Green Iowa Team helps with Food Distribution, Pilots No-contact Lighting Program
Bri Burke, Green Iowa Member
In the midst of this pandemic and all of the changes it has brought, one thing is still the same; the Green Iowa Americorps team is hard at work serving our community. Thankfully, there’s a lot of other great people serving our community that we are partnering with to accomplish much needed work.
The team has been working with the Food Pantry, the Food Hub, and Seed Savers to help food insecurity in our community. Right now, there’s lots of great local produce and meat that our farmers are growing and raising, but which can’t get into the hands of consumers as usual. Food Hub has addressed this issue by setting up an online order form so people can still order great local food without going into the grocery store or a restaurant. Our team has helped Food Hub box up these orders to send delicious food to our neighbors. The team has also been busy helping the Food Pantry continue to serve their clients safely. With masks and hand sanitizer, they are able to do curbside pickup while minimizing risk to clients. Seed Savers is addressing food insecurity by empowering our community to grow more of our own food! The team will help them to grow food in community gardens to donate to people who need it.There is never a shortage of environmental work either! The team has been pulling lots of invasive garlic mustard with Friends of Decorah Parks, and cleaning up litter along our roadsides.
Our team misses doing home energy assessments and helping our community reduce utility bills and carbon footprints, so we’re getting creative! The team is handing out efficient LED light bulbs along with important information on other resources such as LIHEAP to food pantry clientele, and are putting together a Bright Box program. The Bright Box program will allow us to bring light bulbs to people without entering the house. The team has really stepped up to continue our mission of reducing utility bills for NE Iowa in novel ways, and are getting a chance to explore serving the community with such amazing community partners. We will get through this together.