The Holyoke Food and Equity Collective - Holyoke, MA USA

The Holyoke Food and Equity Collective is an antiracist community organization working to create better access to healthy food in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts by building food sovereignty. Through diverse and adaptive mutual aid projects, the collective’s goal is to generate health, racial, and economic equity in their community. 

Led by four co-directors and more than 100 volunteers, they maximize limited resources to deliver measurable impact.  Its projects include:

  • Diaper Distribution: A twice-monthly distribution of diapers to over 100 families in South Holyoke for a total of over 30,000 diapers, a significant resource for local families.

  • Garden Beds and Bucket Planters: Providing free garden beds and bucket planters to Holyoke residents to encourage home growing and self-reliance.  Over 100 planters and beds given in 2024 to over 50 families.

  • Seedling CSA Share: An affordable Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share of seedlings that can be purchased with SNAP and HIP benefits, featuring culturally relevant plants like those for sofrito.

  • Community Compost Hubs: Free community food scrap composting that turns waste into soil for use in local gardens, including the Dwight Street Garden.  This hub is a pilot and hopefully the first of several strategically placed compost hubs around the city. It is a solidly built 3- bin system, which anyone can bring food scraps to for free after a brief online training and signup. The hub already has diverted more than 350 lbs. of food scraps from the landfill.

  • Collective Dinners: Quarterly or seasonal sliding-scale dinners (starting from $0) featuring chef Neftali Duran, with themes, speakers, and activities in both English and Spanish to foster community connection and discuss food sovereignty.  Attended by over 100 people.

  • Gleaning and Food Rescue: Harvesting (gleaning) surplus food from local farms to donate to Holyoke food pantries. Over 100,000 pounds of food have been rescued since 2020.

  • Growing Food to Donate: In partnership with Western MA SURJ, the collective also grows food to donate to local organizations like Kate's Kitchen.

  • HIP Advocacy: Advocacy and policy work to support and ensure continued funding for the Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), which provides extra money for fruits and vegetables to SNAP recipients.

  • Policy Work: Engaging in policy discussions and advocating for local ordinances that support community gardens and other methods of increasing food access.

The Holyoke Collective are fully remote, and rely on shared community spaces for their projects, such as Dwight Street Garden for the Compost Hub and donated storage for diapers. This intentional model of collective leadership, fiscal sponsorship, and low overhead allows them to stay responsive, adaptive, and rooted in the community they serve.  We are amazed by their ingenuity and delighted to be partnering with them in the first half of 2026.

For more information on the collective's work, you can visit their website at holyoke-collective.org. 

Justine Ferland