2007 Harry Chapin Self-Reliance Award Winner
Spotlight Profile

Unity Barn Raisers

Focus Areas: Sustainable Agriculture, Micro-enterprise, Youth, Community Economic Development, Farmers’ Markets

Mission: Unity Barn Raisers (UBR) is a non-profit community organization with open membership that works pro-actively to enhance small-town character and rural environment, while nurturing a thriving community-based economy.

Background: UBR is a growing non-profit community-improvement organization that was created in 1996. Since its creation, UBR has renovated four downtown properties, transformed a vacant building into an active community center, built four miles of community walking trails, supported thirteen local businesses with loans or other assistance, and created support programs for low-income persons. In 2003, UBR received Maine’s prestigious Noyce Award for Non-Profit Excellence.

Unity Barn Raisers is a well-rounded community- improvement organization. In 1997, UBR began coordinating a local Food Policy Council that emerged from an earlier Community Food Project grant provided to a statewide organization, Coastal Enterprises Incorporated. Council members included farmers, retailers, restaurant owners, food pantry operators and users, town officials, and other interested citizens. The council studied the local food system and developed plans for UBR’s Farmers' Market and Community Meals Program. The council has since evolved into a Rural Vitality Committee (RVC).

Through RVC, UBR has engaged over 40 farmers and a variety of local organizations in various “working groups” that have begun other farm projects, including pilot-testing the cultivation of soybeans for possible use as livestock feed and oil, pilot-testing a food-brokering operation linking Unity College with local farmers, exploring new options for raising and marketing grass-fed beef, and partnering with Maine Farmland Trust and Friends of Unity Wetlands on efforts to preserve local farmland.

UBR’s Community Meals program provides community members with an opportunity to come together the first Saturday of each month to catch up with each other and to meet new community members. UBR supports local farms by purchasing food from them for their meals. UBR’s Unity Market Day is an active farmers' market partnered with other events to create a weekly celebration of rural living in the Unity community.

In the 2003 growing season, UBR contracted with 2 farmers who grew a total of 40 acres of soybeans for its Biodiesel pilot project. All of the beans grew well and yielded at the national average despite a very late planting date due to spring rains. The beans from 15 of these acres were crushed and pressed into crude soy oil and high protein meal. The other 25 acres worth were roasted and fed to a herd of certified organic cows. The 2003 pilot project gave UBR some "real numbers and real experience" to guide future efforts in oil seed production

Unity Barn Raisers is also a partner in a Maine Farmland Trust initiative begun in May 2005 to protect and conserve a critical mass of farmland and uplands in the Unity Wetlands complex, the largest remaining unfragmented block of forestland, farmland and wetlands in central Maine.

The organization’s Community Farm Share program provides low-income individuals and families with free local farm produce each growing season. This program, funded through a USDA Community Food Project Grant and the Harry Chapin Self Reliance Award is similar to the federal Senior Share program. The Community Farm Share Program does differ from Senior Share in that it serves income-eligible families not covered by Senior Share and it is designed to test an alternative funding mechanism that channels local resources to support it long into the future. A new study that shows that every dollar in gross farm income will result in 3.6 dollars in local economic activity proves that by supporting local farms through a Farm Share program, towns build their own economies in a way that justifies increased investment by local and federal governments as well as private funders.