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| Dear Friends,
It is with a light heart and a happy little dance that I say goodbye to 2020 and start looking forward to warmer weather, longer days, and getting my hands in the dirt again! Over here at FRESH, we're hard at work getting everything ready for the upcoming season - building snackbeds, creating flyers to advertise our community gardens (signups will be here before you know it!), and, as soon as the weather cooperates, installing new plastic on the greenhouse at the Mercer St. garden.
And once that new cover is on the greenhouse, it'll be time to START SEEDS!!! We want to extend a very special thank you to the Eastern Connecticut Community Gardens Association for their generous donation of top-quality seed starting soil. It will help make our year even more successful! ECCGA works with local individuals and organizations to help organize, plan, construct, plant and nourish community gardens. To find out more about this wonderful group, visit their website: https://www.getgrowingct.org/
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| | | We also want to thank everyone that donated to our fundraising campaign! Our 144 envelope project raised nearly $8,000 and our annual appeal brought in almost $12,000. That's a lot of love and support for our small but mighty food justice organization, and it means the world to us that so many of you recognize how important our work is. |
| | | | | She's not the newest thing, but she's new to us and we're so pleased! From schlepping loads of soil to hauling fresh vegetables and gardening tools, this wonderful thing will be in constant use. And bonus: the back is large enough to fit a constructed raised garden bed, which will come in very handy as we start delivering them again to backyard farmers and new community snackbed sites! |
| | The New London People's Budget Coalition |
| | FRESH has joined forces with Step Up New London, Writer's Block INK, Madry Temple, Cultured AF, New London Green Party, and Hearing Youth Voices to address the problems we see with the city's budget.
Here's the Coalition's statement:
"Many people in New London struggle to meet their fundamental needs. Many families do not have access to healthy food, healthcare, adequate housing, a job that pays a living wage, and a secure income. More and more of our people are being forced into poverty. And Inequality is at an all-time high.
Our city budgets have a lot to do with this inequality and wealth gap. A city budget should always reflect the values of the people. The budget process we have now does not incorporate the people's needs. When the Mayor of New London proposes his first budget draft, he doesn’t start with analyzing what the community needs. The process starts with an assumption of how much money is expected to come in.
Once our elected city council members begin to talk about deficits, we begin to see them cutting our public services, programs, and jobs. In the history of New London, we have not yet experienced a budget process that does not put money first before people. As a community, we should not be competing over funding for healthcare, education, housing, and job creation which then creates a huge division between us.
New London, it is time that we remind our elected city council members of what we elected them to do. The People’s Budget Coalition is a group of powerful community members and organizations coming together to give the community control and a voice in the fiscal year budget for New London. We do this because we recognize that our New London residents deserve to have a voice in how our money is spent."
Do you want to add your voice to the conversation? We have a survey online right now in both English and Spanish that you are invited to fill out:
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WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
Interested in supporting FRESH with a tax-deductible donation?
Of course you are! Follow this link: http://www.freshnewlondon.org/support-us |
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