By JUNO OGLE
Daily Press Staff
Thanks to a large federal grant, the Frontier Food Hub will begin working with residents in the Mining District to increase area food production and access, as well as training opportunities.
The National Center for Frontier Communities, the Silver City nonprofit behind the food hub, has received a $398,142 Community Food Project grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Over the next four years, the food hub will build on the center’s decade of work creating regional food systems, said Ben Rasmussen, executive director of the National Center for Frontier Communities.
“We have been really successful up to this point in our Frontier Food Hub, within our kind of food system operations,” he told the Daily Press. “We work with dozens of farmers. We distribute food all around the state. We’ve paid out over a million dollars to local growers, and we’ve been really successful also engaging with food pantries to bolster their emergency food distribution.”
The grant will allow the food hub to concentrate on creating a community food production plan specifically in the Mining District, he said.
“We recognize that the Mining District is often left out of exciting opportunities,” Rasmussen said. “They’re often not invested in at the same rate as Silver City, and so we really want to be intentional about our engagement with them and that members of the community are involved in the design, implementation and ownership of the project as much as possible.”
That became apparent last fall, when 20 residents worked with the food hub in a two-day planning session held at the Santa Clara Armory. Residents expressed frustration over the lack of attention received by the Mining District and their desire to increase food access, create avenues for employment and engage students and families in programming, according to a press release Rasmussen sent to the Daily Press.
The first year of the project will focus on building community engagement while continuing the food hub’s mobile farmers markets, Rasmussen said. A steering committee is being put together and should be ready for its first meeting within a couple of weeks, but the organization is open to more members, Rasmussen said. Anyone interested can contact him at brasmus [email protected].
To work toward that goal, the food hub has hired Elysha Montoya as community engagement coordinator.
“I believe representation matters. It is an honor and a privilege to serve the community I come from and participate in whole systems thinking and learning. I am eager to cultivate something sustainable and nurturing for the Mining District,” Montoya said in the press release.
While the USDA’s award notice for the grant outlines projects such as construction of a greenhouse and training programs, much of what the project will look like will be dependent on what the communities want, Rasmussen said.
“In later years, we’re going to be doing some sort of community production, a greenhouse, community gardens, things like that, combined with training, education and support,” he said. “We have a lot of experience within the system, but we are trying to just utilize that experience to help supplement community food movements within the Mining District, and the only way to really do that is to make sure that it’s led by the community.
“We really want to make sure that we’re engaging with them in the right way, not just going in and providing a service that perhaps they didn’t explicitly ask for,” Rasmussen concluded.

Juno Ogle may be reached at [email protected].