes or to the school for pick up, or participants can use a voucher system to shop at our weekly free choice mobile farm stand markets.

We partner with SNAP-Ed programs offered in Montgomery County Public Schools to provide fresh produce for an educational “tasting curriculum”, linking elementary schools with fresh veggies and making connections to where and how good food is grown.

377

9

15

school families enrolled in F2S programs

schools participated in SNAP-Ed

public schools partners (F2S programs)

Food Is Medicine

ICFS supports FIM programs to support residents experiencing food insecurity and managing diet-related chronic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, or hypertension. The core idea is that access to healthy foods, nutrition, and healthy lifestyle counseling can lead to long-term positive health outcomes. FIM programs are data-driven, assessing baseline and post-program clinical measures to assess impact and best support residents’ needs. In 2024, more than 60% of diabetic and pre-diabetic patients notably improved their clinical measures by the end of the intervention.

CFS strategically places partners at the core of our FIM work: community health clinics, school-based health and wellness centers, research universities, and community-based organizations focused on healthy food access, know their community best, which leads to positive program impact and greater community engagement.

believe that using local produce for FIM programs improves health outcomes: better taste = increased produce consumption; healthy soil practices and peak ripeness harvest/freshness = higher nutrient density.

297

7

patients enrolled in FIM programs

community health clinics

partners (FIM programs)

M. Castillo

“For me the help that you gave us is very important. Thanks to this program I always have fresh vegetables at home for my family.”

C. Ngweh

“For my family of five, this helped a lot, especially since we could have the produce every week for a long time. Many thanks!”

Food Access & Systems

Mobile Markets

In 2024, CFS started 4 mobile farm markets, a.k.a. our “FARMacy,” with locations in healthy food priority areas in the county. Families enrolled in Farm to School and Food Is Medicine programs use a prepaid card to purchase free choice produce at any market location. The FARMacy creates a dignified farm-stand shopping experience with a selection from 20-30 different culturally appropriate produce varieties. Through the free-choice model, residents select what their families want, resulting in higher healthy food consumption and reduced food waste. Through our Farmers Register app used at check-out, CFS gains valuable data about produce preferences, enabling us to stock each market with preferred produce.

40,820 lbs of produce worth $81,995 selected at markets

43 SNAP recipients accessed fresh produce at markets

193 people served each week at mobile markets

4 stand locations with 94 weeks present in the community

Produce Bags

CFS provides weekly pre-packed fresh produce bags for families facing transportation barriers or whose schedules make it difficult to reach a nearby market. Each week, a dedicated team of volunteers packs culturally appropriate fresh produce bags, including about 8-10 items sourced through our local farmer network and aggregation hub. Additionally, we provide fresh produce bags “in bulk” for organizations that include produce bags in their community distribution models.

83,350 lbs of produce bags worth $204,207 delivered

Wholesale

CFS creates a streamlined process to enable food assistance providers to purchase fresh produce in bulk quantities while supporting farmers by creating another sales channel. CFS’s online marketplace allows community partners to order the type and volume of produce needed for their communities and have it delivered when needed for distribution. By managing the administrative, invoicing, and logistics side, CFS makes buying and selling local produce easier, positively impacting the local food system.