Taproot shared-use kitchen Barnraiser Crowdfunding Campaign

Lopez Island,  a rural agricultural community off the coast of Washington State, needs a shared-use commercial food processing facility to add value to locally produced food, provide livelihoods to support island families and support local food production. We formed a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization to create and operate a facility called “Taproot, A Lopez Kitchen” to meet this need.

A group of dedicated Lopez Islanders has been working since last Winter to organize ourselves and on August 1st we launched a 30 day Barnraiser crowdfunding campaign to build a shared-use commercial food processing facility.

We just need help setting up the kitchen and our user fees will sustain ongoing operations.

Lopez Island gardeners and farmers can grow a lot of food and many people want to eat locally produced food. Abundant opportunities exist to create a diverse and stable food based economy here on the island.

The bottleneck in the supply line between the farmer and the diner is our lack of a commercial processing facility.

Taproot shared-use kitchen has 4 main operational goals to help local families create their own livelihoods and nourish their families with locally processed food:

•              Retail products for grocery store shelves.

•              Catering and direct food sales, as in Farmers Market food booths and catering events.

•              Processing food for personal use with commercial equipment.

•              Food processing education

Please visit Taproot’s Barnraiser website. (Copy this http://bit.ly/2acl7u9  ) Check out our nice video. Share it with your friends, family, colleagues and anyone you know who supports the local farming & food processing and small family businesses.

Please feel free to share this link and/or this email!