First Light Farm to Food Bank Fundraiser; 2025 Season

Help our farm grow a significant amount of produce for the Revelstoke Community Connections' Food Bank next growing season!

Every dollar raised helps us get more fresh and beautiful food to the Food Bank. The Food Bank needs more fresh produce to go with their staple offerings, and we love to grow it for them!

This is one way you can donate to the food bank and support a small local farm with the same dollar. We deliver top-quality produce directly to the food bank on their operating days, adding freshness to the Food Recovery Program's offerings. We bring fresh carrot bunches, beets, cucumbers, tomatoes, greens, kale, broccoli; everything you see at our farmers' market stand!

We look forward to this fundraiser every year because our goal is to grow gorgeous organic food for our community, INCLUDING those who experience food insecurity.

Our farm wouldn't be here without the tremendous community support we receive.

Thank you. Keep reading to learn more about our food bank and First Light Farm.

Who we are:

First Light Farm Ltd is a certified organic market garden located at 2009 Big Eddy Road, in Revelstoke. The owners and operators are Chris and Jesse. We grow a large variety of vegetables: sweetie carrots, beets and new potatoes true to the history of this valley. We also grow a variety of delicate salad greens, broccoli, cauliflower, cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, melons and much more.

You will find First Light Farm produce at our locally-owned Revelstoke restaurants and all three locally-owned grocers. You will see Chris or Jesse on Saturdays at the LFI Farmers' Market and on any day of the week, you can swing by our farm stand in the Big Eddy to buy fresh produce.

Why we started this fundraiser:

We began our farm to help feed Revelstoke. It’s important to us that our produce is accessible to everyone in our community. With your support we hope to grow lots of food for the food bank. This is a way for us as a community to make a substantial contribution to those in need while simultaneously supporting our small-scale farm; you are giving the food bank a tab to shop local and fresh. Over five years we have raised $23,315 and wouldn't it be amazing to bring that up to $30k!

This is our version of a CSA Share (Community Supported Agriculture) that typically looks like a weekly veggie box subscription. We commit to growing the equivalent value of veggies specifically for the 1000 households who will use the foodbank.

The Food Bank & Food Recovery Program

Our food bank needs all the support they can get as they have been operating on the same monthly budget for the past three years even though the number of households that the food bank supplies is constantly expanding, and the price of food continues to rise.

In 2023, our Food Bank served 991 households made up of 1,451 individuals through 11,000 visits to our food bank, which is a 30% increase in usage from 2022. So far in 2024, the food bank is experiencing even higher numbers.

In 2022 our Food Bank served 700 households, which was up from 300 in the previous years.

This requires 60 volunteer hours each week, serving food and delivering hampers to those who cannot make it in person.

To date, the Food Recovery Program has rescued over 1 Million pounds of food that would have gone to the landfill. This food is collected regularly from retailers and food businesses, sorted and distributed at the food bank. The recovered food is significant, and normally makes up the majority of the perishable products offered to people in need. However as you can imagine, these veggies and fruits were deemed ‘not-fit for sale’ and therefore are not of great quality.

The Revelstoke Food Bank believes that local and high-quality produce should be accessible to everyone, and that's where we come in.

How your donation is put to work:

At the farm, we have planned ahead to grow our target value of food for the Food Bank this summer. We will harvest and deliver it through the season and will deduct each delivery from the total donation amount raised until we have matched that value.

When we drop our garden produce off at the Food Bank on pick-up mornings, the clients and volunteers alike are thrilled with the fresh quality and variety. It's a wonderful feeling to grow food that we are proud of, and have it be so appreciated.

We need your help to supply this substantial amount of food to our most vulnerable citizens. With your donation and by supporting our farm, you are helping build our local food system and our community.

Will you pitch in this year? If you can share it directly to friends, the more small donations we can gather the more impact we will make.

Also, if you can share this with another person, that will be a huge help.

It means the world to us to be supported by our community and to be able to provide the freshest food to everyone.

Thank you!

Jesse & Chris at First Light Farm

@FirstLightFarmRevelstoke

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