Heaven Hill Brands, as part of its fifth annual Philanthropy Project, announced it has made a donation of $13,765.33 to the Food Literacy Project to benefit efforts to support youth transforming their communities through food, farming, and the land.

Each year Heaven Hill Brands is proud to host an employee-driven and collaborative fundraising project that benefits charities close to its employees’ hearts. The company looks to its employees to submit non-profit organizations to be considered as the recipient of a company-wide, employee-led fundraising effort, with matching funds from the company up to $5,000. Past recipients have included Feeding America, Portland Elementary, Flaget Memorial Hospital’s Project Hope, Ronald McDonald House, and Coalition for the Homeless.

This year, Heaven Hill chose the Food Literacy Project, which was submitted by Rachel Nally, environmental and sustainability manager at the distillery. The Food Literacy Project is important to Nally because having been raised in the suburbs, she did not have regular exposure to seeing food grow.

Though her parents had a garden, she was lucky to spend some weekends at her grandparent’s rural home where they had a large kitchen garden, until they too moved to the suburbs. As small family farms and kitchen gardens rapidly disappear from the landscape, so does the knowledge of how to grow food, cook food, and care for the land, especially in urban and underserved areas.

The Food Literacy Project is a nonprofit organization with a vision to create a healthy and equitable community where people and places thrive. Since 2005, the Food Literacy Project has been building resilience in our community, especially during this unsettling time, by engaging youth leaders to provide access to fresh and healthy food and caring for our neighbors.

Through several fundraising initiatives between September and December 2020, Heaven Hill employees worked together to raise funds for the Food Literacy Project.

“Food Literacy Project’s vision speaks loudly to our world today and resonated with employees across our company as we continue to address health, wealth and food disparities in both our city and our country,” Nally said in a news release. “Now I have my own garden that feeds our family through a good part of the year, but in the early days I felt like I was re-learning everything I thought I knew about food.  As small family farms and kitchen gardens rapidly disappear from the landscape, so does the knowledge of how to grow food, cook food, and care for the land, especially in urban and underserved areas.”