FAIR HARVEST
MISSION
Fair Harvest makes local food available to families who can't afford it. We buy that food from Massachusetts growers at full retail price, and the families choose it themselves.
Founded in 2018, we serve southeastern Massachusetts, including the Gateway Cities of Taunton, New Bedford, Fall River, Brockton and Attleboro.
HOW FAIR HARVEST BEGAN
Dee Elliot co-owns Elliot Farm, her family's 66-acre produce farm in Lakeville. For years she ran its farm stand and CSA, and she kept watching the same thing at the register: families paying with SNAP doing arithmetic in their heads, putting back the peppers to afford the milk.
The food was right there. The families were right there. The only thing in between was money.
She founded Fair Harvest in 2018 to close that gap, and built it around what she'd seen: families should choose their own food, in the same line as everyone else, with nobody asking them to explain why.
That's why Elliot Farm is our farm partner. Fair Harvest buys the farm shares; families spend them at the store. Our executive director's ownership of the farm is disclosed to our funders, governed by a written conflict-of-interest policy, and every transaction between the two is approved by our board with her recused.
WHAT WE DO
Farm to Family is our flagship program. Each household gets a $350 Harvest Card to spend at Elliot Farm's store in Lakeville, a produce farm and food hub stocked by about 20 Massachusetts growers and producers. Families shop the same shelves, in the same line, at the same prices as every other customer.
Farm to Food Bank buys fresh local produce at full price and delivers it to South Coast food pantries, reaching families we can't serve directly.
Farm to Future puts people into paid seasonal farm work. It is on hiatus for 2026, while Farm to Family grew more than 70% on the same staff.
WHO WE SERVE
In 2026 we served 255 households, 694 people including 314 children, across 29 cities and towns and 42 ZIP codes. Every household was at or below 30% of area median income, with a median household income of $18,000. More than half live in Environmental Justice communities.
The program has grown from 96 families in 2024 to 149 in 2025 to 255 in 2026. In 2026, 685 households applied for those 255 shares over eight days. Half the applications arrived in the first 24 hours.
HOW WE MEASURE
We survey every household at enrollment and again at the end of the season, and we are adding the USDA Six-Item Food Security Module to that survey. We track grocery value, not pounds. The signals we watch are simple: families come back, families spend the whole card, and local farms count our orders as real income.
LEADERSHIP
Our board of directors brings agricultural backgrounds along with expertise in nursing, farm and equine insurance, education and nonprofit management. We are building an Advisory Committee that includes Farm to Family families and Gateway City residents, because the people who live this understand it best.
Fair Harvest has one paid position: a part-time executive director. Everything else is board members, volunteers and farm partners.
Deanna Elliot, Founder and Executive Director. Dee is a farmer first. She holds a B.A. in Communication from UMass Amherst and an M.S. in Nonprofit Leadership from Wheelock College.
LEGAL
Fair Harvest is a DBA of Farm and Community Collaborative, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. EIN 83-1540148. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.