 New Salisbury Market Opens Its DoorsThe Our Neighbors' Table Salisbury Market is officially open and serving more than 1,500 guests per week. Like the Amesbury location, Our Neighbors’ Table Salisbury Market offers a range of fresh fruits and vegetables, meats and staples like eggs, milk and bread. The Salisbury location has absorbed all of the demand for ONT's services while the Amesbury location at 194 Main St., known as the Jardis-Taylor Center, undergoes of renovations. The effort to create the Salisbury market from the ground up and shift thousands of pounds of food from Amesbury was a true community effort behind the strength of a small army of volunteers alongside our staff. The market opening completes Phase 2 of a four-phase effort to expand capacity and distribution across the region once the Seacoast Regional Food Hub is complete. Phase 3 will include opening the renovation of the Amesbury market (the Jardis-Taylor Center) by the end of September, and Phase 4 will be the expanded procurement of surplus food in the community. Watch for a ribbon cutting for the ribbon cutting for the newly renovated Jardis-Taylor Center on October 1! By this fall, ONT will have both locations available to people in need. Imagine a food secure region!  Rally Your Networks - Who Wants a Tour?Many say once they've had a tour of the Seacoast Regional Food Hub, they realize its full potential as a food resource for the entire region. Do you know someone who would be inspired by our goal to create a food secure region? We still need significant community investment to fund this vital project. If know someone who wants to invest in feeding neighbors in need, reach out to [email protected]. We'd love to show you around! Partner Profile - Among Friends Bonnie Schultz, executive director, and Stuart Tuthill, treasurer, stand in Among Friends Meal Program's recently renovated kitchen, which includes a new convection oven and chest freezer. Among Friends partners with ONT for food deliveries and more. For 25 years, Executive Director Bonnie Schultz has been making meals for people in need at the Among Friends Meal Program in Newburyport. Like so many food programs in the region, Among Friends had humble beginnings and still operates out of a small kitchen at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church on High Street, where it serves an average of 350 meals a week. Thanks to a team of loyal volunteers, the program focuses on serving free prepared nutritious and balanced food three days a week – dinner on Mondays and lunch on Tuesdays and Fridays. And while the need has always been there, Bonnie says in recent years her ability to meet that need has greatly improved. During the pandemic, the region’s food providers came together to form the Seacoast Food Providers, and started meeting monthly under the leadership of Our Neighbors’ Table and Executive Director Lyndsey Haight. From those monthly pandemic meetings came the concept of the Seacoast Regional Food Hub to expand food storage and access for the entire region. Among Friends was one of the very first to receive their Greater Boston Food Bank delivery at the Hub, and Bonnie says it’s made an immediate impact. “We were having to use ONT’s van to go to Boston, and find cold storage at Shaw’s or other places,” she says. “Now we use the van to drive over the bridge to the Hub. It’s nice and easy for us. It’s so exciting.” Food Hub in the NewsThe Food Hub is making news! In recent weeks, we've had coverage from: More media is in the works. Stay tuned! Donor Profile - David Ives and Pam Burch David Ives and Pam Burch want philanthropy to not only be a focus of their retirement years, but as a family legacy. The Burch Ives Family Charitable Foundation was started in 2019 and two of the five trustees are the couples’ grown sons – Graham and Spencer. The Foundation supports a range of causes, but an area of specific interest is food security in their own communities. For the Burch Ives Foundation, that has led to generous support of Our Neighbors’ Table through an annual grant over the past several years. When they heard about the Seacoast Regional Food Hub, they saw its potential and donated to the capital campaign from both their foundation and personal funds. “The Seacoast Regional Food Hub project appeals to us precisely because it ambitiously pursues solutions to a vexing regional challenge,” Ives said. “That ambition is worthy of our additional support. Because we know that when this campaign concludes it will have addressed a vital need for the Lower Merrimack Valley to end food insecurity.” Ives, who ran an international insurance consulting firm, says the hub checks all 3 boxes in developing a solution to a problem – viability, scalability and sustainability. “At this time, in this part of the country, we have an abundance of resources,” David Ives says. “Food insecurity should not be a problem. There has to be ways to solve it.”  Thank You Hub Donors!
Learn more at ourneighborstable.org/foodhub
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