Dear Community: A Letter of Growth and Gratitude From the Healing Harvest Food Pantry

Huge strides are happening at Healing Harvest, formerly the Dartmouth Cancer Center (DCC) Food Pantry.

First, I’d like to introduce myself: I’m Julia Boger-Hawkins, but you can call me Jules. I joined the food pantry program in July of this year as its first full-time manager. In that time, we’ve built great momentum toward our collective goal of providing free, nutritious groceries that are critical to the health and healing of our patients as they navigate the many challenges of cancer.

First and foremost, I’m grateful to the people who make this program run smoothly each day. If you have visited our program, you know our small but mighty team of volunteers, many of whom are cancer survivors themselves, who bring an amazing level of creative energy to Healing Harvest. Between taking orders, packing groceries, and delivering them to patients, our phenomenal volunteers also find time to brainstorm inventory changes based on emerging needs, write recipe cards to share with patients, and pack special kits for holidays and special occasions.

Here are some of our current offerings, all of which were dreamed up and assembled by our volunteers and their genuine and heartfelt desire to help patients not only survive but thrive:

• Celebration kits: everything you need to bake a cake for a special occasion
• Comfort kits: specially chosen items to help cope with treatment-related nausea
• Chili kits: an easy weeknight dinner option, perfect for fall
• “Everything but the turkey” Thanksgiving kits: a smorgasbord of Thanksgiving sides for a family of six!

You may be wondering about the new name: “Healing Harvest.” Healing Harvest is not your typical food pantry. We’re committed to quality and sustainability, proudly partnering with several local producers. We purchase all of our milk from McNamara Dairy, located just down the road in Plainfield, New Hampshire. Our bread, which patients rave about, is graciously donated by the employee-owned King Arthur Baking Company. And we’re well stocked with a rotating variety of fresh local produce donated by our friends at Willing Hands and Cedar Circle Farm and Education Center. I’m so grateful to be able to nourish our patients and their families, regardless of circumstances, with the freshest, highest-quality foods—and that would not be possible without our local farmers and producers!

Thanks to this abundant food supply, I’m so pleased to share that Healing Harvest is now able to serve patients from every oncology group, including pediatrics. The pediatric oncology team are some of the most dedicated, patient-centered providers I’ve ever met, and they have done a fantastic job connecting the families they work with to Healing Harvest. An estimated 50 percent of our pediatric cancer patients are living in households that struggle to put food on the table—a terrible problem, but one that we have the power to solve. Because of referrals from DCC care teams who genuinely care about each and every patient, parents can connect with Healing Harvest and go home with groceries after every appointment, saving the time, money, and energy that can be in short supply when a child is going through cancer treatment.

With so much food to distribute and so many patients to serve, our current pantry space is bursting at the seams. This is, admittedly, a great problem, and fortunately, it will soon be fixed. Thanks to funds raised by our incredibly generous community through The Prouty, we are building a brand new pantry space! This will double our storage capacity, streamline workflows, and allow for seamless integration of our new online ordering system, which will start accepting orders very soon.

Funding from the Prouty is at the heart of what we do, and it’s an honor to use money raised by local people to buy local food to serve local patients. DCC is the only National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center located in a rural area, and our patients benefit tremendously from the small-town ethos of looking out for our neighbors and pitching in to support the community.

In this season of gratitude, to everybody who has given time, money, or love to this program, I’d like to say thank you! Because of you, we doubled the number of patients served over the last 4 months, and with your continued support, we hope to grow Healing Harvest 10-fold over the next year.

I’m so grateful to be part of this community of care, and I look forward to what we’ll accomplish together!

With gratitude,

Julia Boger-Hawkins
Healing Harvest Program Manager
Dartmouth Cancer Center