BUCKHANNON - When the IGA in Alderson closed its doors in February of 2015, a small town rallied around a big idea - start their own grocery store.
Fritz Boettner recalls what started as a conversation between three people at the dinner table, and how local farmers and growers came together to find ways to source food for the project, often for less money than they would make elsewhere.
"The beautiful thing was, in the course of our conversations we heard 'We need to feed our children, and we'll do whatever we have to to achieve that,'" Boettner said. "'If that means we're going to get half as much for our lettuce, that's what we're going to do.'"
Boettner was one of more than a dozen people from around the state who talked about the projects they're pursuing to make their communities healthier during the opening session of the third annual Try This Conference, a two-day event focused on helping West Virginians develop projects that improve wellness in their own towns. More than 130 project leaders will share their experiences over the course of the two-day event, and as many as 50 community groups will receive a small share of roughly $110,000 through the coalition's mini-grants project to start or grow their own local projects.
The Green Grocer, a project of the nonprofit Alderson Community Food Hub, is just one facet of a movement that has grown out of Alderson's push for healthy, accessible food. More than 40 producers grow food for the hub, including 15 that grow exclusively for its Farm to School program, which delivered more than $4,000 in vegetables to two Greenbrier County elementary schools this year.
In the year since it opened, the Green Grocer has raked in more than $330,000 in sales, including more than $110,000 in locally sourced produce and more than $17,000 of local meat. Boettner projects the grocery will pull in twice that number next year, and the grocery, coupled with the town's community orchard and garden, school gardening projects and its mobile farmers' market, allows the Alderson food hub to facilitate the sale of local food throughout Greenbrier County.
"This is a community of 1,000 people," he said. "Our mission is not just local food, but healthy, nutritious food for everyone, and we wanted to get that throughout the county."
The town of Kimball, in McDowell County, found itself in similar straits earlier this year, after the local Wal-Mart closed. Like Alderson, Kimball needed to find a new source for food - in particular, for Five Loaves Two Fishes, the local food pantry, which received more than 90,000 pounds of food from Wal-Mart last year.
Linda McKinney's push to supplement the food bank's food stores started with a community garden, a project she started with guidance from folks she'd met through Try This.
"Nobody knew what a community garden was; they thought we'd put caskets out on the field, and they were afraid to come through the parking lot for their food," joked McKinney, who runs Five Loaves. "After that, we put in this thing at the food bank called a hydroponic tower - it runs on water. They all said 'heck no, you can't grow food in water.' We grew celery - 'celery don't grow in McDowell County.' Oh, yes it does."
Like the Alderson food hub, Five Loaves has been crowdsourcing. McKinney's son, Joel, tapped into his veterans benefits, and launched a GoFundMe campaign, which raised $15,000 in the course of three months. The food bank now has more than 20 hydroponic towers on its lot, McKinney said.
In the last two years, Try This has awarded 99 mini-grants for healthy projects across the state. This year it will award as many as 50 more, with each grant award valued for up to $3,000. Projects supported by Try This have received national recognition in the last several years, including the town of Williamson, which won the 2014 Culture of Health Prize from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Wyoming County Students Against Destructive Decisions (SADD) chapter, named the national SADD Chapter of the Year in 2015.
Kathy Brunty, director of the Wyoming County Resource Network and Wyoming County SADD's mentor, was named SADD Mentor of the Year this year. Brunty has helped to grow Wyoming County's SADD chapter to hundreds of teenagers, and has empowered the kids to open not one, but two youth centers in the county.
Brunty said she was inspired, in part, by her son's best friend, who died of a drug overdose.
"I saw my son's best friend - they started together in kindergarten, and he was like my fourth child - I saw him laying in a casket," she said. "I stood over his casket and I swore: 'no more, Chas.' I swore I would never see another youth who I'd been a part of their life fall to this."
Try This West Virginia is a coalition of organizations statewide, with representatives from the state Bureau for Public Health, WV Healthy Kids and Families, KEYS 4HealthyKids, the WV Family Resource Network, the WV Food and Farm Coalition and other health-focused groups dedicated to reversing the state's negative health trends. The movement has grown tremendously in the last three years, and this year, more than 550 people attended the conference, including Kentuckians interested in launching a version of Try This in their own state, according to Stephen Smith, a Try This organizer and the executive director of the Healthy Kids and Families Coalition.
One in four West Virginia 11-year-olds has high blood pressure, according to data from West Virginia University, and seven out of every $10 spent on health care in the state are used to treat preventable diseases brought on by unhealthy lifestyles.
"Yes, we're working on community health, but don't kid yourselves - this is about economic development," said Try This organizer Kate Long. "The plain fact is that businesses and families want to locate in communities with biking clubs and farmers' markets and community gardens and healthy workforces. This is a better future in more ways than one."
To learn more about Try This WV or to access more than 100 how-tos on subjects ranging from community gardening to creating biking trails, visit www.trythiswv.com.
Reach Lydia Nuzum at lydia.nuzum@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5189 or follow @lydianuzum on Twitter.