Pugh Celebrates Grant Funding for Food Dignity Movement

June 27, 2025

LUZERNE – State Rep. Brenda Pugh (R-Luzerne) is excited to announce The Food Dignity Movement is set to administer a $723,839 infrastructure grant to five local farms through Pennsylvania’s Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure (RSFI) grant program, which is funded through a cooperative agreement with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).

“Food Dignity performs such an important service in our district by providing families access to healthy, nutritious food,” said Pugh. “I know these grant dollars will be put to good use and are another tool for Food Dignity to help farmers improve their infrastructure.”

Food Dignity’s mission is to break down barriers for everyone in Northeastern Pennsylvania to access local food. This grant builds the supply chain capacity of the local agriculture system, which significantly increases farmers’ ability to scale and serve more community organizations.

“This grant is based on the needs of five local farms,” said Clancy Cash Harrison, MS, RDN, FAND, founder and president. “These enhancements will help local farmers grow, harvest, store and distribute more food.”

The RSFI program provides a dollar-for-dollar match to support product processing, distribution and aggregation of products from multiple farms to help meet demand for local, seasonal and fresh food. Local farmers are slated to use the funding for building cold storage, processing and delivery systems to support a network of 29 farms and launch 15 new value-added products.