Meet Kathy Ryan, FBG Board President 2017-2022

Every organization needs a matchmaker -- someone who puts the right people with the right project or with others who inspire them to keep going. For the Food Bank Growers, that person is FBG Board President, "Glue-ru", and lifetime advocate for helping others, Kathy Ryan.

Kathy started out in New York as an elementary school teacher which morphed into becoming a librarian in Rhode Island after education cutbacks. After a medical retirement from library work,  she became interested in local small farms through work/trade, prepping farm stand produce displays, vineyard maintenance, intense growing on a one acre farm, and even being an Alpaca manure coordinator (ask her for details…)

After her husband Herb Tracy (also an educator) retired, they came to Port Townsend to be closer to the grandkids and immediately began donating their time first to the Grange Garden,then the Port Townsend Food Bank, the Jefferson Land Trust, and to thePT Food Bank Farms and Gardens (now called FoodBankGrowers.org).

Kathy believes in learning-by-doing. You'll find her cleaning out the strawberry beds at Port Townsend High School garden, handing out food at the Port Townsend Food Bank, chopping veggies for the Just Soup Kitchen, working with the Gleaner's apple sauce project, or attending countless meetings in-person or on-zoom.

She's the moxie behind the movements that sometimes take years to happen and need a consistent voice to keep pushing them into existence -- the food freeze-dryer project is just now gaining steam (or frost) after 3 years of incubation driven by putting up summer surplus for winter use. Talk to her for 15 minutes and you'll hear about the Growing Groceries program, or the WSU Seed Library (that began at the Food Bank Gardens), Senior Home Delivery, or how programs on the west end of Jefferson County are doing things. 

It's a lot for one person to be both historian and futurist of an organization, so now she's on a mission to transfer some of that institutional knowledge onto this website ensuring a past, present, and future for local Food Bank Growers.

Thank you Kathy for your years of stewardship, friendship, and doing the networking necessary to strengthen our local food safety net.