What we find, as we find it.

On December 6, 2025, I turned in a grant proposal for a grant-writing course. The assignment: design a program and ask a funder to pay for it. I asked for $500,000.

The applicant on the cover page was a fictional nonprofit the university made up for the assignment. The program was mine, and it's the one this organization now runs.

What the paper proposed.

It was called the Regenerative Leadership & Community Food Equity Initiative. At its center were two pieces. A Community Food Equity Hub: fresh-food distribution, nutrition education, micro-gardening. And a 12-week Leadership & Sense-Making Cohort to train residents as community food-system navigators, the people who connect farms to the restaurants, schools, and institutions that buy from them. A goal added in revision tied it to the farms: at least three standing partnerships, and a family dinner program built on local food.

The goals didn't change.

The proposal set targets. A Hub serving at least 150 households. Household food security up at least 20%, measured with the USDA's own survey. Fifteen residents through the cohort. Three farm partnerships. Those are the numbers on The Plan today. The program names carried over too. The family dinner program became Community Sunday Dinners.

Almost everything else did.

The proposal covered Boston, Greater Boston, and southern New Hampshire. We start in southern New Hampshire, because that's where we are, and because Rockingham County has the highest low-access share in the state.

The proposal budgeted $318,750 for three staff positions, $30,000 for an outside evaluator and a consultant, $100,000 for program costs, and $50,000 for overhead at a 10% rate. The real organization started with $500 of my own money. By July 22 it had spent $315.50 on a domain and two filing fees. Overhead rate: 100%.

The proposal promised funders quarterly updates and an annual report. We post every transaction within seven days, on a public ledger anyone can read without asking.

From paper to filing.

I have friends who work in public education and family members who rely on the government. I knew what it was like to grow up on food stamps and the shame that was imposed by someone else or by systems that deemed us unworthy. We deserved better then, and as a people, we deserve better now.

In fiscal 2024, New Hampshire's state government paid 28 percent of what its public schools cost, the smallest share of any state. The national average was 45 percent. In August 2025, a Superior Court judge ruled the state's special education aid unconstitutionally low: $2,185 per student, against an average cost of roughly $31,000. The state has appealed. In 2025, Congress cut SNAP by roughly $186 billion over ten years, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates about 2.4 million fewer people will receive benefits in an average month. That makes it harder for people who already deal with food insecurity.

On July 20, 2026, I registered gsfla.org and paid the state's fee for Articles of Agreement. New Hampshire accepted the Articles on July 22, and that afternoon I filed for 501(c)(3) status. The IRS determination letter is dated July 27. On October 15, we filed our charitable registration with the state. Six directors sit on its board.

In December, this was a paper with a $500,000 budget. Today it's a 501(c)(3) with seven lines on a public ledger. The line we're working toward is the first standing order from a farm to a buyer.

In July, this organization was four lines on a ledger: a founder's $500, a domain, and two filing fees. Total spent, $315.50. Overhead rate, 100%. We published that number because it was true. Every nonprofit starts at 100% overhead — most just never show you.

Here's where we are now.

The IRS said yes.

We filed for 501(c)(3) status on July 22. The determination letter came back dated July 27 — five days. Granite State Food & Leadership Alliance is a recognized public charity, and contributions are tax-deductible. We said we'd update that line the moment it changed. This is the moment.

New Hampshire is next.

On October 15 we filed our charitable registration with the Attorney General's Charitable Trusts Unit (Form NHCT-11, submission HQS-AR39-3XVWJ, $25 on the ledger). Giving opens when it's approved. We're not asking for money today. What we need first is something money doesn't buy.

The board is seated.

Six directors. A president, a treasurer, a secretary, all named. The governing documents (bylaws, conflict of interest, whistleblower, document retention, pecuniary benefit) went to legal review this week. When they're adopted, they publish on this site. "Board minutes published" is on our commitments list. We meant it.

The ledger moved for the first time since July.

Transaction five: $25.00 to the State of New Hampshire, dated, itemized, posted. Still ahead: the balance moves into the organization's own bank account once the board's signatures authorize it, and that posts too.

What we need now is working relationships.

If you run a small restaurant or a grocery in southern New Hampshire and you want local, sustainable produce on your menu or your shelves, we want to talk to you. If you grow food and need steadier buyers, we want to talk to you. And if what stands between your business and local sourcing isn't interest but capacity — an ordering system, inventory that works, training for your people — that's the leadership half of our name. Building the systems that keep small food businesses running is the work, same as moving the food.

Reach out: info@gsfla.org. Tell us what you run and what you need.

Launch is not a gala and it isn't a press release. It's the first standing order that moves food from a farm to a buyer, and the first dinner with local food on the table. Both get a date, and both go on the ledger.

The farm is fifteen minutes away. We're closer than that now.

A food desert isn't a place with no food. It's a place where the food within reach is the wrong food, or too far away, or too expensive to get to without a car.

Nobody moved. The ruler did.

A food desert is a census tract that fails two tests at once: it's low income, and it's far from a grocery store. Both, or it doesn't count.

"Far" is a number somebody picks.

Same map. Same year. Two rulers.

The line at one mile in cities ten miles in the country

18.8 million One in sixteen Americans

The line moved in to half a mile a ten-minute walk

53.6 million One in six Americans

Bars are drawn to scale against each other. The rural threshold is ten miles in both counts. Source: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Access Research Atlas.

The rural line sits at ten miles in both counts. It never moves. The city line is the only thing that changed, and it changed by half a mile.

Nobody moved houses. No store opened or closed. Same map, same year, same families. The count nearly tripled because someone shortened the walk that counts as too far.

Two shapes

In cities they're pockets, sometimes a mile wide, where the grocery store left and never came back. There the real barrier isn't distance. It's not owning a car.

In rural America they're enormous: whole counties where the nearest supermarket is ten or twenty miles down the road. Most low-access tracts are urban. The rural ones cover far more ground.

Who lives in them

Who lives in them isn't random. In 2023, 23.3% of Black households and 21.9% of Hispanic households couldn't reliably afford enough food. For white households the figure was 9.9%. The national rate was 13.5%.

That's not a gap. That's more than double.

It isn't shrinking

The share of Americans in low-access neighborhoods has barely moved in over a decade. Poverty didn't fall. Stores kept closing.

One force shows up again and again: the dollar store. When a dollar store opens in a rural community, the local grocer becomes about 5% more likely to close, and its sales drop 9.2% (USDA Economic Research Service, 2024). In cities the same opening does roughly a third as much damage. Rural grocers take the hit.

Dollar stores rarely stock fresh produce or meat. They can hollow out the one full grocery store in town and leave the shelves that matter empty.

In 2026, Family Dollar moved to close more than 350 stores. The closures fell hardest on the same low-income, low-access places the federal government already flags.

The food dollars are shrinking too

SNAP, or food stamps, is the largest force against hunger in the country, and it does its heaviest work in exactly these places. In 2025, Congress cut SNAP by roughly $186 billion over ten years and tightened the work rules to qualify. The Congressional Budget Office projects the new work rules will mean roughly 2.4 million fewer people receiving benefits in an average month.

Fewer food dollars, in the places where food is already hardest to reach.

New Hampshire is not the exception people assume

The state is wealthier than most. Its poverty rate is 7.2%, against 10.6% nationally.

But food access isn't only about money. It's about distance, and New Hampshire is rural and spread out. By the USDA's distance measure, 27.5% of the state lives more than a mile from a supermarket in town, or more than ten in the country. That's about 362,000 people. It puts New Hampshire within a few points of the hardest-hit states in the country.

And it's worst exactly where we work. Rockingham County has the highest low-access share in the state at 43%. Hillsborough County, home to Nashua and Manchester, sits at 32.3%.

Rockingham's poverty rate is 4.8%. This isn't mostly about being poor. It's about being far.

Not a red problem, not a blue problem

A food desert doesn't sort by party. It hits the reddest rural county and the bluest city block the same way. It's a broken supply chain. A broken supply chain doesn't care how you voted.

Far means stuck

In New Hampshire, being far means being stuck, because there's almost no way to close the distance without a car. The state runs about a dozen local bus systems, and nearly all of them sit in the cities: Manchester, Nashua, Concord, the Seacoast, the Upper Valley.

Windham has none of that. The one service that reaches it, CART, is a ride you reserve in advance, not a bus you catch. It runs in only a handful of southern Rockingham towns.

Distance traps the old hardest

And New Hampshire is old. In 2010, 13.5% of the state was 65 or older. Today it's 23%. Nearly one in four, against 18.9% nationally, and among the highest of any state.

That's the baby boom aging in place, in a rural state built around the car. A generation that could always drive to the store is reaching the age when it can't.

For them, and for anyone who can't drive, that distance isn't an inconvenience. It's a wall.

Best isn't the same as fed.

Why we exist

The farm is fifteen minutes away. The food it grows leaves before the people nearby can buy it.

That gap is the whole reason we exist. The food is already here. Our job is to move it, from the farms that grow it to the people a broken supply chain keeps it from. Not with a study. With a truck, a buyer, and a standing order.

The map is frozen

Here's what should bother everyone: the government's own map of where the food deserts are hasn't been updated since 2019. The Food Access Research Atlas still runs on 2019 store locations laid over 2010 neighborhoods. No newer edition has come out.

Every dollar store that opened since then, every grocery store that closed, none of it shows up. The official picture of who can reach food in America is frozen years behind the country it describes.

Researchers found the same thing from the other direction. Tracking every licensed food store in the country from 2003 to 2023, they found barely a dent in the food deserts, and steady growth in the neighborhoods stocked mostly with fast food and dollar stores. Rural America was worst off the whole way (Wiese et al., American Journal of Public Health, 2026).

We don't wait years to show our work. Every dollar we spend goes on the public ledger, updated as it happens, where anyone can watch.