Category: Conversations

Rutland’s first family of recreation

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cindiCindi Wight is a great ambassador for Rutland Recreation and Parks Department as well as active living in general.
But Wight, the superintendent of the department, has been bringing a lot more to the job than even that for years. She’s been bringing her family. The Wights — husband Keith and children Josh, Molly and Emily — have been fixtures at Rec-sponsored events since they first moved to Rutland.

The kids would be at the start line of races, marking the courses, handing out prizes and snacks. Cindi recalls Emily as a three-year-old handing out doughnut holes — she’s quick to note with just a little wince they hand out healthy snacks at events these days. And I first met Keith when we were both volunteer shovel operators at Pine Hill Park on a work day.

Keith in fact was a part-time employee when Cindi took over as superintendent but with an obvious conflict of interest he had to resign. But he enjoyed it so much that he kept on working as a volunteer.

Cindi says it made hdunkin-donuts-9er work “a family job … special events weren’t time away from the family.”

“The kids always found roles they could help with,” she said, and when trail building got too much they would “spend the day up there … working, building fairy houses, reading.”

On the other hand, Cindi owns up that there were times the kids were “voluntold” helpers. And the sheer length of work days at Pine Hill quickly wore thin for the kids (and others). Keith Wight, Shelley Lutz and Michael Smith, who led many of the work crews, were seemingly happy to spend a full day on the hill but we mere mortals were not necessarily so eager, and Cindi Wight notes that work days at Pine Hill are now over at noon.

“Do a morning, end at noon, everybody’s happy,” she says. And while the park is run by the all-volunteer Pine Hill Partnership, Cindi has a seat at their table and they work closely together.

And the family tradition continues — Keith was helping with a new shipment of balance bikes for an upcoming learn-to-ride program at the North Street building when I stopped by for an interview and Emily had been by the day before with some power tools to dismantle giant comic book covers for storage until the Halloween parade. But with Josh, 22, and Molly, 20, off to college, and with school visits happening for Emily, 17, it’s almost the end of an era for Rutland’s first family of recreation.

Still, with Wight hands on pretty much every aspect of the city’s Recreation and Parks for the past decade and a half, they are leaving a real legacy. And with the tens of thousands of hours of volunteer time that go into every aspect of recreation in a small city like Rutland, from building trails at Pine Hill to coaching, fund-raising and driving kids to events, having the superintendent’s family set the volunteer bar so high seems pretty cool.

This article was originally published in Sam’s Good News; the latest edition is here.

Food, from farmers

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By Randal Smathers

Can eating your veggies make you healthier? There’s an innovative program in Rutland that aims to show it’s a fact.

Each Wednesday, 100 bags of locally grown vegetables are handed out by the Health Care Share program to families and residents of senior and assisted living homes whose doctors have prescribed them.

Heidi Lynch, who runs the program for the Vermont Farmers Food Center on West Street, said the Health Cares, in its second year, is unusual in that most similar plans offer coupons instead of hard, cold cash crops. They get the produce in turn from small and / or beginning farms from around the region: Alchemy Gardens in Shrewsbury, Breezy Meadows Orchard and Nursery in Tinmouth, Caravan Gardens in Cuttingsville and Yoder Farm in Danby, as well as the Smokey House Center in Danby.

Education is a major part of the program. Every week, recipients get a printed sheet with a list of veggies, recipes and health tips, and there’s a demonstration of recipes or samples during distribution at the Food Center where roughly two-thirds of the bags are picked up. The other third are handed out at the Community Health Centers of Rutland County on Stratton Road.

The produce naturally varies by season. The last week of August the bags included tomatoes, melons, squash, zucchini, carrots, onions and kale – almost seven and a half pounds of fresh food. It’s designed to serve a family of four for a full week. If there is any extra, families are welcome to take more. Due to health concerns not everybody can used everything in the bag, so there is some swapping. Corn in particular can be too high in sugar for Type II diabetics, said Lynch, but those conversations are also an important part of the educational process.

From 10 to noon is farm dropoff time. Then there’s two hours of sorting and bagging and a pause before the distribution starts at 3 PM. After an initial rush, things typically slow down, said Lynch, then pick up again around 5:30 as people get off work. By 6 it’s all over. There’s a secondary distribution on Thursday and if any is still unclaimed it is donated to the Turning Point and / or Dream Center. There’s surprisingly little turnover: Some 85 percent of users pick up their shares week in and week out.

The program is 9 weeks into a 12-week run, with monthly “harvest shares” planned for the fall / early winter. Folks wishing to participate should ask their doctor. The year started with five medical offices prescribing. Two more recently signed on. Lynch is signing up doctors and farmers in February and March; April through June is open enrollment.

Lynch is an enthusiastic proponent. A Rutland native, she attended St. Mike’s in Burlington where she was introduced to organic gardening. She was introduced to a program similar to the Health Shares in Richmond, Vt., then talked to Greg Cox, the president of the Farmers Food Center, about it and it took off. Now she discusses “the food system,” and how the program works as a wholesale opportunity for small farms that don’t grow enough to attract a regular bulk purchaser. A vegetarian, she can still discuss the relative merits of local, organic meat versus corporation-farmed soybeans shipped thousands of miles.

And it’s a combined effort. Besides the farmers and Farm Center, Vermont Youth Conservation Corps volunteers and the youth team at Vocational Rehab have been regulars at helping sort and bag the produce, along with help from Grace Congregational and Good Shepherd Lutheran churches, College of St. Joseph and Green Mountain College. The major funder (Lynch calls it “seed money” with a straight face) is the Bowse Health Trust of Rutland Region Medical Center. Rutland Area Farm and Food Link, Vermont Fresh Network, Hunger Free Vermont, UVM’s Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, and SAGE (Shrewsbury Institute for Agricultural Education) provide the training, nutritional expertise and recipes.

For more information, see http://www.vermontfarmersfoodcenter.org/health_care_share.

This article was originally published in Sam’s Good News; the latest edition is here.

Summer @ the Farmacy

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By Randal Smathers

Madison and Griffin Kingsbauer have a different story to tell when it comes time to write their “what I did this summer” essays. The sister and brother – she’s 15 and he’s 13 – ran a farm stand at their father’s medical practice.

Every Monday from April 9 to August 22, the two set up their “Farmacy” vegetable stand outside Rutland Community Health Center (12 Stratton Road, across from the hospital), where Dr. Matthew Kingsbauer practices. Their mom, Trish Kingsbauer, said the idea came from a farmers market in New York City; the family then contacted Greg Cox of the Farmers Food Center and he put them in touch with Carol Tashie, who along with partner Dennis Duhaime runs Radical Roots Farm, which provided the produce.

Tashie would tell the Kingsbauers what was available and what was unusual about it. Then the kids would pass that along to their customers. Griffin listed beet greens, heirloom tomatoes and heirloom broccoli as some of the more unusual offerings they taught their customers about. For the record, unlike more common varieties which have an edible crown and woody stem, the stem of heirloom broccoli stays tender and delicious all the way down.

The most common purchase was the humble cucumber, helped by the $1 “prescription for vegetables” discount – $1 just happening to be the price of a cuke.

Trish said learning about the various foods and passing that on to the customers was the biggest thing the kids learned – along with the social skills needed to interact with the public, and making correct change. Griffin joked that they probably lost money on the first day by giving out too much change. They also homeschool, so they will get full credit for the work they put in.

Both Trish and Griffin think the Farmacy might work better a second time around – although he’s not interested in doing it again, in part because it took a while for the idea to gain popularity, which made for some slow days before they built up a steady clientele. Any leftovers were donated to the homeless shelter, so nothing went to waste.

It wasn’t all work for the kids this year – there was climbing camp, 4H, and the family took a vacation to Washington, D.C. Among the sights they took in was a farmers market — where they duly took note of various ways of setting out produce and signage.

A love of veggies comes naturally to the Kingsbauer family, who have enjoyed a vegan diet for the past eight years. But Griffin did notice that a lot of kids would come up to the Farmacy with their minds made up – “they would say, ewww, broccoli!” And he at least came away with a new appreciation: He says that while he wouldn’t want to run a store, he might just like to be a farmer when he grows up.

Although the Farmacy is closed for the season, Radical Roots is at the Vermont Farmers Market every Saturday, 9 AM to 2 PM and Wednesdays, 3 to 6 PM; in Depot Park in Downtown Rutland.

This article was originally published in Sam’s Good News; the latest edition is here.