The Intervale Center

In its 21-year history, the Intervale Center has faced five big challenges:

• Diversification: For most of its history, the Intervale’s cash flow was too dependent on its composting operation. A couple of years back, too much rain brought the operation, and its revenue, to a halt for several months. There’s a need to diversify the Center’s cash flow. Income from land leased to farm enterprises, along with the establishment of new enterprises such as the Food Hub and conservation nursery, has helped, but there is a need for even more diversification.
  
  
• Focus: Will appreciates that to succeed, the Intervale must keep to its expertise in self-financing food systems. He thinks it was smart to hand over the compost operation to Chittenden County. “Just like in most businesses today, you’ve got to focus on what you’re best at and get rid of the non-core initiatives.”
  
  
• Politics: The initial relationship with the city was critical to the startup of the Intervale, but it made the Center appear closely aligned with Vermont’s “progressive enclave” and subjected it to additional scrutiny. The result was a major regulatory dispute over the size and operation of the compost operation, once it grew to the point where it needed special licenses. It cost the Intervale $300,000 to come into compliance and effect the transfer of the operation to the solid waste district to the county.
  
  
• Leadership: Will acknowledges that one of the key challenges for the Intervale has been himself. As long as GSC was providing funding to the Intervale, purchasing much of the compost, and leasing land to the organization, Will’s ongoing presence on the board presented a lurking conflict of interest. The Intervale had reached the point where it needed a board and manager totally independent of GSC. As noted, however, his departure triggered wrenching changes within the organization, and the challenge now is to stabilize.
  
  
• Next Generation Programs: If the Intervale is to meet the demand for the local food it is promoting, there will need to be more farmers and growers in the region, and the Intervale needs to target some of its incubation work accordingly. Increasingly, the challenge for the Intervale is to develop a systems approach. The Food Hub and its first enterprise, the Food Basket—an extension of a good CSA model that involves multiple growers—is a good example of how the Intervale is moving deliberately toward making systems thinking a high priority.
  

Despite these challenges, people now come from all over the world to visit, study, and replicate its work—so many, in fact, that the Center is establishing a more formal consulting arm. With the Center committing to extend its mission and work beyond Burlington and Vermont, Will felt comfortable enough to move onto other projects.

“I think the Intervale Center,” Will reflects, “has charted a way to stop food production from moving farther away from Burlington and from reversing the decline in the percent of food retail dollars going to our farmers. The food system impacts we have had over twenty years are a main reason Burlington is in fact recognized as among the most sustainable cities in the United States.”