Connection and Care in Hard Times – Reflections from the Gleaning Season
By Sarah Bluestein, Community Gleaning Coordinator
As I look back at the 2025 gleaning season, I feel so deeply inspired by what we have been able to do together. After two incredible years growing the community gleaning program (harvesting and distributing surplus farm produce), this third year showed us what is possible when we mobilize our growing network. We gleaned over 115,000 pounds of produce from local farms, more than doubling the 50,000 pounds that we had gleaned in 2024. Even 50,000 pounds had felt like a stretch for our program capacity without a gleaning vehicle or larger storage facility—almost all of the produce is delivered directly by volunteers after gleans. Being able to glean so much more this year has been achievable because of the commitment and dedication of our incredible volunteers.
The season started off strong as experienced volunteers came back for their second or third year of gleaning and new volunteers joined the program, many immediately becoming weekly regulars. I can’t even count the number of people who came to their first glean, deeply understood what we are doing here, and came back the next week or even the next day bringing family and friends. Throughout the entire season, and especially as the season wraps up, gleaners talk about how meaningful this community has become for them. It’s a rare free of charge multigenerational space that they can show up to on their own timeline, knowing that they will spend two hours outside doing a physical activity that directly helps to feed people. They will learn about local farms and crops, meet new people and be connected to a broader community.
To me, the true power of the gleaning program is the possibilities for connection that it offers: not only between gleaners meeting each other, but through all the ways that having a surplus of food to share can bring people together. For the past three years, we have been able to send fresh local produce to support almost every community event that we’ve been connected to. Our network has connected us to community meals through several local non-profits, cider pressing workshops, free farmers markets, school programs, kimchi and apple sauce making workshops, and so many more. Gleaned produce has contributed to community connection at each event and made many of them possible through supplying free donated produce.
Gleaners also bring produce home with them to support their own families, friends, neighbors, and strangers. Watching the growth of this informal distribution has been one of my proudest moments of the program. While we send the majority of gleaned produce to our partner agencies (food pantries, meal programs, etc.), sometimes there is extra produce left in the field that agencies don’t have the capacity to distribute. When gleaners bring produce home with them (see our map of where gleaned produce went in 2024), we encourage them to share with neighbors, add it to a local free fridge, or otherwise support people that they know could use some extra food.
This year more than ever, gleaners have come to me with stories about neighbors and strangers that they have met through having food to share. Through having an extra 50 pounds of apples to distribute, one gleaner met her elderly upstairs neighbors for the first time and is now excited to regularly bring them gleaned produce for the rest of the season. Another gleaner always brings a box for a newly settled refugee family in their neighborhood. Another gleaner knows that her neighbors love to pickle and brings them radishes and turnips. Another knows exactly who in her church community needs support, and fills her van with 700 pounds of apples or 600 pounds of cabbage, distributing them through her network over the next few days. Every gleaner has countless stories to share about people they have met or deepened relationships with through sharing produce. Seeing people take an active role in supporting one another feels like such a simple yet powerful antidote to the divisive cruelty we are seeing in the world right now. It is so beautiful to get to know not only the people in our growing gleaning volunteer community, but also the people they are supporting with gleaned produce through hearing their stories of connection.
Success in this program looks like being able to respond to agency and farmer needs. When a farmer offered us a field of cabbage that had tens of thousands of pounds in it, I expected us to be able to harvest maybe as much as 3,000 pounds. Every box of cabbage is a re-used banana box that someone has picked up from a grocery store, brought to a glean, filled with harvested cabbage and then driven to a partner agency to be distributed. We have built a program framework that is scalable but relies on so much volunteer effort. I put out a call on the gleaning list-serv and said that we could distribute as much cabbage as we had boxes for. It was the week that SNAP was paused in Massachusetts and people were looking for tangible ways to help.
Over 30 people showed up to the glean, bringing around 150 boxes to fill and distribute. That day, we were able to glean and distribute 6,800 pounds of cabbage, flying past our previous gleaning record. Through some incredible collaborations that week (the generosity of the farmer, so many gleaners showing up to help, Adamah coming in to glean and deliver to Connecticut), in the end we were able to glean and share over 18,000 pounds of cabbage in the same week that our partner agencies were seeing two or three times their usual numbers of clients coming to them for extra food and meals. Even two months ago I would not have thought that we could have pulled that off, and I am blown away by the number of people who stepped up to help us glean and distribute so much produce this season.
In these hard and disconnected times, I am so grateful to have a job where every day I see people coming together to make a better world for each other. I see how much this program sustains the people who are involved through the food itself and through the connection it brings. I am so honored to partner with the incredible farmers, partner agencies, and community contacts who make this all possible. Thank you so much to everyone who has come out to glean or has supported the program this year. We have become a trusted and reliable source of food for so many in this area and contributed to so much community connection and care. Thank you for an amazing season, I can’t wait to see what we do next.