Dear Friends and Community Partners,
As the year draws to a close, we reflect on the strength of our community and the collective care that has carried Archuleta County through rising food costs, strained family budgets, and interruptions in federal assistance. Time and again, we see that when our neighbors face hardship, we move forward by moving together.
Healthy Archuleta is honored to serve as a trusted community partner in our food and health ecosystem. In a small rural county with limited resources and where local organizations are often less competitive for state and national funding, collaboration is not just a strategy but a necessity. With your support, we worked alongside residents, partners, and agencies to strengthen the systems that nourish our community, from responding to urgent needs to investing in long-term solutions.
Through the Food Pantry Network, equitable distribution ensured that all seven pantries, especially smaller sites, had supplementary nutritious foods when families needed them most. During the government shutdown, we coordinated rapid response efforts to help pantries manage a surge in demand, demonstrating the power of a coordinated, community-centered approach.
At the same time, we continued building upstream resilience. As we look toward the 3rd biannual Archuleta Food Summit in April 2026, we are strengthening our local food system through hands-on growing programs and year-round techniques that build household resilience and deepen shared learning across the community.
Your partnership also moved the Archuleta Community Food Hub vision forward, bringing residents, local producers, and USDA architects together to design a space that expands food access, supports small businesses, and engages youth and adults. This year, youth leadership flourished through internships, design-thinking projects, food system education, and health-career exploration with partners such as Drexel University College of Medicine.
We also helped launch the Rural Health Network to improve access to care for families facing barriers. Alongside this effort, we supported insurance assistance services and facilitated Community Health Worker training across three local agencies, expanding vital workforce capacity. Through trusted relationships and bilingual outreach, families connected with health screenings, prevention resources, and nutrition education at the third annual Archuleta Health Fair and Expo. Throughout this work, culturally responsive engagement ensured language access, community voice, and navigation support for those seeking mental and behavioral health resources.
As the year ends, we invite you to stand with us. Your donation supports the programs, partnerships, and community-driven solutions that keep Archuleta County strong, nourished, and connected. To contribute, please visit our website or mail a check. Thank you for believing in this work and for helping build a healthier, more resilient Archuleta County.
With gratitude,
Lisa Scott, Valarie Groves, Kim Barnes, and Connie Cook
Healthy Archuleta Board of Directors
At Healthy Archuleta, our vision is a community where everyone contributes to and benefits from an equitable, resilient, and sustainable food and healthcare system. Our mission is to drive strategic systems change by engaging community members to advance nutrition security, health equity, and greater social belonging.
In Archuleta County, 8.2% of families and 11.6% of residents fell below the poverty line in 2017. During that time, an informal group of community members representing different agencies came together to understand the food system with the aim of advancing food equity in our community. For the next two years, this group (Food System|Food Equity Coalition) met and learned about each other’s work as it relates to the residents of Archuleta County. In 2019, through a planning grant from the Colorado Health Foundation (CHF), the Food System|Food Equity Coalition (Coalition), as a project of a fiscal agent (Community United Method Church), conducted a participatory-based community food assessment, developed an implementation plan, and strengthened its Coalition with community member involvement beyond partner agencies. In 2020 with the stay-at-home order resulting from the Pandemic, the Coalition was asked by the Archuleta County Director of the Department of Human Services to work on emergency food work since it had established connections in the community. One of the first activities of the Coalition was to bring the food pantries in the county together to form a network and to work on access to food. It also brought the growers together remotely to encourage and support them to grow food for the food pantry clients. From the Fall of 2019 to the Fall of 2021, the Coalition engaged numerous community members to support food access during the pandemic while working on the implementation plan that was submitted to CHF. The Coalition applied for several grants to support the community with food access and engaged community members as contractors and volunteers to support the work. Activities conducted during this time included a participatory budgeting project that supported community member’s ideas, garden education, cooking demos at food pantries, a pilot mobile food pantry effort, restaurant vouchers for food for community members, procurement and distribution of food through the food pantries and partner organizations, among others.
On September 10, 2021, Healthy Archuleta, Inc. dba: FSFE - Food Coalition was established as a non-profit corporation in the State of Colorado with the mission of being dedicated to advancing food production, health and community wellness through food/nutrition resource assistance, educational programs, advocacy, systems work, and promoting community-driven solutions that lead to a healthier Archuleta. Since then, it has continued to advance its work in line with the outcomes it achieves and in concert with its mission.
Today, Healthy Archuleta is focused on three primary areas of action and learning, which include Health Equity, Nutrition Security, and Community Cohesion. Healthy Archuleta recognizes that at the heart of its work is community engagement and capacity building related to the local food and health system. Toward this end, the current efforts are focused on the following ten areas: 1) Nutrition Security|Health Equity Assessment, 2) Increasing access & utilization of primary & preventive health care, 3) Increasing local food production/supply, 4) Increasing food access & security, 5) Advancing learning about the food system & health promotion/wellness, 6) Language equity, 7) Volunteer engagement, 8) Youth engagement, 9) Community building, and 10) Supporting and strengthening HA’s operation toward sustainability.
At Healthy Archuleta, we strongly believe that access to nutritious food and quality healthcare are fundamental rights that should be available to everyone.
Organization name
Healthy Archuleta Inc
2021
Tax id (EIN)
87-2588549
Category
Food, Agriculture & Nutrition, Health Care, Community Improvement & Capacity Building
Organization Size
Large Organization
Address
80 CR 600Archuleta County, CO, US