Partnership between Skagit Valley Food Co-op and Community Action of Skagit County will support food bank customers and local farmers.
This year, the Skagit Valley Food Co-op’s Growing Good Fund is supporting the Skagit Food Distribution Center’s efforts to increase community access to fresh food from local farms.
Established in 2006, the Distribution Center is a prominent wing of Community Action of Skagit County, a nonprofit that works broadly to address poverty in local communities. Like many programs in the region, the operation took a major hit with the passage of last summer’s federal spending bill.
“We had these huge grants,” said Trisha Hochreiter, the Distribution Center’s food access manager, “and then they were suddenly gone.”
The Distribution Center acts as a sort of headquarters for local anti-hunger efforts and a hub for more than 20 food banks and food pantries across Skagit and San Juan counties. Its warehouse in Sedro-Woolley serves as a storage facility for space-pressed nonprofits, while staff and volunteers work to streamline the processes of donation organization, food purchasing and transportation between local partners.
These operations typically rely on state and federal funding. To source much of its fresh food during the last few years, for example, the Distribution Center utilized support from We Feed WA, a state-sponsored initiative born out of a gap in federal funding during the COVID-19 pandemic. The program allowed organizations like Community Action to buy directly from local farms, bolstering the local food economy and supplying community pantries with fresh food.
In 2025, We Feed WA’s funding period came to an end. With no extension in sight and the Distribution Center’s purchasing power undermined by further funding cuts, food pantries in the area lost much of their access to local produce, meat and dairy.
“People still need fresh food,” said Elizabeth Jennings, Community Action’s Director of Community Engagement. “That hasn’t gone away.”
Local producers, too, had come to rely on their financial relationship with the Distribution Center.
“Farmers were coming to us, hoping to sell us food,” Hochreiter said. “But we didn’t have any funds.”
Community Action’s Food Distribution Center is not the only organization to experience this stalemate between community need and available resources. An initial survey by Northwest Harvest estimates that cuts to food bank funding and emergency food assistance support has resulted in a drop of 10-15% in available food resources statewide.
The newly expanded partnership between the Distribution Center and the Skagit Valley Food Co-op aims to fill at least some of this gap.
Growing Good and Farm to Food Bank
The Skagit Valley Co-op’s Growing Good Fund sprung from a desire to strengthen the local food system by harnessing the power of community dollars.
Since 1973, the co-op has carried out its mission of providing quality food to the community at fair prices, explained Nicole Noteboom, who has worked at the customer-owned grocery as the Director of Marketing and Community Outreach for nearly a decade.
“We recognize, though, that food access is a growing challenge in the world at large, and it’s our responsibility to help where we can,” she said.
Growing Good is a product of this mission, attempting to support stronger and more inclusive local food systems.
In a blog post from earlier this year, the co-op explained that funding for the grant is generated through gains from the co-op’s diversified investment portfolio, which follows Environmental, Social and Governance guidelines. Utilizing investments in this way keeps the grant running independent of the co-op’s day-to-day operations and does not affect customer-owner dividends or staff profit sharing.
For three years, the Growing Good Fund’s annual $100,000 grant was awarded to Viva Farms, a nonprofit based in Skagit County that offers bilingual agricultural training and accessible land leases for new farmers.
In the aftermath of the SNAP funding changes and major flooding that endangered farms and homes across the valley last December, the co-op’s Community Giving Council invited other local organizations to apply for the grant at the end of last year. The funding was ultimately awarded to Community Action’s Skagit Food Distribution Center.
“Feeding our friends and neighbors is something everyone can get behind,” said Noteboom.
The co-op also announced that it will continue to support Viva Farms in 2026 with a matching donation of $25,000.
The Distribution Center has used the Growing Good Fund to launch Farm to Food Bank, a mutually supportive initiative that will provide infrastructure loans of up to $10,000 to local farmers. Farmers will repay their loans over a five-year period through donations of fresh produce, meat and dairy for distribution among the facility’s network of food pantries.
New, improved and farmer-focused
Farm to Food Bank inherits its mission from a previous success story. In 2016, the Skagit Food Distribution Center used a Community Development Block Grant from the Washington State Department of Commerce to purchase crucial infrastructure and equipment for local farms in exchange for donation repayments.
The initial wave of infrastructure loans “created a network of relationships with local farms,” explained Madeline McGonagle, the Distribution Center’s recently hired farm liaison, “Farm to Food Bank is an opportunity to expand that network.”
In contrast to the state-funded grant, Farm to Food Bank will run solely on the community support of the Growing Good Fund.
As McGonagle explained, operating outside of the paperwork-laden requirements of federal and state funding means that the loan application and reporting processes for both farmers and Distribution Center staff will be much more straightforward.
“The biggest things that I’ve heard from farmers are that they want flexibility and they want uncomplicated upfront payments,” she added. McGonagle, who served as the previous Food Access Manager for the Distribution Center, is a farmer herself. Her new role as Farm Liaison will ensure that Farm to Food Bank is designed to best fit the needs and constraints of farmers hoping to access the program.
Noteboom said the co-op is proud to provide funding that comes with “fewer hoops” for the Distribution Center to jump through. To her, this means that the organization’s staff can devote more of their focus to getting funds to farmers and food to the community.
“Funding Community Action’s Farm to Food Bank Program … not only helps put fresh food on the family table, it’s (also) going to support the local farmers who do so much for our Skagit Valley community,” Noteboom said, “The ultimate win-win.”
If precedence serves, those wins could be significant.
“We invested $419,000 into the local agricultural industry (in 2016),” Hochreiter said. In return, the 19 farmers who received CDBG loans have already surpassed their 10-year repayment requirements, having donated over $500,000 worth of fresh food so far.
The regional track record for farm-to-food-access initiatives is certainly strong. In 2003, Sustainable Connections, a Bellingham-based nonprofit, launched Food to Bank On in collaboration with the Community Food Co-op. The long-running program offered mentorship programs, training opportunities and reimbursements funds to participating farmers who donated fresh produce to local food banks. Between 2003 and 2019, more than 50 farmers enrolled in Food to Bank On, contributing over $100,000 in farm donations to hunger relief sites in Whatcom County.
Strengthening the food systems network
Today, Community Action’s Skagit Food Distribution Center purchases and collects food donations from more than 30 local farms. McGonagle and Hochreiter hope that Farm to Food Bank will grow this number even more.
“Around half of the applicants so far are farms that Community Action has not worked with before,” McGonagle shared, “That’s definitely exciting.”
Farm to Food Bank applications will be reviewed by a committee composed of representatives from Community Action, the Skagit Valley Food Co-op, food pantry partners and Washington State University’s agricultural extension center. McGonagle explained that the committee will engage in a sort of “matchmaking process.”
“We have to look at what (the applicants) are farming and compare it to what the greatest needs of the food pantries are.”
This means not only fresh vegetables, added Hochreiter, but also sources of protein, which are often more expensive to purchase and difficult for food pantries to come by.
The Distribution Center will award the loans to selected farms later this spring.
A longstanding partnership
Even before last year’s funding changes, Community Action and the Skagit Valley Food Co-op had a long-standing partnership rooted in a mutual drive to address local food insecurity.
Community Action’s Food Distribution Center has been a frequent recipient of the co-op’s “5% Friday” initiative, where a portion of the grocery’s sales are donated to a local nonprofit one Friday each month.
The Distribution Center had additionally already been chosen as the recipient of the co-op’s new Feeding Change register donation program when the national SNAP freeze took effect, but Noteboom remembers the moment as “a sign to double-down on the work we’d already started.”
Jennings recalled how quickly the co-op’s team stepped up in the moments surrounding the SNAP suspension, using their marketing leverage to direct community members to Community Action’s arsenal of resources and offering customers even more opportunities to donate to the Distribution Center.
“It was really a turning point for this partnership,” she said, adding that the Growing Good Fund will further these joint efforts during a critical time for anti-hunger efforts.
Jennings is excited to watch the impacts of Farm to Food Bank this year. As far as its future, she stressed that, as federal funding remains unreliable, “the sustainability of the project is going to rely on potential partnerships with the co-op and local farmers, and also on local generosity.”
“The co-op is fortunate to be able to step in and fill some gaps where we can,” Noteboom said, “but it’s difficult to watch aid evaporate, especially in terms of food access.”
—By Hannah Swartos
Hannah Swartos is a farmworker in the Skagit Valley.