Bountiful Baskets: Helping people eat healthier

Havre Daily News/Lindsay Brown

Volunteers pack baskets full of fruit and vegetables for a Bountiful Baskets site at Highland Early Primary School.

To honor volunteerism in north-central Montana during National Volunteer Week, every day this week Havre Daily News will be looking at some volunteers and volunteer-run organizations which help sustain our communities and enrich our lives.

An old cliché has neighbors meeting neighbors when one asks to borrow a cup of sugar from the other, but a modern twist bringing neighbors together through food is about teams of volunteers spending part of their Saturday distributing fresh produce, ordered online, to their neighbors.

People across the Hi-line have volunteered to help bring a multi-state food co-operative to make bulk-purchased, low-cost produce and other foods available to their communities.

Bountiful Baskets is a modern business model that started as a food cooperative in Phoenix, Ariz., in 2006, but when the co-founders wanted to enlarge the co-op they turned to the Internet for online ordering. Though this does not seem like a solution that would bring neighbors together like meeting them in the grocery aisle, it ended up being a business that fosters a sense of community.

The food co-op relied on word-of-mouth and social media to take care of the advertising, and the co-founders set up a system of food distribution that relies primarily on a network of volunteers to get produce and other foods from producers and marketers to distribution points throughout the participating communities — across 21 states right now.

Volunteer site coordinators take on the responsibility of arranging community drop points, organizing volunteers, who unload and divvy up the delivery, and ensuring that all orders have been filled before the delivery truck drives away. The VSC and other volunteers then hand out the orders to the people who purchased them.

Ruth Wardell, who started the second Bountiful Basket site in Havre, had only participated in the co-op a couple times, she said, before deciding that she needed to become involved as a volunteer site coordinator.

"Everybody was just stressing out the morning of ordering because it sold out so quickly," she said, referring to the fact that the window in which people can place orders is only about 36 hours long and only a set number of orders can be placed, on a first-come basis, before it's over.

In the early months of the co-op site's existence in Havre those orders went quickly.

"It was like a lottery. Everybody was trying to get in and get a basket before they were sold out, and they were selling out in like 5 or 10 minutes," Wandell added, "and so I just decided that, for the community, I would go ahead and start another site."

Alisha Roseleip, the co-coordinator of the Chinook site that started in January 2012, said that she wanted the produce for herself, but, more than that, she wanted to get the co-op into her community which, she said, isn't big enough to have a store that can offer a wide variety of produce and other food available through the co-op.

Though percentages would suggest that it would be harder to find the large number of needed volunteers in a town with a significantly smaller population to draw from, Roseleip said she's had few times when she's been desperate for help.

"I have a good group of volunteers," she said. "A good core group I can rely on and many others who have spent time here."

An ample number of volunteers last Saturday meant the job of unloading and dividing up the food was completed 15 minutes ahead of schedule. As volunteers who weren't needed for the distribution filed out of the Girl Scout club house, which serves as the drop point in Chinook, they chatted with people starting to line up for their purchases.

"I would love to see more younger people volunteering," said Roseleip, who is a volunteer Girl Scout leader and Sunday school teacher and naturally involves children in her activities. This is evidenced by the handful of preshoolers playing in a corner out of the way of the steady stream of people coming for their purchases and the volunteers carting baskets of food to tables for bagging and boxing, and then cleaning and stacking the empty baskets — all in a general hum of conversation and laughter.

Roseleip said she has some high school students who volunteer, "but it's getting harder and harder to find kids who are willing to help without getting something out of it."

However, she's quick to add that she doesn't think the shortage of volunteers is a generational problem so much as a cultural problem.

"I think it's a skill being slowly lost," she said.

Her solution for getting volunteers of all ages came during a brief period when she was short of volunteer help. The one simple thing that worked the best is to call people directly rather than relying on a general notice that assistance is needed.

"It's harder to say no when someone specifically asks," she said.

Though it's difficult for people naturally drawn to serve to ask for help from others, she's encouraged by the good response from people to her direct requests.

"If you put opportunity out there for them," she said, "they help."