Connecting OFSR Grant Funding to Local Food Purchases
Ensuring Local Food
Access for Everyone
by ciara o’ brien
For many Montgomery County residents, a trip to the Agricultural Reserve offers easy access to fresh, locally produced food. For others, however, transportation and affordability barriers place that same food out of reach. The Montgomery County Office of Food Systems Resilience( OFSR)— with it’ s mission to build a more equitable, efficient, resilient, and sustainable food system in Montgomery County— has developed and activated a variety of strategies to invest in the local food economy and ensure that local food is available to all County households, regardless of income or zip code.
From grant-funded market vouchers to investments in food aggregation infrastructure, the County is using public dollars to shorten the supply chain and keep local foods available within our own borders.
The OFSR manages an extensive portfolio of grants and contracts that allocate funding to more than 80 unique organizations in Montgomery County; $ 7.4 million of the OFSR’ s budget is focused on grant programs that address food insecurity through partnerships with schools, the healthcare sector, and the faith community, among other community-based organizations. Across OFSR’ s three largest grant programs— the Community Food Assistance Grant Program, which funds 55 organizations, the School-Based Food Assistance Grant Program, which funds 11 organizations, and the Food as Medicine Grant Program, which funded six organizations in the 2025 fiscal year( FY25)— grantees are encouraged, though not required, to source food from locally owned and operated food businesses. In FY25, which spanned from July 2024 through June 2025, approximately 41 percent of all food purchased through these grant programs was locally sourced, amounting to over three million pounds of food and more than $ 1.7 million in grant-funded purchases. These investments supported local farms, retailers, and wholesalers within the County and regional food system, while ensuring residents accessing food assistance services benefited from fresher, more nutrient-dense, and oftentimes more culturally relevant foods.
Through OFSR’ s Community Food Assistance( CFA) Grant Program, Montgomery County food assistance providers have also integrated direct retail food access offerings to empower clients to shop for foods on their own while supporting local businesses. Community FarmShare, which aggregates local produce from farms across Montgomery County and makes it available to residents through direct distributions and a Mobile Market, uses CFA funding to connect clients with Market Bucks, which can be used to purchase affordable fresh produce from the Mobile Market. In FY25, Community FarmShare distributed 52,758 pounds of locally sourced produce to County residents through the CFA Grant Program; Community FarmShare has also been a key partner in the OFSR’ s School-Based Food Assistance Program and Food as Medicine Program.
OFSR’ s Food as Medicine Grant Program funds partnerships between healthcare clinics and food
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