06/19/2026
Hi LFPers,
After this week, you’ll be seeing a new name on your LFP emails as Leah steps in to take on the LFP manager role, and I couldn’t imagine a better replacement. She brings an extensive background of entrepreneurship, food hub experience, and, closest to my heart, a stint as an oyster farmer, and her enthusiasm is infectious. I’m sad to go, but confident about where Leah will take this.
I want to thank each of you for your commitment to sustaining our local food economy and supporting this special program. It’s been one of the most meaningful professional experiences I’ve ever had. Seeing what you all do every week is an inspiration - showing up, caring about the food you eat, supporting your neighbors - and that matters so much more than I could convey in an email. I started this role feeling pretty jaded about the world, and I’m leaving with a profound appreciation for the people who quietly, without fanfare, show up because they know that the little things matter.
Honestly, the fact that this works at all is a miracle, and it works entirely because people decide to show up. Every week, a handful of incredible people arrive at the LFP pavilion out of the goodness of their hearts and a desire to add some kindness to our corner of the world. Whether it’s packing orders, making deliveries, hustling boxes out to cars, bringing fresh baked treats for the team, or just swinging by to say hello, there’s a volunteer effort taking place every week that is the sole reason this happens at all. They show up on the hottest, coldest, and rainiest days of the year, because that’s what community is — not a buzzword to sell you a condo development, but the truest sense of caring for the land we live upon and the people we share it with in our short time here together.
And none of it would hold together without Sara, who has been the true heartbeat of this program, showing up for our customers with a consistency and care that I’ve never seen matched.
LFP isn’t a moneymaker for our parent organization, PAREI — it’s a 20-year old commitment to a better future, deepening our roots, and providing small producers an additional revenue stream. PAREI doesn’t have to keep this going. Food hubs are hard, margins are thin, and there are easier ways to spend a nonprofit's energy. The fact that they've chosen to for twenty years says something real about what they believe. Every transaction between neighbors provides additional benefit to our community rather than disappearing into a corporate account and paid as dividends to the shareholders, and since 2020 it’s amounted to around a half a million dollars of payments to local producers. In a local economy, we’re the consumers and the investors at once, and our dividends are farmland and wild spaces, reduced agricultural carbon emissions, and eating food we can trust from the place we live, to name a few. The world is changing, and these investments in the future are the most important inheritances we can offer future generations, and blueprints for a better way to live.
Most importantly, my gratitude goes to our local producers. Not just for the food they raise, but for not giving up the ship, for not selling to a developer. For waking up every day and getting out there to do it. For defending land against the ecological carnage of “progress.” For getting mobbed by bugs every day so we can eat well. Once a small farm becomes a parking lot, or gets rolled into a private equity portfolio, it’s never coming back, and we owe more gratitude than we could possibly realize to the people who refuse to sell out to the false gods of the stock exchange. Sometimes I panic about the world my daughter is inheriting, but I find myself most at peace when I reflect on the goodness I see in people through this program — people who show up quietly, stubbornly, to keep the practice alive, and to strengthen the ties that are going to hold us together as the world keeps changing around us.
A local economy is one built on volunteerism, trust, and mutual aid — commitments to each other and our common good. Prioritizing our relationships, expanding our renewable energy capacity, and maintaining a local food system are acts of resistance in a world designed to separate us, and a blueprint for a community’s self-determination and sovereignty. This is not a moment for neutrality. The future of our food, our land, our energy, and our ability to determine our own future is being written right now — and YOU, who shows up, who buys from a neighbor, who chooses renewable energy, who keeps a small farm viable, are making a declaration about the kind of world you want to live in.
Thank you for letting me be a small part of it. If you ever want to chat over a coffee, please reach out to me at [email protected]. I'm not going anywhere, and one of my superpowers is that I can chat about almost anything for hours :)
With gratitude,
Dennis
