Everyone Deserves Good Food
These are hard times for a lot of folks, especially those who may have lost their jobs or had their hours cut when they may have already been struggling to make ends meet. As a sustainable food business, we want to help out. We’re not rolling in money right now as we face challenges of our own, but we do have access to a lot of great food grown by local farmers and stewards of the environment. We therefore recently started a partnership with Mount Horeb Neighbors Helping Neighbors (NHN) to try to get this food to people in need in our community.
We really appreciate the generosity of those who have donated so far, and in our first couple weeks we have raised over $1400. Mount Horeb NHN will then use that money to buy food through our suppliers that they can then give to local households in need.
One person in particular who generously donated was Tisha Brown, in honor of her late grandparents Raymond and Jeannette Garbes. Tisha was instrumental in getting the Brix and NHN partnership started, so we asked her to describe the background of the partnership and the motivation for her donation, which is included in the quoted content below:
Above: Tisha with her grandparents Raymond and Jeannette Garbes, 2010.
“Early in May Matt Raboin contacted me with a request - could I help Brix figure out a way to make the locally grown and processed food and drink available through Brix’s Food Delivery marketplace accessible to Mt. Horeb neighbors experiencing financial difficulty. I eagerly accepted the challenge and started doing research. Quickly, I learned that Neighbors Helping Neighbors had developed a food distribution effort following the onset of the pandemic. A few phone calls later, I was talking with Ann Szalkowski and learning all about the need in our community as well as the response of Neighbors Helping Neighbors. One meeting with Matt, Ann and I was all it took to set up a system through which Brix customers could make donations that would be given to Neighbors Helping Neighbors so that they could purchase fresh, local produce and meats at cost from Brix’s growing network of local food producers to supplement the products they are receiving weekly from Second Harvest of Dane County. These donations enable Neighbors Helping Neighbors to offer more variety as well as fresh, seasonal foods and locally produced meats to their clients.
This growing partnership is incredibly exciting to me. It has so many elements that reflect my values - support for local systems of food growth and production and especially local farmers, support for neighbors experiencing hardship, and support for local businesses that sustain our local economy and make Mount Horeb such a great place to live. For this reason, it was a no brainer to make a donation to this partnership out of the small inheritance I received following the sale of a portion of our family farm in Northeastern Iowa. It is out of deep gratitude to my grandparents, Raymond and Jeannette Garbes that I offered this donation. It makes me really happy to know that some of the legacy of their lives stretches into this community. I know they would both be pleased to be part of making locally produced food from small farms like the one they worked for more than 60 years available to neighbors in need through a small business like Brix. I hope you will join me in generously supporting this initiative!”
Kindness and generosity will help draw us all together and get us through hard times. If you are in a financial place where you can donate to this effort, we encourage you to donate, and we will do our best to ensure that good food goes to people in the community who need it. Here’s a link to the donation page:
Above: Mount Horeb Neighbors Helping Neighbors logo
