Announcements:
Jim Callender said that he and Tom Bates had spent $1,073.12 for hygiene products for one school in Cobre so he feels we will reach the $2,500 point since Silver has not been shopped for yet. They did get a refrigerator and a microwave that had been requested. Jim said they will also purchase sweatpants at a later date.
Mark Richard suggested we talk about the Toss No Mas event on May 17 from 9-11 am. Art said we are having Alicia Hallmark, who runs that program, next week, and we should be able to get any questions answered. Mark suggested we get a show of hands from people who plan to participate; four people raised their hands. Mark suggested we get some publicity out. Tom said there were Epic Day shirts and caps available for purchase. Art said he had neon vests available to wear.
Art gave a future speaker update and asked for speaker ideas. It was suggested that we have a speaker from the Commons and Ellen Pryor agreed. 
Art mentioned the request from La Plata Middle School for a donation to help fund their trip for National History Day. He said that he and Tom would match committed club money. Mark
made the motion to offer $500 with additional support from club members. Maggie Callaway seconded. Motion carried.
Maggie reported she had no update regarding our Millie’s Retirement Center project.
Jim said Art’s “demotion” date needed to be decided. Ray Goellner will make the decision on this when he returns.

 

Art introduced Ben Rasmussen, CEO of National Center for Frontier Communities, which is based in Silver City and has been around since 1997. (Ben passed out a flyer about the Bayard Community Garden project.) This non-profit started because there needed to be a voice for small, geographically isolated rural communities. Locally they do a lot of work in southwest New Mexico— Catron, Grant and Luna counties. Remote communities in New Mexico have a high dependence on federal funding. For example, WNMU receives between $15 and $20 million a year for their budget from federal sources; the Hospital receives about 70 to 80 percent of its annual budget from federal sources; our school system receives
about 30 percent of their funds from federal sources. This doesn’t mention all the grant programs, utility help and food programs. These are parts of the reason we are able to have our really vibrant, progressive, isolated community.
He wanted to talk about the Frontier Food Hub and the Bayard Community Garden project today. New Mexico is among the leaders in food insecurity. Luna county by some measures is
the most food insecure county in the whole country. We don’t have a lot of food production; pretty much all of our food gets imported. The empty grocery store shelves during the COVID pandemic made a lot of people aware that we don’t have control over our own food production or the federal or state authorities that allocate food to our community. In 2014 several organizations started the Grant County Food Policy Council so we could figure out how to improve this situation. Founding members of The Commons started this Council, and we eventually merged. We have farmers, ranchers, nurses, public health professionals, parents, teachers,
nutritionists and many others around the region all coming together to try to figure out response to the food insecurity problem. Farmers said we would have more farmers if we had more market. So they did a feasibility study with farmers and ranchers to see what they needed to grow their business and to stay in business, what would make life easier for them. We looked at the food pantry system and measured the quantity of food coming out of them for an entire summer.
There is an issue with the food coming to these pantries and again we don’t get to make the decisions regarding them. However, when we band together and make noise together, and have
data to support it, we can start shifting things. So we put all our data together and formed Frontier Food Hub, which was meant to be a dynamic intervention for our food system to address food insecurity and economic downturn. We work with 50 to 60 farmers and ranchers every year across the region. We provide a lot of consultation. We segregate, which means we take their food together, bring it to our warehouse, pack it, and market it across the state. Now a farmer in Lordsburg has access to markets all over the state at no additional cost. We have been able to pay out over $2.5 million to these farmers and ranchers and contributed to their sustainability in New Mexico.
One of our projects is the southwest New Mexico Seed Library. There our about 10 locations now and we have thousands and thousands of native seed varieties as a free resource to farmers and gardeners in the region.
We have distributed over a million pounds of food to food pantries to supplement what they get from Roadrunner. We are now the main distributor of local food in southern New Mexico.
We worked with our community and decided we wanted to build a greenhouse training center and community garden to help train future farmers. We partnered with WNMU on design and
got funded to do this which is in the mining district. We chose the mining district because they get less resources than Silver City does. We were able to get this very competitive funding after
applying for it three years in a row. Everything we are doing is focusing on the community and their involvement. As of April 1, this grant was suspended by the new administration. This is a
four year, $400,000 grant, and we are currently in the middle of year two. We are unsure if we can get this unsuspended. We have been engaging with our entire New Mexico congressional delegation, journalists, and with attorneys, but our future is unsure. We are good until June 30. What we do know is that crises like this make you realize what you are fighting for. Ben stated that we are going to continue fighting for this. The city is behind us; people are behind us.

After a question and answer period, Art adjourned the meeting.