Community Feedback, Peer Learning Get Priority in Vermont Foodbank’s Grant-Making  - Food Bank News

Community Feedback, Peer Learning Get Priority in Vermont Foodbank’s Grant-Making  - Food Bank News
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Community Feedback, Peer Learning Get Priority in Vermont Foodbank’s Grant-Making
January 7, 2026
Vermont Foodbank is getting more strategic in how it grants funds to partner agencies.
During the Covid years, it was like many food banks in channeling money to pantries for a broad range of capacity-building projects to help meet increased demand. Now it is getting more focused in its competitive grant-making to partners by directing it toward specific, new priorities.
Its new grant opportunities, introduced in 2025, reflect its priorities on strengthening its partners’ capacity to engage with community members, as well as on helping them learn from their peers on how to run a better, more resilient operation. “We wanted to … match the focus of each individual grant more explicitly with a strategy that the Vermont Foodbank was working on for long-term change,” said Chris Meehan, Chief Community Impact Officer.
Vermont Foodbank’s competitive grants for partners align with long-term goals of the food bank, said Chris Meehan, Chief Community Impact Officer.
Its Community Conversations grants, a one-time program, solicited input from community members on how the pantry experience could be improved. Selected partners received $3,000 to recruit, host and compensate participants, and another $7,000 to implement the recommendations that came to light. Six selected partners completed the program and are now planning operational changes based on what they learned, while five of the six are also establishing new, ongoing feedback loops. The project followed a two-year effort by the food bank to elevate community voices, including building a conversation-based feedback model.
Now concluded, the program has helped the food bank better understand the range of capacity for community engagement across its network. “Our partners are all so different and have different capacities and needs,” Meehan noted.
Applying its learning, the food bank has developed a “feedback mechanisms toolkit” to help partners obtain community feedback no matter their capacity – whether it’s asking a question at an intake desk, conducting a survey, or engaging in structured community conversations. “We want to provide the opportunity for them to be able to engage in all of those different places, and not just focus on those that are at the highest capacity,” Meehan said. The food bank plans to roll out the toolkit across its network, along with technical assistance, followed by another round of competitive grants to refine it in practice.
The food bank’s second competitive grant opportunity, the Catalyst Cohort program, is focused on building partners’ capacity and long-term organizational resilience through monthly group learning sessions. The cohort model, Meehan said, provides “a shared learning space for them to learn from each other and improve together.” The food bank granted $200,000 in total – $25,000 each – to eight network partners.
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Recognizing a cohort model would require participants to “step away from day-to-day urgency,” the food bank created a self-assessment to identify partners with “a little bit of a higher capacity to be able to participate,” Meehan said. The self-assessment also ensured that each cohort member brought unique strengths and needs to the group and established a baseline for measuring outcomes.
The food bank invested significant effort to understand “what would be the best self-assessment tool for us to use and why,” Meehan said. This included studying similar tools used by other organizations, including AmeriCorps and Oregon Food Bank, and consulting comparable organizations that ran cohort programs, such as the Foundation for Essential Needs and Minnesota’s Second Harvest Heartland.
The first cohort is halfway through its nine-month run. The next will focus on “the middle of our organizations” to further develop their capacity for cohort work, Meehan added. Current participants are using their grants for a variety of purposes. One is launching a regional task force to address the root causes of hunger. Another is leveraging another member’s experience to start its own grassroots campaign to triple municipal funding.
These two, more focused grant opportunities replaced the food bank’s original Competitive Capacity Fund, which distributed $1.6 million to 169 partners (out of 280 applicants) over four years. Funded projects included a walk-in cooler and helping a partner grow from serving 35 households per week to 200.
The evolution of the food bank’s competitive grant program was “deeply informed” by its participation in an October 2024 Feeding America capacity-building program, Meehan said. As part of its “right-sizing,” the food bank has reduced funding for capacity-related grants from over $1.2 million in fiscal year 2024 to about $600,000 in fiscal 2025. It has budgeted $607,500 for fiscal 2026.
The food bank’s approach to capacity grants reflects the principle that “for us to be strong, our network partners out there need to be strong,” Meehan said. While current grantmaking is far below Covid levels, it remains significantly higher than before the pandemic, when the food bank funded $10,000 a year for items like refrigerators, she said. “It’s hard for others who maybe only joined food banking during the pandemic to comprehend . . . how many more resources we are deploying into the community now compared to pre-Covid.”
– Amanda Jaffe
Amanda Jaffe is a writer and former attorney with a deep interest in organizations and mechanisms that address food insecurity. In addition to writing articles for
Food Bank News
, she publishes humorous essays on her Substack,
Age of Enlightenment (https://amandajaffewrites.substack.com/)
. You can find more of her writing at www.amandajaffewrites.com.
PHOTO, TOP: Retreat Farm celebrating the grand opening of its free farm stand, made possible with a 2021 community grant from Vermont Foodbank.
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