These short films grew out of the Rural Food Business Assistance Project, which ran a series of community meetings in WNC towns last year and gave more than $20,000 in scholarships to 80-plus local food businesses in the region. The project aimed to capture a snapshot of what was happening to the local food scene across WNC, also connecting farmers and food businesses with their local small business centers to ensure they could grow and prosper. 

“We spoke with people from every town in our seven-county region, and they came up with a list of over 500 local food businesses and organizations here, as well as dozens of stories that should be told. We hope that this video series can at least start to paint the picture of all the amazing people working to make our local food scene so vibrant and successful,” said Sarah Thompson, Executive Director at the Southwestern Commission, which led the video project on behalf of MountainWest.

The videos are available at www.gownc.org. Funding for the first video was provided by the Cherokee Preservation Foundation, with funding for the second video from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation and the USDA.