The bread is always baking at Delta County Schools on the Western Slope of Colorado. What’s also always happening is Jeri Main, the district’s food service coordinator, and her staff are always on the hunt for new recipes.

Forty-one dining hall staff and managers serve breakfast and lunch for a district of a little more than 4,600 students. Since the start of Healthy School Meals for All, the voter-approved initiative to provide no-cost lunch and breakfast in Colorado’s public schools, Main’s staff has been serving an increasing number of students.

And that means, they’ve had to up their game.

Colectivo de Paz makes food a bridge. 

The Denver nonprofit’s mutual aid program focuses on supporting people living unhoused. And a major way it builds trust between the organization’s volunteers and staff and the individuals they serve is by demonstrating an understanding of basic needs. 

“If you don’t have those basic physical needs met, there isn’t anywhere else to go. Food is always a need, and it creates trust,” said Julian Temianka, the group’s Director of Outreach and Advancement. “With that line of communication open we can do more. Maybe it’s naturalization status. Maybe it is a wound that’s just out of sight under their shirtsleeve. We can’t just come in to say, ‘Who needs legal services?’ until we establish that baseline.” 

Greta Allen, the Blueprint’s Policy Director, recently visited Leadville to celebrate with some partners in Colorado’s Lake County. Located in a mountain valley of central Colorado, Leadville is the highest-elevation incorporated town in North America at 10,158 feet.

During her time there, Greta attended a full-day celebration of food and earth, with the collective goal of creating change to see food in abundance and in ways that allow everyone to eat healthy and be well. The event called “Future Town: Lettuce Gather” was hosted by Lake County Build a Generation (LCBAG) and Warm Cookies of the Revolution in September 2023. 

In tiny Creede, where the school district is home to just 90 students, one man has a goal for himself and his team.

Malcolm Snead, the school’s nutrition director, wants his dining rooms to be considered the “best rural food service program in Colorado.” If you look at his menu and the response from the kids who come through the lunch line, he’s well on his way.

His menu features lentil stew sourced from Dove Creek, micro greens and hydroponically-grown lettuce from the San Luis Valley, and yak meat from a rancher in Saguache.

The San Luis Valley spans nearly 8,000 square miles of southern Colorado, where much of the land in the world’s largest alpine valley provides for the local community as well as people all over the state and nation. They’re the second-largest producer of potatoes in the United States and the largest supplier of native hay for Colorado. With the high-mountain desert’s climate, farmers also grow alfalfa, barley, wheat, and vegetables as well as raise livestock and use their land for grazing.

Dana Wood, the Blueprint’s Community Investment Manager, recently visited several partners in the San Luis Valley who are centering community-driven solutions to transform their local food systems and address hunger locally. This included the Valley Roots Food Hub, San Luis People’s Market, and Saguache Food Access Coalition. See her photo essay to learn more.

Greta Allen, the Blueprint’s Policy Manager, recently visited the Pueblo Food Project and RMSER in Pueblo County in late August. She also traveled to Prowers County to make a presentation and meet with Lamar Unidos. 

Michelle Ray, the Blueprint’s Visibility Manager who’s based in Colorado Springs, is becoming more active with the Southeast Food Coalition. In addition to attending coalition meetings, she recently volunteered at Solid Rock Community Development Corporation’s free farmers market and helped facilitate a small-group conversation around local food access during a community dinner at Food to Power. 

Find out a little more about each group’s efforts to build community and address hunger locally.

As part of our work, program staff for the Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger find it important to visit and connect with network partners right in their communities. We want to see what’s happening locally – especially the great work being done by community coalitions and organizations.

Dana Wood, the Blueprint’s Community Investment Manager, recently visited with recipients of Food Pantry Assistance Grants in southwestern Colorado. This included the Montezuma School to Farm Project and Pine River Shares in Bayfield, along with a joint food distribution by Good Sam’s Food Pantry and Dolores Family Project in Cortez.

It’s a known challenge within the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program in most communities. How do we get more people eligible for the program to actually use it?

The Community Food Bank of Grand Junction is tackling that question with a significant grant from the USDA. One of only 36 organizations selected to participate in the work, the food bank is certainly one of the smallest and also one of the few in a more rural part of the country.

Children flocked to a neighborhood playground in Fort Morgan last Friday afternoon. Young adults wearing bright blue T-shirts, denoting them as staff for Kids at Their Best, were already on-site, getting ready to serve lunch and connect with any kid or teen who came. And they showed up for fun and food.

“It’s all about solving issues but also having fun,” shared Jodi Walker, founder and executive director for Kids at Their Best.

What started as a way for James Grevious to spend more quality time with his kids has grown into a fledgling non-profit, Urban Symbiosis, with the ambitious mission of becoming an urban farm incubator, fresh food provider, and economic engine for the Aurora community.

It all began with too many zucchinis, tomatoes, and leafy greens.

The initial group, made up of Grevious’ family and a few additional local kids, adopted the name Rebels in the Garden to describe their efforts to grow food for their families. They found that their plan to sell excess fresh food from their front yard -- lemon aide-stand style -- was met with an unexpected level of interest and need.

Last week on Juneteenth, Andrea Loudd shared her story and her community during Workgroup 2/3’s Liderazgo Comunitario (Community Leadership) workshop. It’s a powerful reminder of the racial disparities that still exist since the emancipation of Black slaves in the U.S. on June 19, 1865 – and why the Blueprint is committed to equity and being community-centered in its work to address hunger across Colorado. 

Her words and leadership inspire others to imagine a community without hunger, and we’re here to help amplify community voices like Andrea’s.

One year ago, Food to Power opened its Hillside Hub in southeast Colorado Springs to meet the needs of its local community with a no-cost grocery and urban farm that supplies some of their store’s healthy food options.
“People have always asked for a grocery store in the Hillside community, and this fresh-food access point is needed now more (than) ever,” shared Executive Director Patience Kabwasa.

At Colorado Circles for Change, the focus is connecting young people to their sacred self.
Because that is the mission, the organization’s leaders soon realized that this type of self-exploration and actualization wasn’t possible until the young people had the basics. And one of the most essential was food. “We know that in our programs, our youth can’t focus on the larger goals if they don’t have access to nutritious food,” said Frida Soto, the organization's lead program manager. “So we started with snacks and then meals.”

When you visit the Nederland Food Pantry, you might be struck by how much of the pantry space and surrounding land is dedicated to food production and display. That’s intentional.

Over the last several years, the pantry has worked hard to produce food on the land around the pantry building, which is an old school.

At the heart of the San Luis Food Sovereignty Initiative is the acequia. Both the irrigation ditches that help keep the San Luis Valley the productive agricultural land it is, and the Acequia Institute provide the lifeblood of a movement that is seeking to reclaim a food system and the heritage attached to that system.

In 2014, Growing Home’s leadership understood it was time to work to expand beyond the limits they saw in the direct service they had always done, to a model that included deeper community engagement and community-driven change.

It is important to begin this way. Spirit of the Sun is an Indigenous womxn-led nonprofit serving Denver and its surrounding suburbs which are located on Očhéthi Šakówiŋ, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho) land, Comanche, and more than 48 other tribes’ sacred land.

At the Family & Intercultural Resource Center of Summit County, the motto is “promoting stable families and strong communities since 1994.” While promoting stable families remains the long-serving organization’s focus, much additional attention is being paid to the experience of those families who use the food resources available there. The intentional shifts to enhance user experience, as well as the intersectional nature of each consumer’s life has resulted in some big changes in stigma reduction, education and improved environments for the organization.

No one expects to need to rebuild their lives. Still, thousands of adults and families find themselves in need of doing just that. And for 36 years, a safe harbor in that particular storm has been the Gathering Place. This refuge for rebuilding lives provides shelter, basic necessities and supportive programs to women, trans folx and children who are experiencing poverty and homelessness.

It all started when Thai Nguyen joined other mothers at her child’s school to try and infuse more healthy fresh foods into their school meals. To make the budget work, they picked up unused food from a local food bank.

Now the Kaizen Food Rescue has grown and provided 5 million pounds of food through 21 partner organizations in 2021. “I saw what would happen to the food we were rescuing. Just our little school and what we could load in our cars to share with our kids and our families,” Nguyen said.

Village Exchange Center's food access program serves Aurora and Metro Denver's immigrants, refugees, and communities experiencing food insecurity. Through strategic partnerships, the food pantry meets community needs for fresh produce, meals, toiletries, and diapers weekly.

The Sister Carmen Community Center is not an emergency response organization. The 44-year-old non-religious nonprofit found itself in the middle of need for one of Colorado’s most destructive fires, the Marshall Fire, that swept through Boulder County destroying thousands of structures, most of them homes. People in the community who had used the community center before for the various food, rent and other assistance provided were the first to trickle in. But they were quickly followed by hundreds of others who suddenly found hotels full, rent prices skyrocketing and a need to simply talk their way through the shock of losing everything in a matter of minutes.

Rising Up understands how food coincides with not only nutrition but how cultural identity has become equally important. As a partner agency of FBR, deliveries have increased to include foods that are commonly consumed by the different cultural and ethnic groups represented in Morgan County. However, it must be noted certain communities, for example east African do not want canned items. While the food item may be a traditional food, it is rejected because the packaging, in this case a can, diminishes its quality.

Founded in 2013 and formerly known as the Colorado Springs Food Rescue, the group's flagship program designed to reduce food waste while increasing food access, quickly evolved into “organism with a mission” — multi-faceted programming working together to cultivate a healthy, equitable food system in the greater Colorado Springs community.

MYPI is working with all three refugee resettlement agencies in Colorado to provide culturally appropriate aid to Afghan refugee families who will resettle in Colorado, with a current approximation of 3,000 Afghan refugees.

The unforgiveable truth understood all too well by the anti-hunger community is that there is far more food in the world than we need to ensure no one goes hungry. The issue is the access which our broken system fails to provide. Thankfully, communities across Colorado are working on fixing these systems and many are doing it with an equity lens for both the people who need the food as well as the farmers who need to make a living producing that food.

Colorado regularly makes Top 10 lists for food insecurity among older adults. At the same time, enrollment in the Colorado Supplemental Food Program, which specifically serves people 60 and older, has seen declining enrollments for years, well before pandemic shutdowns caused additional hardships.

t all started because a little boy raised his hand to answer this question: What do you want to ask Santa for this year His answer, born of need free from stigma, was simple. Food. “We knew that we were working with kids and families who were struggling in many ways,” said Julia Simmons, president of Denver-based Amp the Cause. “But to have a child put the need so clearly and simply, you can’t look away from that.”

ReKaivery is on a mission to recover local food networks, starting with Larimer County. ReKaivery is creating carbon-neutral food hubs which will operate similarly to hyperlocal grocery stores within renovated, solar-powered shipping containers. These food hubs will make it easier for all community members to access, purchase and sell locally sourced food. ReKaivery is reducing barriers that exist within the local food space to ensure local food is accessible for all while supporting local suppliers by providing an equitable, convenient channel to sell to the local market. ReKaivery’s model is unique in that the products are sold on consignment. This means, the suppliers maintain autonomy over their pricing while ReKaivery manages and sells the products on behalf of the suppliers. ReKaivery’s food hubs will have a large community impact with a small environmental footprint.

He who holds the purse strings holds the power. It’s a well-worn adage, but no less accurate today than yesterday. Understanding this reality, the Archuleta County Food System|Food Equity Coalition centered their recent work – as so many in their community struggled with pandemic-related challenges – on breaking down one real financial barrier to a more equitable food system. The Coalition includes organizations, community food agencies and groups, growers and producers, and individual community members from across the rural county nestled in the San Juan National Forest.