We have a guest post this week from Ali Dalsing, the Cafe Supervisor at Vivalon, a Marin-based non-profit organization whose mission is to advance the independence, health, and quality of life of older adults, specifically focused on transportation, nutrition, and social connections. And their Healthy Aging Campus in San Rafael is one of our newer CSA sites!
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So much has been written about how food can help create connection that it almost feels stupid to keep talking about it, but I persist because we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the ways we can use food – something we require every day, multiple times a day – to better connect with everyone around us. Because of how it can build connection, it’s been a goal of mine for years to bring a CSA pick up spot to a place I work because I love these programs so much.
I completed that goal when I became the Café Supervisor at Vivalon’s Healthy Aging Campus in San Rafael and I also got the chance to create our Harvest Connection program. Harvest Connection is a month-long series that meets weekly on Fridays, the day after our Thursday CSA drop off. Vivalon purchases several boxes and then we divide them up into smaller portions for our 12 participants who meet for an hour to discuss the produce in the box, share recipes and ideas for what we could cook with those ingredients, and share what we made with our ingredients the previous week.
I often make pastries that include something seasonal or from my own CSA box to share, and participants also have been known to bring snacks they made, as well as additional ingredients from their own gardens, or that they gleaned from plants in their neighborhood. The Nutrition Programs Manager Baptiste and I lead the discussions. We both have extensive backgrounds in food service, and even still, we both learn something new or get inspired by every one of these discussions. We’ve taken a pause while we plan to relaunch the program as a seasonal offering with a Spring, Summer, and Fall series. I can’t wait to start again in May; I need the connection and the inspiration! It’s one of my favorite programs that we run in the Vivalon Café.
In the six months that we offered it last year, many clients signed up for it again and again. We got to know each other, we learned each other’s preferences, and tried recipes from one another. We became friends.
A lot of Vivalon’s programming is free, and we rely on donations to fund our classes. We did need to charge for this program and it is our most expensive at $30 for Vivalon members for the month-long series. I was nervous starting it- what if it’s not enough to fill an hour? What if participants don’t like not getting to select their produce? What if they don’t feel like it’s worth the money? But it has been received so warmly and with so much love.
We’ve expanded beyond the Harvest Connection program! We have also created volunteer-led Flower Arranging Parties with Full Belly Farm flowers. We came up with the idea after seeing what she was able to create with the Full Belly flowers we were getting for our monthly special luncheons. And when we just couldn’t wait any longer for Harvest Connection to start up again, we built one of our monthly cooking classes around improvisational cooking- getting clients to sign up for the class with no idea what we were going to teach them until the Wednesday before when we improvised two recipes that utilized everything that would be coming in the boxes.
So- much like I get to connect with further away parts of my community by getting my CSA box and eating the same vegetables from the same soil as neighbors I may never meet- you’re getting to touch the edges of our community of older adults living vibrant sparkly lives and continuing their pursuit of community and lifelong learning here at Vivalon. We’re happy to be in community with you and we’ve got our fingers crossed that all your recipes and experiments are turning out well. But- like we often talk about in our meetings- don’t feel bad if they don’t, that’s all part of it.
Ali Dalsing
Thanks to Ali for sharing about their programming and the photos and for two excellent recipe ideas (see the Recipes of the Week!). You can learn more about the Vivalon Cafe here and more about their programming and classes on the main Vivalon website.
