Montpelier Commonshare, LLC

Dear friends of local farms and food,

It is with both joy and sadness that I write to you with an update about Montpelier Commonshare.

When I became the delivery day coordinator for what started as a project of the Tree of Life Collective in 2003, our beloved local farmers and producers had very few outlets through which they could connect with customers to sell their products after the summer farmers' market wrapped up each year. Now, we have a twice-monthly farmers' market in Montpelier, there are winter and year-round CSAs (including some multi-farm CSAs with fantastic selection and variety in their offerings), and there is even a weekly Farm-to-Table program run by Food Works at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier that is open to private buyers' groups!

My heart hurts to say that I can no longer fulfill all the responsibilities of the Commonshare monthly orders that I've taken on to keep us going over the years. We had a meeting last Wednesday to make a decision about whether (and if "yes", how) to continue the Commonshare's activities. I received a wonderful, sincere, and much appreciated outpouring of support and concern in response to my last e-mail on this topic, but participation that meeting was small. The message to me is me that while our customers and volunteers support the idea of the Commonshare, we are all fully engaged in other aspects of our lives, as well, and just don't have enough hours to commit to more responsibility.

We will be wrapping up Montpelier Commonshare as an organization over the next month or two...but this e-mail address will remain active for the foreseeable future, and I will keep checking in. If anyone is interested in connecting up with a winter CSA, or with the Food Works Farm-to-Table program, please e-mail montpeliercommonshare at gmail dot com and I will do my best to help you out.

I am so grateful to all of you:

Farmers and producers, for trusting us to connect you with customers in the dark of the year--and for bringing the bounty of your gardens, fields, pastures, and orchards to us during good weather and bad every winter.
Volunteers, for lending your time and energy to so many aspects of the order: compiling the order forms, managing the mailing list, helping with sorting every month, accounting and tracking hours and writing checks...all of it. I wouldn't have been able to do it without you.
And finally, a warm thanks to our customers, who ordered faithfully, picked up cheerfully, were patient with our ever-changing order file formats over the years, and who were--and are--the glue that held everything together. Your unflagging support for the idea that locally produced food is important remains a giant inspiration to me.

Warm regards,
Amy, for Montpelier Commonshare