Meet Kelly Liken and Kelli Duncan of The Community Market in Eagle County

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelly Liken and Kelli Duncan.

Kelly and Kelli, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Eagle Valley Community Foundation (EVCF) was founded in the summer of 2015 after recognizing the need for a convening resource in the Eagle River Valley. As the breadth of our work grows, we remain true to our focus on wellness, early childhood education and food security. EVCF’s main program is their food access project, The Community Market. According to a study done by Feeding America, 16% of Eagle County residents struggle to put food on the table for their families. That’s about 8,700 people in our community. When EVCF received the results of this study at the end of 2017, they concluded that there was an unmet need for food assistance in Eagle County. For that reason, The Community Market was started in May of 2018.

Formerly the Eagle River Valley Food Bank, The Community Market (TCM) is a non-traditional food bank based in Gypsum, Colorado about an hour West of Vail. We decided to change our name to The Community Market in the summer of 2019 in response to the stigma which the term ‘food bank’ carried for some of our customers. Since we are different than a traditional food bank in many ways, we decided to use a name that we feel better encompasses our role in the community.

“This is about much more than just giving out food,” Kelly Liken, Director of TCM, said. “This is about lifting people up and creating equality in the food system. We believe that healthy food access is a human right.” The Community Market focuses on providing healthy, fresh options (as well as pantry staples) to local residents at no cost to them. Today, around 40% of our food distribution is fresh produce, we’re partnering up with local farmers in order to reach our goal of 60% fresh produce by 2020!

We are currently serving 800-1,000 people each week through our storefront in Gypsum as well as our mobile operations in different low-income communities spanning from Avon to Dotsero. Our main location is located at 760 Lindbergh Drive (unit #7) in Gypsum, Colorado. Since we know that many of our customers struggle with access to transportation, we also hold mobile, ‘pop-up’ markets in different under-resourced communities throughout the week. Mondays we are in Eagle, Tuesdays in Edwards, Wednesdays in Avon and Thursdays in Dotsero.

We are an independent food assistance organization and do not require any documentation or proof of economic hardship in order to access our services. We want to make sure that our food is accessible to everyone and that feeling of fear around giving personal information does not stand in the way of that.

We are currently only addressing about 10-15% of the need here so there is still work to be done in order to achieve healthy food access for everyone in our community. In this next chapter of our growth, we are collaborating with community members to bring together a board of ‘food ambassadors’ which will help inform the strategies we use in working to ensure that EVERYONE in Eagle County has access to fresh, nutritious food.

Our organization is also very passionate about making a difference in environmental sustainability by reducing food waste in the valley. About 60% of our food is ‘rescued’ as donations from local grocery stores. We pick up all kinds of food items every day from stores where it would have otherwise been thrown away. So far this year, we have rescued approximately 150,000 pounds of food. In addition to rescuing food, we purchase much of our food from local farmers such as Austin Family Farm in Paonia, CO. Austin Family Farm supports us by aggregating produce from other local farmers in the area and selling it all to us at an incredible rate of $1 per pound. In this way, we can ensure that our customers always have access to fresh, local produce while also helping support our local farmers.

“At The Community Market, we think local produce means something,” Kelly Liken said. “We are bringing together a community and keeping it sustainable when we are eating locally.” We also divert 92.7% of our waste through our recycling, composting and animal feed programs! Any food that isn’t suitable to distribute to our customers is either set aside for local farmers to pick up and use as animal feed or it is composted. Composting is a process that recycles organic materials otherwise regarded as waste and produces a natural fertilizing agent to nurture healthy soil. This product is called compost. Through our sustainable waste diversion practices, we have prevented 5.27 metric tons of CO2 emissions in the first six months of this year.

The Community Market has a small team of staff and therefore relies heavily on the support of the community and our wonderful volunteers. Our various operations are made possible through the support of a network of almost 400 volunteers in the area. Many of our customers are also volunteers, creating an environment of equity and community. “Whether you’re coming to help, be helped or both, The Community Market’s doors are always wide open,” Liken said.

“The line often gets blurred between the people who serve and the people who are served,” Liken said. “What we’re talking about is creating a community that feels whole and which is supportive of everyone – a community that is really thriving – and we need to work together to do that.” So, what is the Community Market? We are a team of passionate community members working to increase access to nutritious food for everyone while also reducing the amount of food that is wasted.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
We have been very fortunate to benefit from the support of our volunteers and partners in this journey towards food access. Of course, there have been some challenges along the way.

During our first year, we experienced massive growth as demand for our services grew. To keep up with the need in our community while also sticking to our mission of providing fresh, nutritious food, we have had to think strategically and creatively in every aspect of our operations from sourcing to distribution.

No matter the challenge, we believe that serving our customers well and being responsive to our community’s needs should be at the forefront of our minds. We have had to be innovative in the methods through which we collect feedback from our customers which was initially difficult as we are such a small staff.

However, the feedback we have received has helped inform what kinds of products we source, when and where we hold our mobile markets and the overall culture we try to foster wherever we are.

If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
If we were starting The Community Market over today, I think we would have launched our operations with that name rather than initially branding ourselves as the Eagle River Valley Food Bank. As I stated before, we received feedback from our customers that the term of a “food bank” held some not so savory memories for many of them and, therefore, wasn’t a term that immediately felt welcoming to everyone. It is also a bit antiquated and does not accurately describe our mission.

Besides that, I think we have been very responsive to community input in every stage of our operation from planning to execution. So I’m not sure there is much that we would change. We are glad to engage in work that feels authentic. We are learning and growing alongside our community and are constantly striving to serve our fellow Eagle County residents better.

Contact Info:

• Address: 760 Lindbergh Drive (Unit #7) Gypsum, CO 81637
• Website: eaglevalleycf.org/the-community-market/
• Phone: 9703287900
• Email: kelly@eaglevalleycf.org

Image Credit:
José Valsecia

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