Greenfield Nonprofits and Charities

Stone Soup Café offers weekly pay-what-you-can Community Meal and Grocery programs from their home in downtown Greenfield. The meals are always prepared from scratch by a small staff coordinating the efforts of hundreds of volunteers. The food is delicious, healthy, and features ingredients sourced from a variety of local farms, food businesses, and gleaning groups. The menus celebrate cuisines and cultures from around the world and Stone Soup's grocery program, Everybody's Community Store has produce, pantry staples, personal care items and excellent variety and quality of food. With volunteer delivery drivers and curbside service, the Café serves ~600 meals every Saturday. <br><br>

The community members that started this organization back in 1979 had tremendous vision. The FCCDC has been providing useful services to small businesses for all these years. Whether it's help with a business plan, capital to start or grow a business, space to work, or equipment and expertise for food businesses, the FCCDC has the staff and resources to make it easier for entrepreneurs throughout Franklin, Hampshire and Berkshire Counties.

I have recently attended workshops for teachers managed by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA). NESEA and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) intelligently set up a system of trainees becoming trainers, so that their very useful curriculum and materials could be spread much further than it otherwise would have been. NESEA educational trainers are responsive listeners who build on experiences and discussions to make a well-tuned yet flexible curriculum. Especially in these workshops, but in other things they do, I appreciate how NESEA uses professionals in the field of sustainable energy and sustainable building to inform and inspire their K-12 educational work. The majority of NESEA members are professionals and enthusiasts in architecture, construction, and renewable energy, not K-12 education, but I joined the organization as a teacher and a representative of my own educational organization because the organization as a whole goes above and beyond working for advancements in education. One great example of exceeding expectations is how NESEA runs Junior Solar Sprint (JSS), an annual engineering challenge for middle school students to build shoebox size solar cars. They improved on the national version of the event, and it is now a very successful program in engineering education from Maine to DC. I've been attending and volunteering at JSS local and regional races every year since 2005.