Season’s greetings from the HAFA staff! The farm is closed and covered with a bed of snow. We just finished a series of one to ones with our farmers and their children. And we are completing our budget and planning for 2018. Can you believe the holiday season is upon us? It’s the time of year that people gather with their families and friends to reflect on the past year and celebrate community. At HAFA, we have a set of core values that guide our work, and it’s especially prominent during this time of celebration. These values are varied, but some of our core values include focusing on the farmer and his or her family and a strong commitment to innovation and building community. It was those values that were exalted when we were recently awarded the Bush Prize—a recognition given to organizations that have a track record of making great ideas happen. Thank you to the Bush Foundation for this award and hurray to HAFA, our farmers and to all of you for supporting our work!
In this season of reflection, we wanted to review some of our key accomplishments this year:
- Added five new staff members to the organization for a total of 14 full time staffers
- Completed a full season of growing specialty crops in the high tunnel to test the efficacy of certain crops in maximizing profits with minimal labor
- Acquired a 16 foot, refrigerated truck to deliver our CSA and wholesale contracts year round
- Welcomed over 800 visitors to the HAFA Farm
- Incorporated the Vameng Produce Value Added Cooperative for bulk purchasing
- Collaborated with ArtCrop to introduce art into this year’s Thanksgiving CSA
Lastly, at our annual brain dump – an event where we reflect on the previous year, refine our systems and lastly, write guidance documents to archive our core procedures – we asked ourselves, “How do our core values influence the spirit of our work?” One person who immediately answered that question was Yao Yang, Organizer and HAFA’s Food Hub Director for the past three years.
Yao said, “When I first started [at HAFA], I really didn’t understand what it meant to focus on farmers. [All] I knew was that I wanted to serve farmers… [But] now that I’ve worked with HAFA all these years, I see it– serving farmers isn’t just helping them, but creating conditions where they can help themselves. [The spirit of my work] is about trying to build equity for our farmers so that they have a better quality of life, [see that their] work really does matter, and [have] integrity. [My job is to] make sure that farmers can continue to farm, because [honestly] who else is going to do it, right?”
Yao Yang is leaving HAFA at the end of the month, but her insights also reflect the enormous impact she has made on our farmers and the growth of the HAFA Food Hub from a pilot project to a formidable, racial-equity framed, food aggregation operation. Thank you, Yao! And thank you again for all your support this past year.
Please consider donating to HAFA at the end of this year and join us on January 10th from 9-11 AM when we host a blessing ceremony and an Open House for our new office located at 149 Thompson Avenue East, Suite 210 in West Saint Paul, MN 55118. Happy Holidays!
We are dedicated to advancing the prosperity of Hmong farmers through cooperative endeavors, capacity building and advocacy. HAFA was started and is led by family farmers. Organizing is in our DNA.