Making Farm to Institution Work For All

Connecting Practitioners to Share Stories and Best Practices to Make Farm to Institution Work For All

This session will be held at St. Joseph's College after a morning session called The Cumberland County Food System Summit  (for more info on Summit, contact Jim Hanna at jhanna@ccfoodsecurity.org or visit the Event Page

This is an afternoon exploring Implementation of Farm to Institution - 

What’s happening right now? 

How can we grow it together?  

Registration at 12:30 St Joseph Alfond Auditorium

At 1 pm we will hear from a panel discussion with successful local food programs:

• Maine Farm and Sea Cooperative about services providing technical assistance on a 9 step plan to implement a local foods program;

• St. Joe’s College now buying 44% of their food budget from local producers ;

• Efforts in Healthcare,

• Falmouth Schools farm to school program. 

• Maine Farm to Institution Work Group

At 2:15 pm Small Group Discussions to tackle the most common barriers cited for a local foods program: 

• How to tell the story - marketing your local foods to the customers and develop a Harvest of the Season program with us today!  

• Why is it so hard to buy local?  Solutions to aggregation and distribution issues; 

• Jumping the hurdles  - Food safety, pricing and product consistency, buying agreements  

At 3:30 pm we will gather together, hear some tales from each group around action steps that we can tackle as a network of local food providers.

At 4:00 Enjoy a local foods happy hour provided by St Joe’s Food Service in the Pearson Cafe and catch up with the folks you didn’t get a chance to see earlier!

This event is supported in part by funding from the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation.

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We hope you can make it!

Cheers,
Maine Farm and Sea Cooperative & the Maine Farm to Institution Work Group