Sturdy Communities is working with growingSOUL to build closed-loop food systems in Montgomery County Maryland. We operate vehicles converted to run on filtered waste vegetable oil, to collect pallets of donated perishable food from grocery stores & current participants in our work to compost what cannot be gleaned with our partners. We currently serve a couple hundred low-income families in Montgomery County, MD & Washington, DC, providing them with much-needed food resources sustainably sourced from within our community!
Our mission is to reduce the economic and environmental costs of self-sustained communities. We strive to equalize the benefits and the burdens of self-sustained development and to reduce the social inequities that place a greater burden on people and communities earning lower incomes. One of our programs supporting this mission is made possible through a partnership with growingSOUL, a non-profit that feeds the hungry and teaches the hungry to feed themselves.
Our contribution to this zero-waste shared mission is three-fold: 1) end food waste to create self-sustained communities, 2) reduce the amount of CO2 released in landfills caused by decaying produce and 3) reduce the carbon footprint of our transportation by using alternative fuel. All transportation is made possible by SCI owned carbon neutral vehicles; a pick-up truck and a shuttle bus converted to run on filtered waste vegetable oil (WVO). The oil is donated by our network of local restaurants. We use our vehicles to collect discarded or “seconds” food throughout the County and from our network of farmers to sell at farmers markets.
