River Cities Harvest Inc

The mission of River Cities Harvest (RCH) is to eliminate hunger in Northeast Kentucky by providing free nutrition and meal-planning education and by rescuing perishable and non-perishable food for distribution to local social service organizations that feed low-income individuals and families. The number of hungry people grows daily in our community. The goal of River Cities Harvest is to provide programs that offer a consistent, reliable means to get food to people, at no extra cost to participating organizations.

River Cities Harvest began in the early 1990s as a volunteer effort led by a group of ordinary retired citizens looking for a way to help a local meal center, Ashland Community Kitchen, serve food to the hungry in Ashland, Kentucky. These founding volunteers were troubled by the amount of perfectly usable food being thrown away by restaurants and grocery stores while free meal centers and shelters struggled to meet demand. They soon came up with a simple solution. They began coordinating donations from restaurants to Ashland Community Kitchen, picking up surplus food in their own vehicles and delivering it free of charge the same day. As a result, leftover food was being given to those who needed it most, instead of going to waste. The success of these initial efforts led to the formal creation of River Cities Harvest in 1991, and while the scope of the organization has grown, its simple, common sense approach to fighting hunger has remained unchanged.

River Cities Harvest now works with 15 area restaurants and grocers to distribute more than 300,000 pounds of food each year to 29 agencies feeding the hungry in Boyd and Greenup Counties in Kentucky and Lawrence County in Ohio. To accommodate this growth, River Cities Harvest moved into its new permanent warehouse and office space in The Neighborhood in 2007. One year later, in 2008, RCH partnered with the Boyd County Cooperative Extension of the University of Kentucky's College of Agriculture to establish the Master Gardener program at the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland. Now in its fifth year, the garden program receives its annual funding from River Cities Harvest, while the Cooperative Extension provides technical horticulture training to participating inmates. The Correctional Institution provides the manpower necessary to plant and tend the garden and donates one hundred percent of the yield back to the surrounding community through River Cities Harvest. In 2012, the garden produced more than 68,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables for free distribution to RCH agencies.

In 2012, River Cities Harvest expanded its mission to include education as a key component in its fight against hunger by establishing the Nutrition Education program. The nutrition program offers free nutrition education and basic cooking lessons to low-income families served by RCH agencies. The lessons focus on planning well-balanced, cost-effective meals that make it easy for families to meet the USDA’s recommendations for daily intake of fruits, vegetables, grains, protein foods and dairy. Hosted by River Cities Harvest in partnership with the Boyd County Cooperative Extension, the classes offer one hour or more of classroom instruction and hands-on learning each week, with full program completion for participating families after six weeks.