About Us

The Village Food Hub is a nonprofit organization founded to strengthen our community food system.

Our Story

In 2022, the Ballard Vale United Church was seeking a way to increase their impact on their local community. Firm believers in God’s call to serve one another, the church already had a longstanding partnership with Neighbors in Need in Lawrence. Members brought in donations of cereal every Sunday, and delivered roughly 1200 boxes to NIN each year. They also provided 100 meals for the NIN Christmas program each December. It seemed natural to build on their foundation as a church which ‘Feeds the Need’ by expanding their food ministries.

Glen McLeod, then church Moderator, had a vision to build a community pantry and fridge on church property to directly serve those facing food insecurity. They secured a grant from the Trauma Intervention Program of the Merrimack Valley to pay for the needed materials. TIP’s mission is to “provide emotional aid and practical support to victims of traumatic events and their families” and they recognized that lack of access to sufficient food is a form of trauma.

Glen, his son, Cameron and brother, Jay, donated their time and construction expertise to build the two bay structure with a section for dry goods on one side and a full size refrigerator/freezer on the other. By September, it was up and running with a plan to be largely self-sustaining. Church and community members were encouraged to “Leave what you can and take what you need.”

It quickly became apparent that the need for food was much higher than anyone had imagined.
By the end of the year, the pantry was providing approximately 2000 pounds of food to more than 300 families every month. Even with robust support from the church and greater community dropping off food, the need was so great that the self-sustaining model was not able to keep up with the demand.

In order to meet the need, Glen’s wife, Shari, took on the responsibility of keeping the pantry stocked. She coordinated food drives and scheduled volunteers to keep it clean and organized. She also began soliciting donations and working cooperatively with other organizations to acquire surplus food from a variety of sources. Shari was recognized for her work on the pantry, receiving a Citizen’s Who Care Award from the Rotary
Club of Andover..

As Shari became immersed in the world of food insecurity, learning from those who’d been doing this work
for many years, she and Glen developed a passion to do more to fight hunger. They soon learned that they could have the biggest impact on food insecurity in the area by building a Food Hub – connecting multiple food sources, acting as a central point in a network, including storing, repackaging, and redistributing it to meet the needs of both the food pantry itself and also increasing food available to other local organizations
engaged in similar work.

By December, Shari and Glen were engaged in researching and developing what would
become Village Food Hub.

Link to article Panel cites infrastructure, stigma as challenges to addressing hunger in Andover News andovertownsman.com

The Journey

Village Food Hub was founded as a 501(c)(3) in February of 2023, with a hope to make its home at Ballard Vale United Church.

Members of BVUC were excited about facilitating the expansion of food ministries in their space. While Glen and Shari wrote business plans, and began fundraising for the new venture, BVUC worked on finding a path to free up the needed square footage.

Ultimately, the congregation came up with a plan to radically change how they used the building, reallocating upstairs rooms to Voices of Hope, an organization which raises funds for cancer research through the performing arts, and investing more than $50,000 in order to welcome VFH to the building in November.

Even before the space was ready to move into, Village Food Hub was already doing regular food rescue with various partners including manufacturers, schools, distributors, restaurants, and local farms. During the period of July-December 2023, Village Food Hub averaged between 1000 to 3000 pounds of food rescued per month.

The original goal was for Village Food Hub to rescue 8000 pounds per month by the end of July 2024. In actuality, in that first full year, we rescued 100,000 lbs of food (over 8300 lbs per month average across the full year). Then in 2025, over 320,000 lbs (over 25,000 lbs per month).

This food is gathered from a constantly growing list of rescue partners, and is distributed through our programs, along with a growing number of partner organizations.