How We Work
ACORN, founded in 2009, began as a board-driven network with no staff or office. We have incrementally grown and now have two full-time and one part-time staff members and a food hub and office! Due to our grassroots nature, we have had to be creative and entrepreneurial. We manage our resources and time conservatively, so collaborations with a wide variety of partners are key. We’ve worked in our community as a catalyst, an incubator and as a networker.
We strive to be financially sustainable by raising enough revenue through our projects and donations to cover the cost of our operations, and grants help fill in the holes. Key to our success has been the generous sponsorship we have received from the local business community. While we cannot provide direct funding of projects, we can serve as a fiscal sponsor for grants in our capacity as a 501(c)(3) organization.
Please get in touch if you’d like to collaborate with us!
Board of Directors
Kristin Blodgett
Kristin Blodgett (she/her) manages the Vermont Farm Fund, a non-profit loan fund for farmers and food producers that operates as a program of the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE), where she was first Financial Manager and then Deputy Director. Prior to joining CAE in 2015, Kristin worked on land and natural resource management programs in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and served as Assistant to the Chair of the UN Committee on World Food Security Open-Ended Working Group on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests. Kristin was born and raised in Vermont and lives with her family in Monkton.
Claire Contreras
Claire Contreras is a Washington, DC native, now living in Burlington, Vermont. She came to Addison County in 2019 to study environmental public health at Middlebury College and started vegetable farming in 2020. After graduating from Middlebury in 2023, Claire joined Shelburne Farms’ six-person Market Garden crew. She helps the farm grow a diverse offering of vegetables, flowers, and fruit and raise laying hens.
Claire has worked on farms, in kitchens, and at farmers markets across the Champlain Valley. She loves the tenacity of the local food system and the people that fuel it. When she is not farming, Claire is biking around Burlington, cooking what she grows, and mending the latest hole in her clothes.
Jonathan Corcoran: Board Chair
Jonathan Corcoran is a small business and social entrepreneur who has worked in sales and marketing in the organic food and food packaging sectors as well as a strategic consultant.
He produced and secured distribution for a feature film, “She Sings to the Stars,” and is currently working on a second film. Jonathan is a founding member of ACORN, the Vermont Biofuels Association, and the Monkton Community Coffeehouse. Jonathan has an MBA in Marketing and Small Venture Management. He is the editor of VISION 2020 and author of the Addison County local food plan.
Harley Fjeld
Harley is an eighth generation Vermonter with a background in farming, education, and human resources. Her passion for food access and community building grew while working at a non-profit farm that provided teenagers with job skills and vulnerable community members with fresh produce. Witnessing the strength a community experiences from increased food access led her to the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op, where she works as the Human Resources Assistant.
Harley connects with her community through food and outdoor exploration, spending her free time gardening on family land in Leicester and playing disc golf.
Jessica Freed-Haitz
Jessica Freed-Haitz, a Pennsylvania native, relocated to Addison in 2022 where she resides with her husband. Raised on a small farm, fresh produce and local meats were dietary staples. Respect for local farmers is engrained in her ethos.
Jessica holds an MBA in Finance, and built a career developing human resources programs across global markets in response to ever-changing workforce priorities. Concurrent with her work-life, Jessica and her husband raised two children, now adults, and made local CSA participation a priority early on to garner first-hand knowledge about the economic, environmental, and community benefits of local farming. Now retired, Jessica brings business insights to ACORN in support of its mission to support local farms and communities.
Neily Jennings - Treasurer
Neily Jennings (she/her) heads up finance and operations as one of twelve worker-owners who cooperatively own and manage the Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA). Prior to joining AORTA, Neily spent 5 years as Operations Director at Common Ground Center, a non-profit retreat center in Starksboro, where she still lives with her husband and their two young kids.
Neily's dedication to ACORN's work is rooted in her belief that we urgently need to democratize local food systems and land stewardship as part of a just transition to an economy that centers ecological sustainability and equity. When she's not in Zoom meetings, Neily spends her time parenting, listening to podcasts, reading, cooking, biking, and swimming.
Sarah Kaeck
Sarah Kaeck is the founder and former CEO of Bee’s Wrap, a sustainable, biodegradable alternative to plastic wrap for food storage. Sarah founded Bee's Wrap in 2013 after recognizing the need for an alternative to store fresh food without the use of plastic. Bee's Wrap grew to support distribution throughout the country and internationally and was sold in 2021. It continues to produce and distribute its products in Middlebury, VT.
Over the past 14 years, Sarah and her husband have raised a variety of animals and vegetables for their family of five in New Haven, Vermont. Sarah is passionate about striving towards living a sustainable lifestyle and helping others to do the same, while recognizing the challenges our current agricultural systems and lifestyles pose for us.
Emily Landenberger: Secretary
As a dedicated advocate for food sovereignty and climate-friendly agriculture, Emily is thrilled to contribute to ACORN's work to cultivate a thriving, ecologically sound, and socially just local food system. She is the Marketing and Communications Coordinator at NOFA-VT and came to that role after having spent more than a decade in food systems education and community outreach at the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op. She engages in this work with the goal of both fostering a meaningful connection between producer and consumer and inspiring deep admiration for the hands that feed us. In addition to her ACORN board service, Emily is proud to serve as co-chair of the Addison County Hunger Council through Hunger Free Vermont. She and her husband tend a subsistence-scale produce and mushroom farm and a retail perennial plant nursery called Taproot at her home on Snake Mountain in Weybridge, VT. When she's not working, Emily enjoys skiing, climbing, trail running, foraging, fermenting, and experimenting in the kitchen.
Susan Smiley: Vice Board Chair
Susan has been involved in local food production since purchasing a farm in New Haven in 1974. Grass-fed beef production, retail yogurt making, and organic vegetable sales harmonized with child-rearing on the farm and a focus on food self sufficiency for a family of six.
A fifteen-year stint as a buyer of organic food ingredients for Earth’s Best Baby Foods led to the creation of an Addison County local foods directory which Susan manages for ACORN’s Addison County Guide to Local Foods and Farms. Susan continues to cultivate a lush garden in New Haven.
Aisha Thapaliya
Aisha (she/her) grew up in Delray Beach, FL and came to Vermont in 2022 to attend Middlebury College, where she is studying Environmental Justice and Arabic. Food has always been a central part of her life whether it be working in restaurant kitchens, on production farms and edible schoolyard programs in the Adirondacks, and at the Middlebury College Knoll. She was initially inspired by her family’s farm in Dhulikhel, Nepal, and is particularly interested in the cultivation of culturally-relevant foods. Aisha has been a Middlebury Climate Action Fellow since May 2024. She spent the past summer in Amman, Jordan, farming and volunteering for food-justice organizations to provide humanitarian food aid. She is thrilled to work with local food producers in Addison County and strives to help create systems of reciprocal responsibility to connect, nourish, and support people and planet. Aisha also loves to swim, roller skate, sing, make jewelry and hike!
Staff
Lindsey Berk: Executive Director
Lindsey spent seven years in marketing, advertising and PR in the private sector before escaping the cubicles of New York City to find herself nestled in the vines of Mendoza’s wine country as a harvest intern.
What was meant to be a five month hiatus became a five year journey around Latin America, Australia and New Zealand. A transformative role at a Peruvian disaster relief organization convinced Lindsey to continue working in the non-profit sector, and time spent with a Guatemalan coffee cooperative, an Australian organic farm and various WWOOFing properties locked her into the food justice movement for good.
Lindsey and her partner Matthew founded a food education tourism project, Origins of Food, that reconnects people with where food comes from.
Lindsey joined ACORN in 2015 as the Director of Marketing and Development and has served as Executive Director since 2021.
In addition to working to improve small farm viability and food sovereignty, Lindsey is dedicated to further building community resilience through a number of side projects and initiatives. She also really likes growing things in her back yard and hanging on the couch with Matt and their three pets.
Jessica Purks: Food Hub Operations + Logistics Manager
Jessica recently moved to Vermont to join the local food scene as a young farmer and advocate for more sustainable agriculture. While pursuing a B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology at Green Mountain College, she was enchanted by Vermont's working landscapes and the cultural appetite for local products.
She has worked on numerous farms in Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Zealand since 2013. With 8 years of experience in CSA, farmers' markets, and farm produce retail, she's committed to growing and sharing good food with her community. She is excited to step into her new role as ACORN'S Food Hub Operations + Logistics Manager and to continue working to make farming more sustainable. She also runs organic vegetable farm Stone’s Throw Farmstead in Shrewsbury, VT, with her partner.
Lilah Krugman: Programs and Outreach Coordinator
Lilah Krugman graduated with a degree in Food Systems from the University of Vermont in 2023. She first became interested in food as a tool for social change while working on an urban farm in her hometown of Atlanta, GA. Since then, her passion for food and its role in transforming communities has only grown. During her time at UVM, she had the thrill of exploring her interest in food and community both inside and outside the classroom. She is most proud of the work she did through her club, Food Recovery Network, which redistributed prepackaged meals to the campus community, and her senior thesis, which centered on the Addison County Farmacy Program.
Lilah began working with ACORN as the 2022 Food and Farm Guide Intern and Farmacy Intern. In 2023, she join ACORN full-time as the Programs and Outreach Coordinator. Outside of her time spent driving the ACORN Food Hub van, Lilah enjoys going to the movie theatre, walking with her dog, and lounging by fresh water of any variety.
Alicia Hughart: ECO AmeriCorps Member
Alicia Hughart graduated in 2019 with a bachelor’s degree in Psychology, then relocated to Vermont in 2022 where she began working in at the Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op. Prior to moving to Vermont, Alicia worked in a produce department at a large grocery store where she found a lack of connection between major food systems and the communities they reside in, and this motivated her to want to be a part of the shift improving that relationship.
Now she serves as an ECO AmeriCorps member split between ACORN and Feeding Champlain Valley (CVOEO).
When not working with food Alicia can be found playing with flowers from her and her partners dahlia-based flower farm, Misty Hollow Farm, in Cornwall, VT.
