Mel and Damaris Hall, the owners of the Quechee-based Global Village Foods, are a friendly, humorous, and hard-working husband-wife team with a passion for connecting with the community and affecting social change through their business. Recently partnering with Vital Communities on the New England Food Vision Prize, they are currently seeking to share their delicious variety of Pan-African foods with an even wider community while continuing to source many ingredients locally and offering great wages and working environment for employees.

Damaris began to learn about food production and hard work growing up on her family’s large farm in Kenya (which featured vegetables, tea, coffee, and more). She says that, like most children, she was not a huge fan of farming as a child; however, food has been a passion of hers for a long time. Food was also central to Mel’s experience as a child. Family, friends, and church members would gather at a large table to share an abundance of food at Sunday dinners and celebrations in his hometown of Memphis, TN.

Mel says, “Food was always what brought the family together.”

The food Mel grew up with is spicy and meat-based, whereas Kenyan food features less salt, spice, or meat, and more vegetables and beans. When he met Damaris, Mel had trouble wrapping his head around a meal without meat at its center, but he soon learned that vegetarian dishes could be tasty too. Mel’s grandmother, upon meeting Damaris, even pointed out that some Memphis and Kenyan dishes were very similar.

Damaris and Mel met in Kenya, where Mel was studying abroad in an Environmental Studies program and Damaris was studying cooking and institutional management. Mel’s homestay sister invited Damaris to help put on a farewell dinner party for students (including Mel) and their homestay families. Mel’s homestay sister happened to also have a brother Melvin (studying in the U.S.), and after she introduced Mel Hall as her “brother” and walked away, for a little while, Damaris thought Mel was the Kenyan brother and attempted to speak with an American accent.

After they were married, Damaris and Mel started an African art business, later adding food to their offerings when their first child, Wangene, was born. They found that the food was more popular and helpful in earning income to support a family. Over the years they have tried many types of food businesses – food carts at music festivals, catering, restaurants, and now, frozen prepared foods and food for institutions.

For Damaris, the business is about empowering people and building community. Through her mother’s example of building organizations such as banks, cooperatives, and housing organizations, Damaris saw how institutions could serve the community.

From the time she and Mel moved to Quechee and started Global Village Foods, she has asked the question “How can we make food a way to connect with the community?”

She and Mel have done this by working with local farmers (such as at farmer’s markets) to source local ingredients (such as potatoes and carrots), hiring people for sustainable jobs at a great wage, and having a hard-working and friendly workplace environment. Damaris also enjoys the chance to provide for the next generation through supplying their products to local colleges, which form a large proportion of their current market.

For his part, Mel says that his sensibilities have “always been around organizations and how you build organizations, or businesses, or other things that can actually have an impact.” He believes that business has the power to efficiently solve social problems such as inequalities through economic motivation: “Say there’s an issue I want to affect. I don’t have time to wait for politicians or academics or anyone else. How do you do it? Businesses solve problems. Why? Because when you have financials on the line and you’ve invested blood, sweat, and tears, and investors, money, and family, friends, capital, you find a way to solve the problem.”

Mel and Damaris feature a diversity of Pan-African cuisines and flavors in their menu, including Kenyan and southern U.S., as well as Ethiopian, Moroccan, West African, Caribbean, and more. They serve a West African no-nut stew (an allergy-friendly variation on a peanut stew), Ethiopian injera flatbreads, chicken and veggie samosas, and southern chicken and peaches, to name a few.

The couple caters to a niche market, including those interested in ethnic food who may also be vegan/vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, and/or nut-free. Mel and Damaris attribute their success in part to the devoted following of their supporters.

Along the way they’ve taken on challenges, some inherent to food businesses. Mel points out the fluctuating marketplace, accounting and marketing, small margins, and the changeable nature of customers. Ultimately, these challenges bring satisfaction though, too.

“Every day is a challenge,” says Damaris. “One minute you are either doing operations, or you are doing financing, or you are doing equipment-breaking, or you are doing people, so you are kind of constantly in this juggle. There’s always something going on, and it is challenging. But at the same time, it’s also rewarding, which is really strange.”

Mel and Damaris have created a niche for themselves which helps them compete against large companies. “You are all competing for the same space on the shelf. That gets to be quite a challenge,” says Damaris. “So you have to create a product that is unique enough.” She adds, though, that the uniqueness is not enough: “You also have to learn how to market it.”

Another challenge came up when Damaris and Mel had a child with multiple allergies. At that time, they modified some of their dishes, such as creating a version of a West African stew with sunflower seeds instead of peanuts.

Catering to people with various dietary preferences has been eased somewhat by the fact that Damaris grew up eating a lot of food that was already vegetarian and diet-friendly in other ways.

As they have gone through transitions, being able to try out their products in the local community has been helpful. Mel says, “As we started trying to move into prepared foods, our relationship with our local co-ops was key as a place to test.”

Those who test out their products also include people with origins in the area a dish comes from and who are able to speak to the authenticity of the flavors.

Global Village Foods has grown rapidly. Currently based in the heart of Quechee, just a bit up the road from the covered bridge, Mel and Damaris’s big project now is to increase their automation to keep up with rising demand. Workers have in the past assembled certain foods such as samosas by hand, folding the dough one day – as their kitchen manager described – and letting the dough sit overnight so that the samosas will stick together when filled the next day. Now a machine will be speeding that and other processes up.

The couple has to address many questions as they continue to expand their business, making sure that they have the necessary capacity at each stage in the production process. Mel and Damaris must think about many details, such as how they will store the product, cook it, process it, and package it.

As they go through the transition to automation, employees will be helping to troubleshoot problems with the machines and other parts of the process. Everyone on the staff is expected to be a leader in this way. “We’ve got a great leadership culture, everybody is expected to be a leader,” Mel says. “Because there are enough problems to be solved on a day-to-day basis. We try to create systems that work really well, but at the same time, you still need to get people who come in and say, ‘Oh wait a minute, is this being done to standard?’”

Mel says that they’re trying to create a working environment with “collaboration and team spirit” which helps people to solve problems together.

Ultimately one of their goals is to be able to sell to larger natural food chains, offering their quality food to even more people while continuing to nurture their community relationships.

By the time you read this article, Global Village Foods will likely already have expanded its production. Check out their tasty offerings at a local coop and stay updated for more news of this thriving business via their website at globalvillagefoods.com.

Through outdoor learning, students at the Ottauquechee School experience benefits such as, safe opportunities for student-directed play, learning through discovery, and connecting with new peers. 

In the beginning of the pandemic, “all classes were spending as much time outdoors as possible for safety reasons and to allow for a mask break as learning continued, using outdoor spaces next to the school constructed by Paul Sadowski (garden organizer and longtime outdoor leader at Ottauquechee) and volunteers,” said first grade teacher Jodi Tierney. 

More recently, however, most teachers have shifted back to learning outdoors mainly when it makes most sense for them and their students. They must also balance factors such as, meeting student needs in-person while providing work to those quarantined and being ready technologically for the entire class to go remote, according to principal Amelia Donahue and third grade teacher Staci McDougall.

The first-grade teachers decided to continue weekly first grade outdoor classrooms into the 2021- 2022 school year due to the benefits they observed these students getting out of outdoor learning. Aria Bergeron, a first-grade teacher who had previously led forest classrooms as a kindergarten teacher at Ottauquechee, provided initiative for this as well. The kindergarten classes have been doing a similar weekly forest classroom since 2013.

Students have opportunities for imaginative play outdoors, such as defining and creating their own spaces. When the Quechee Times visited, several first graders were busying themselves in a so-called “restaurant” formed by a circle of stump seats. “This venue had previously been used as a doctor’s office by students,” said Tierney. The first graders had previously written up menus and orders at the restaurant described above, practicing reading, and writing in the process.

Construction comes with the need for repair, too. In the kindergarten forest classroom, a group of kids were working together, “to repair everything in a makeshift stick building,” one said. The students were making a soup out of snow and pouring it all over the house as glue. 

Some other first graders cooperated in an adventurous way when they used a rope attached to a short rocky slope to climb up the slope.

Students can create outdoor opportunities for games, too, including variations on ones they already know. One kindergartener, Scarlet, played Tic-Tac-Toe in the snow, creating a larger board too in case multiple people wanted to play.

“Kids have the opportunity outdoors to spend time exploring what they’re curious about,” said Morgan Fisk, another first grade teacher. Recently, for example, some first graders expressed curiosity about animal tracks, so teachers printed up animal track identification sheets that students could use. 

In Sadowski’s opinion, “learning outdoors helps students remember what they learn and works best as a way of solidifying concepts.”

McDougall took students outside to reinforce a subtraction topic recently. She used a constant distance between two students on a physical number line to demonstrate how a problem such as 572 – 299 could be changed into one with a more rounded number, such 573 – 300, to solve it more easily. 

Often students are inspired by curiosity and wonder at first-hand observations. Fourth graders on a hike on the Section Five trails “were floored by the fact that the stone walls still existed,” including one that used to be a farmer’s backyard, “but the land was no longer open farmland,” said Gigi Stone, a fourth-grade teacher who leads a yearly field trip to these Quechee trails. 

At other times, students compare local outdoor examples of a topic to global examples they also study in class. “Third graders compare local frogs in different microenvironments to frogs around the world,” said Donahue. Fifth graders contrast local forest systems with rainforest systems.

Different students can flourish in the outdoor setting. Alisha Keel, the school counselor, who helps lead the Wolves on the Prowl outing club for fourth and fifth graders, said that the program started as a way for students to be active outdoors who did not normally play sports or get out in the woods. Now, however, many students who play sports have joined as well. Staci McDougall also mentioned how, “some students who may not excel at indoor academics can learn especially well in nature.” 

In Wolves on the Prowl, students gain outdoor experience and spend time with peers while learning a variety of specific outdoor skills such as using a med kit and safety whistle. Tavi and Violet said they learned how to use their whistle to call for help if they got split up from the group, and how to deal with a bear encounter: to yell “bear!” and back slowly away from the animal.

“First grade students in forest classrooms this winter have more often attempted to resolve conflicts amongst each other on their own before consulting teachers than they would indoors,” said first grade teacher Fisk. Students were encouraged in this direction by posters teachers had made available, providing them with problem-solving ideas. 

Focusing on natural sights and sounds can also help students calm themselves and recenter. Some young children who go outside with the school’s mental health clinician will sit down and say, “Can you hear the birds? Whenever I’m outside at my house and I need to calm down, I just listen for the birds,” according to Principal Donahue.

The kindergarten and first grade forest classrooms help develop this healthy awareness of one’s surroundings through “sit spot” and “statue” activities, among both first grade teachers’ favorite parts of the outdoor classroom. They briefly sit and listen, observe, and/or – in the case of sit spots – perhaps quietly play with snow and sticks in their immediate environment. 

Other benefits of outdoor time include, “improved motor skills such as balance and lower extremity strength and endurance,” distance vision and general sense stimulation, said Ottauquechee occupational therapist Aimee Marshall. 

There are endless highlights and upcoming opportunities that the Ottauquechee students see in their outdoor programs. Fourth grader Ryland found joy in singing carols with the group while hiking down Mount Tom recently. Fifth grader Stephen enjoyed a recent scavenger hunt for deer antlers, pinecones, and teacher words of wisdom. Déja is excited to learn to cross-country ski. Whether in the woods behind their school or farther afield, these students are eager to find fun and adventure.