Angels Among Us 2014

Our annual celebration of ordinary New Englanders — the angels among us — who are making an extraordinary difference in the lives of others. Nancy Breen | Green Acres

Nancy Breen points across the field to the woods. “You want to see the trails we’re working on today?” she asks. Actually, Breen isn’t really asking. She’s already marching through the shin-tall grass, which waves gently on this sparkling late-spring day. You feel compelled to follow her, because her excitement about the work makes you want to see those trails. Soon, you’re pitching in. Breen has that power to inspire. As founder and executive director of the Youth Enrichment Center at Hilton-Winn Farm in Cape Neddick, Maine, five miles south of Ogunquit, she’s poured the last 11 years of her life into introducing the outdoor world to kids who rarely get to experience it. On a 400-year-old King’s Grant farm that she has fully restored, Breen welcomes school groups and youth programs to not just see nature but immerse themselves in it. They feed the farm’s chickens and goats, build gardens, and pull weeds. They learn about animal tracking and how to identify plants. They climb big rocks and then learn what those rocks are made of. In a post-and-beam barn they eat big plates of locally produced food, and at night they swap stories around a campfire. Some groups come for the afternoon, others camp out for several days. “I love being outside, and I want these kids to love it, too,” Breen says. Breen’s own childhood—she grew up in North Andover, Massachusetts, and summered in Ogunquit, Maine—had been shaped by the outdoors. But Breen, who’s had a long career in the food industry and now runs a catering business and cafe in York, found that her own passion for nature wasn’t matched by many of the kids she employed over the years. “There were kids who’d never had a s’more or seen the stars,” Breen recalls. She long dreamed of starting an outdoor center for kids, and in 2002 she bought a 48-acre farm in southern Maine. Over the next year Breen and whomever she could recruit gutted and fixed up the old place. It became like an old-fashioned barn-raising. Friends, family, even casual acquaintances, lent a hand. In October 2003, Hilton-Winn Farm welcomed its first guests, a small group of teenagers from Lawrence, Massachusetts. It’s grown every year since. Today, the farm hosts a couple of thousand kids each year. There’s a summer camp for local kids, teen programs, and an annual week dedicated exclusively to kids with autism. Every July, Volunteers for Peace, an international volunteer-exchange program, brings young adults from around the globe to live and work on the farm. Groups pay what they can, but the farm, a nonprofit, often covers the costs for those who need financial assistance. At the center of this whole endeavor is Breen’s not-so-unspoken agenda to help kids detach from their screen lives: from their phones, their TVs, their computers. Devices are checked at the door. During the workday there’s no texting, no e-mail. “They might complain at first,” Breen says. “‘I can’t believe we can’t watch TV. I can’t believe we can’t use our phone.’ But after a day they get it. They get to experience nature, just be in the moment.” Her excitement at making that happen never wanes. As Breen makes her way through her fields on this late morning, there’s fire in her voice, about the “great” group of kids she’s got for a few days from a Boston charter school. All morning these high-school juniors have been upgrading and adding to a network of trails that snake through Breen’s woods. One of the trail builders is 17-year-old Mike Auguste from Randolph, Massachusetts. He’s tall with a lanky build, and the hood of his black sweatshirt is wrapped tightly around his head to ward off the blackflies. “When I first got here I just felt so uncomfortable,” he says, as he rakes out the leaves from the old path. “The flies were just annoying. But then I got used to it. We had this free time, and a bunch of us played soccer. I’m normally just so concentrated on school and basketball that I don’t talk to anyone. But here, I started talking to people. It was nice.” Breen pulls up beside him. “Was it hard to put away your phone?” she asks with a smile. Auguste shakes his head. “Not really,” he says. Then he smiles. “I didn’t have a choice.” He’s then asked about the big “G” on the front of his sweatshirt. “It stands for Georgia,” he says. He pulls at one of his sleeves. “I got this as a present.” He examines the sweatshirt for a moment, which is covered in bits of leaves and mulch. “And look what I did to it,” he says, laughing.   For more on Nancy Breen’s programs, visit: hilton-winnfarm.org

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Ashley Stanley | The Rescuer

Ashley Stanley is not your typical foodie. As founder and executive director of Lovin’ Spoonfuls, a Boston nonprofit that distributes healthy produce and meats to shelters and programs that serve hungry populations, she’s spent the last five years bridging the gap between an abundant food supply and those who struggle to access it. “Food is a right, not a privilege,” Stanley says. “It’s not a luxury, it’s not an extra, and as our population gets bigger and food production continues to rise, how we distribute it has to get better. How we connect the dots has to improve.” But connecting those dots can be a complicated business. One method, and the heart of what Lovin’ Spoonfuls is all about, is food rescue. It works like this: A supermarket has crates of, say, apples and eggplants that are still fresh, but because of some imperfection–minor bruising, for example–it can’t sell them. Instead of discarding the produce, the store lets Lovin’ Spoonfuls take the produce free of charge and disperse it to shelters, community meal programs, social-service groups, soup kitchens, and safe houses. The supermarket doesn’t have to pay to throw it away; the recipients get vegetables and fruits they’d normally have to buy or, because of budget constraints, bypass altogether. It’s a concept people are still getting acquainted with. “We once got a call from a woman who wanted us to empty her fridge while she and her family were on vacation,” Stanley says, with a laugh. “No, we’re not garbage people. That’s not what we do. And, of course, people are disappointed when they find out we’re not a cover band.” For her, the numbers tell the story. Each year, because of cosmetic imperfections, individual waste, and inefficient farming practices, more than 40 percent of the food that’s produced in the U.S. is discarded. That has implications not just for those who could use that food, but for landfills and fossil-fuel consumption. Wasted food accounts for 14 percent of the solid-waste stream; growing and discarding that food requires 300 million barrels of oil. One issue feeds another. From its startup days in early 2010 when Lovin’ Spoonfuls consisted largely of its founder and her SUV, the organization now has seven full-time employees and sends out trucks and vans to supermarkets throughout the Boston metro region each morning. During its short life the nonprofit has partnered with 70 stores and agencies to deliver more than 25,000 pounds of fresh food to different groups each week. For Stanley, her work is a small part of what needs to be a broader discussion—about food, politics, and a living wage. But for Jack Nolan, the acquisition and distribution manager at Pine Street Inn, a transitional shelter in Boston that serves 565 people each day, the impact of what Stanley has created is tangible. “We go through 28 cases of bananas each week,” Nolan says. “It’s not unusual that we’ll get six or eight cases from Lovin’ Spoonfuls. Those are bananas that we don’t have to buy. That means more money for other things, like blankets and training programs. It makes a difference.” For more on Ashley Stanley’s food-distribution program, visit: lovinspoonfulsinc.org

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Dan Baker | Sweet Rewards

In the spring of 1999, Dan Baker, an associate professor in the Community Development and Applied Economics department at the University of Vermont, was invited to Honduras to assess the wrath visited by Hurricane Mitch on the country’s coffee growers. As a token of his appreciation, Baker, who spends his springs tapping a couple hundred maples on his hillside farm in Starksboro, brought small batches of his syrup to give to his hosts. Talk soon turned to maple, to boiling, to evaporators. And eventually to how Baker could help the country’s small-scale sugar producers. You see, whether the end result is something you teaspoon into your coffee or pour over your pancakes, the sugarmaking process doesn’t vary all that greatly. You extract, you boil, you package. In Honduras, generations of farmers have scraped together a living by making panela, a brown sugar, sold in blocks, that can be used in cooking and in beverages. But for many small producers, inefficient cooking methods remained much as they were a century ago, and the need for fuel wood was devastating the country’s forests. The sugarer in Baker knew there was a better way. “There aren’t many times in your life when you can look at something and say, ‘Wow, I think I can actually help out a lot,'” says Baker, who visits Honduras three to four times a year. “But that was my feeling as I was looking at what they were doing.” Working with local conservation and economic development groups and the international group Partners of the Americas, he began coordinating the construction and introduction of the kinds of boilers and flu pans that New England maple producers have been using for decades. Over the past 15 years, Baker, working largely in western Honduras, has steered the setup of 160 new evaporators, each of which is used by teams of 15 to 20 panela producers. The end result for many has been a more than 75 percent reduction in wood usage, Baker notes. That’s something the Yankee in him can appreciate. “I love sugaring,” says Baker, who has begun working with a technical high school in Honduras to produce more evaporators. “I love it here, and I love it down there. And I love that we strive in both places to produce this quality, nutritious product with a good story behind it.” For more information on Dan Baker’s projects, visit: vermonthonduras.org