WELL-BEING MATTERS
Brought to you by Texas Health Community Hope
Well-Being Matters is an ongoing series highlighting different members of our community and their strategies for well-being. Texas Health Community Hope engages in a broad range of innovative programs, investments, and collaborations outside hospital walls to promote a lifetime of health and well-being. This month we meet Trey Harper, Executive Director of Community Link. A native of Newnan, Georgia, Trey came to Texas to attend Baylor University and stayed when he met his wife, Fort Worth native Dr. Amanda Wilson Harper. At Community Link, he’s focused on thinking outside the box to deliver services to people in Northwest Tarrant County.
Q: How did you get from Newnan, Georgia, to Fort Worth?
A: I attended graduate school at Baylor, obtaining a master’s degree in divinity and a master’s degree of music. My wife got her master’s degree and Ph.D. at Baylor. I served in faith communities in Alabama, Texas and Georgia. We were looking to come back to Fort Worth, and Community Link was hiring for a director of development.
Q: At Community Link, you use a shared leadership model with two executive directors. How does that work?
A: I deal with everything external and my colleague deals with everything internally. When Community Link’s first executive director was retiring, Lara Fuller (Community Link’s other executive director) and I proposed the idea of sharing the role to strengthen the work that was already taking place.
Q: You arrived at Community Link in 2019. Talk about the changes you’ve seen in the community.
A: Population growth is a big change. We serve Northwest Tarrant County, and people remember when it was a smaller agricultural community. Growth means a growing need. When I started, Community Link was just a food pantry. During Covid, we expanded beyond our food program to address root causes of hunger by launching case management and mental health counseling. We also opened our first farmers market in Saginaw
Q: Farmers markets are one way to address food insecurity, but the case management piece is critical in moving people forward.
A: Every nonprofit should be solving a problem. With case management, the hope was to work ourselves out of the food business. We got a large grant from the State of Texas and we focused on housing and needs beyond food that address issues of poverty.
Q: People come in needing fresh food, but there’s so much more available.
A: If you have any need beyond food, you meet with the case manager. To paraphrase a poem, the food pantry is the ambulance at the bottom of the mountain, picking up injured people. Case management is trying to build a fence at the top to keep people from falling.
Q: This year, Community Link is starting a new endeavor – home to Tarrant County’s Fresh Link Farms.
A: Fresh Link Farms is a freight farm. It’s a collaborative effort between Texas Health Community Hope, the City of Azle, and the Charis Family Foundation.
Q: What exactly is a freight farm?
A: It’s a container that makes it possible to grow lettuce, other leafy greens and other produce. The container has vertical walls with four or five panels that can move, and plant pods where the seeds grow. The lighting and temperature are controlled by computer. You can grow produce year-round. The container uses very little energy and water.
Q: That’s definitely some out-of-the-box thinking, which is a benefit to everyone in the community, especially because the weather in Texas can be challenging for produce.
A: The problem in food justice is getting fresh fruit and vegetables. Most food insecurity programs base their services on food waste or surplus. We want to provide a more dignified service and address nutrition security as well. We looked at several models for growing our own produce, including a community garden model, but that didn’t work for space.
Q: But Community Link isn’t the first organization in North Texas to operate a container space like this, is it?
A: The University of North Texas has freight containers growing produce for their students. You can see where the lettuce is growing. Across the street there’s the lettuce in the salad bar!
Q: So where are you in the process of starting Fresh Link Farms?
A: The container is here now and hopefully will be producing by the summer. It has the potential to produce a thousand heads of lettuce a week, which will feed right into our farmers markets. Until then, there’s plenty of locally grown, fresh produce at our Saginaw Farmers Market and Azle Farmers Market.
Check out the farmers markets at communitylinkmission.org
Learn more about Texas Health Community Hope at TexasHealth.org/CommunityHope