This post was originally written and published by our partners at Willing Hands. We're sharing it here with gratitude for their support of our Food Farmacy program and for telling this story so well.

Little Rivers Health Care is fortunate to work alongside incredible community partners, and few relationships have shaped our work as deeply as our partnership with Willing Hands. Their recent feature on our Food Farmacy program captures the history, the people, and the impact behind "produce by prescription" in our region, and we wanted to share it with our community.

How it started

Back in the summer of 2019, Little Rivers was looking for a way to help our chronically ill patients access healthy food in a region that is often considered Vermont's largest food desert. Maureen Boardman, a family nurse practitioner and doctor of nursing practice at LRHC, reached out to Willing Hands for help, and the Food Farmacy program was born. What began with Maureen personally picking up a few hundred pounds of produce each week grew, especially during the pandemic, into a full team effort lead by Emilie Perry, LRHC's Food Is Medicine Program Coordinator who organizes volunteers in Bradford to sort 600 to 1,000 pounds of fresh, local produce each week for our patients across Bradford, East Corinth, Newbury, and Wells River.

Where it is now

Today, the Food Farmacy is part of our broader Food is Medicine project, developed in collaboration with the Bi-State Primary Care Association and Dartmouth's Center for Advancing Rural Health Equity. Patients across our Bradford, East Corinth, Newbury, and Wells River clinics can be screened and enrolled to receive a weekly box of shelf-stable food along with a tri-weekly tote of fresh, local produce, most of it provided by Willing Hands.

The program now serves 91 patients managing chronic illness and food insecurity, and we track their health outcomes over time. Little Rivers is the only site in the Bi-State program tracking these biometric results, and we're seeing real improvements in blood pressure, cholesterol, BMI, and blood glucose among enrolled patients at risk for heart disease and diabetes.

The people who make it happen

None of this works without dedicated hands on the ground. Every Friday, volunteers gather in Bradford to receive that week's delivery from Willing Hands, typically 600 to 1,000 pounds of fresh, local produce depending on the season. Food Is Medicine Program Coordinator Emilie Perry leads the effort, sorting and bagging deliveries into totes bound for each of our clinics on a three-week rotation, all with virtually nothing going to waste.

The Willing Hands feature spends time with Emilie and volunteers Marcey, Twig, and Sol, capturing just how much heart goes into this work each week.

Why this partnership matters

As Ashleen Buchanan, our manager of community relations and grants, put it in the piece: everything Little Rivers receives from Willing Hands fits directly into our produce-by-prescription mission, and Willing Hands has been the partner that made this program possible in the first place.

We're deeply grateful to Willing Hands, to our volunteers, and to everyone working to make sure food, as medicine, reaches the patients who need it most.

Read the full story on the Willing Hands website: https://willinghands.org/2026/09/08/lrhc-food-farmacy/