It Takes a Village to Feed a Village: The Innovative Food Programs of Windsor’s SASH
Written by Marion Major, Outreach & Marketing Coordinator at Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT), and featured in their Fall 2024 newsletter. Photos and story courtesy of WWHT.
No one goes hungry on Molly Bennett’s watch.
Molly is the SASH Coordinator based out of WWHT’s Windsor Village, where, for the last four years, she has helped connect residents and low-income seniors in the community with resources, services and supports that they need to continue to live as independently as possible. That includes bringing healthy food to all who need it. And Molly makes it her business to know exactly who needs it.
As the SASH coordinator, Molly spends her days engaged with the residents of Windsor Village and Union Square, as well as about 25 participants living in private homes in the community. She helps with everything from housing to finances, to health and wellness, to filling out applications for assistance.
“One of the benefits of SASH is we’re very connected to our participants and any kinds of challenging things they are going through,” says Molly. “If we’re doing our jobs the way that we’re supposed to, we know about these things – and that includes knowing if there’s food in the refrigerator.”
Identifying and addressing food insecurity is a real focus for Molly, and she has put a great deal of effort, imagination and heart into bringing direct food access to her community in Windsor. As a designated senior housing facility – and WWHT’s largest property in the community – Windsor Village serves as the community’s food hub.
“We have a bit more food programming offered here,” explains Molly. “Some of the programs are age and income specific, and this property is the most eligible and appropriate for a lot of the state and federal programs.”
Weekly deliveries of produce from the Norwich nonprofit, Willing Hands, bring an abundance of fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy, eggs, meat and bread to the property. Even more fresh produce is delivered monthly from the Vermont Foodbank as part of the Commodities Supplemental Food Program, which also delivers shelf-stable pantry items like cereals, pastas, and canned soups and vegetables. “These are the things that help people get through when the money starts to run low,” says Molly.
Commodities is a federal food program through the USDA that is age and income specific. If someone mentions a need, Molly helps with the application. She has participants from both Windsor Village and Union Square, and says about 25 residents access the Commodities program on a regular basis.
With a significant amount of produce coming in weekly, Molly started to think about what other resources she could access to maximize usage and promote healthy eating. She sought out, and received, an $1800 Vermont Fresh mini grant.
“The purpose of this grant is not to purchase food, but to purchase other things that you would use to promote the healthy eating of produce,” she explains. “We have been able to make some very noticeable changes to our community room space, where we keep a lot of the produce we get.”
So far, Molly has used the grant to buy a cooler for temperature-controlled produce storage; she bought materials to build a cedar orchard rack to store onions, potatoes and other dry goods; and she purchased a chalk board, mounted in the community room, which displays weekly recipes using ingredients on hand. She also plans to use these funds to create a Windsor SASH Cookbook.
“It will contain produce-forward recipes,” says Molly, “using some of the produce that we get pretty regularly. We get a lot of onions; we get a lot of kale. We get some produce that people don’t know what to do with. So just knowing what we get for produce deliveries, and then coming up with some delicious recipes that use those items.”
Somewhere around researching recipes and food storage, Molly had another idea: individually portioned frozen meals.
“Most of my SASH participants are older adults, and a lot of our older adults are not making great big meals. They need smaller portions, easy to make, maybe just popping them in the oven or the microwave. A lot of difficulty is in the prep – standing up to cut vegetables, cook at the stove – that’s really hard for people.”
There was another scenario that was even more compelling for Molly. “We also have people who are going through a challenging time of life – maybe they’ve just been discharged from the hospital, or maybe there is something else going on in their life – and they have no access to food. Maybe they’re not consistently food insecure, but they might be acutely food insecure, as opposed to chronically food insecure. How do we help people get through those times?”
So, in January, Molly set off on a culinary experiment to figure out what a frozen meal program would cost. “I bought some ingredients and I made 28 meals,” she says. “I made a baked ziti and a shepherd’s pie. It came out to about $2.76 per meal.”
That sounded like a good number to Molly – good enough to pursue funding. Through the Vermont Food Bank’s Competitive Capacity Grant, Molly accessed $2,250 to pay for non-food supplies, like pots and pans, storage containers, and a freezer. Additionally, the SASH program received a $500 grant from Claremont Savings Bank Foundation to help purchase supplies for the program. Currently, Molly is looking at other funding sources to pay for food. In the meantime, she says she has an engaged group of residents at Windsor Village who are onboard to help with food prep.
Molly says what she really likes about her frozen meal project is that it is available to anyone who needs it. “Because this is something I’m creating, there’s no paperwork to fill out. So people don’t have to tell me how much money they make, or answer any probing questions. There’s no income requirement, there’s no age requirement, there’s no requirement, there’s just a need. You tell me you need food, I’ll get you some food.”
Molly attributes her intense focus on addressing food insecurity to her own lived experience. “Honestly, it’s just something that’s personally very important to me. I grew up somewhat food insecure, so I kind of know what it’s like to not know if there’s going to be food tomorrow. There’s nothing worse than being hungry.”
“I think we need to be able to meet people’s basic life needs before we can ask them to work on anything else,” she says. “We can’t ask people to make sure they’re going to the doctor and managing their blood pressure, managing their diabetes, managing anything, if they’re hungry. People’s outcomes are going to be so much better if we can just feed them.”
She adds, “You always feel the most love when someone puts a delicious meal in front of you that they’ve made for you. I think that really shows people that we care about them. If I bring a meal – just a little frozen meal – I bring it to someone, and it shows I care about them, that I want them to be okay.”
Molly’s vision for the frozen meal program extends beyond Windsor Village into the greater community.
“My hope is that we can build up our capacity, find people who are willing to volunteer and help make food, get creative with where we find the funding. I’m fairly well connected with our SASH community partners, our local hospital, our local mental health agencies, our local area agency on aging, so if I could offer these frozen meals to patients at Mount Ascutney, or clients who are being seen by Senior Solutions – where these other folks who are doing this good work for our aging Vermonters could come to me and say, hey, could you bring me a couple of frozen meals for one of my clients – if we could build our capacity outside of just WWHT properties to feed a larger community, that would be kind of great.”
“I’m a big believer that the last chapter of your life is supposed to be your golden years, it’s supposed to be happy, somewhat worry free. So this is my little grassroots attempt at making this chapter in our participants’ lives just a little happier, just a little easier.”
“Food insecurity is a real thing,” she adds. “Whether that’s an acute need or a chronic need, we need to do whatever we can to help people who may be struggling to eat.”