There is no national security without food security.

The Greene County Food Security Coalition operates as a collaborative network rather than a single organization. It unites roughly two dozen member organizations — food pantries, feeding agencies, faith-based food ministries, community fridges, and local food producers — spanning Greene County and reaching into Columbia County and the broader Hudson Valley. Members include the Athens, Catskill, Coxsackie, Windham, Tannersville, and Prattsville pantries, Community Action of Greene County, the Community Fridge of Hunter, Mountaintop Cares Coalition, and others. Rather than replacing what these organizations do individually, the Coalition connects them: sharing information about supply and demand, coordinating coverage so no community falls through the cracks, and pooling capacity across a rural region where pantries would otherwise operate in isolation.

At the operational core is a food rescue and last-mile distribution system, run in close partnership with FeedHV, the food rescue program of the Hudson Valley AgriBusiness Development Corporation (HVADC). Surplus and donated food, much of it fresh product from local farms, is recovered before it goes to waste and routed to the pantries and feeding agencies where it is needed most. This network has scaled dramatically, growing annual food rescue from roughly 66,000 pounds to more than 200,000 pounds over three years, moved by a volunteer corps numbering in the hundreds. The logistics challenge is real: rural Greene County covers a lot of ground with limited cold storage and transportation, so the Coalition invests in asset mapping, cold storage capacity, and delivery coordination to make the system work.

The Coalition administers grant funding with a deliberate philosophy: money goes directly into food, and that food comes from local farmers. To date it has administered approximately $18,000 in grant funding with 100% of funds spent purchasing fresh food from local agricultural producers, strengthening the regional farm economy while feeding neighbors. While formalizing its 501(c)(3) status, the Coalition has used fiscal sponsorship arrangements through member organizations to accept charitable gifts, and it connects into larger state and regional pipelines such as Nourish NY that channel New York agricultural surplus to emergency food providers.

The Coalition is intentionally lightweight in structure and heavy on relationships. It is led by co-founders and a working board drawn from member organizations, with participation from town, village, and hamlet representatives and volunteers across the county. Decisions are made collaboratively among the pantry operators and agencies who actually do the work. The animating idea is that food security is foundational infrastructure. There is no community resilience, and ultimately no national security, without it — and it is an issue where people across the political spectrum find common ground. In practice, the Coalition has brought together neighbors who might disagree on nearly everything else and turned that shared 80% into working partnerships and lasting friendships.