Neighbors feeding neighbors
The Port Townsend Food Project has one job: to keep a steady stream of good food flowing to the Port Townsend Food Bank, and to knit our neighborhoods a little closer together while we do it.
The ask is small. One extra item in your cart when you shop. A green bag on your porch six times a year. Small on purpose, because when a whole town gives a little, the food bank can count on a lot.
How it started here
Our Food Project began in 2025, when a delay in SNAP funding stretched our food bank thin at the very moment more of our neighbors were turning to it. Trish Cardosa had recently moved to Port Townsend from Ashland, Oregon, where the original Food Project was born, and she knew firsthand how well the green bag model works.
Her first group of contributors was not a neighborhood at all. It was the Port Townsend Cold Plungers, who took to the idea with the same enthusiasm they bring to jumping into cold salt water. Plungers started signing up to coordinate their own neighborhoods and groups, and the project grew from there. Today a handful of coordinators and their neighbors fill green bags across town, and we welcome new groups one at a time.
Trish Cardosa
Trish Cardosa moved to Port Townsend from Ashland, Oregon, home to a thriving food project that delivers 20,000 pounds of food every two months. Just a few months after arriving, she knew this town was perfect for a food project of its own. The natural beauty, the spirit, the traditions and the kind, joyful people make it the community she has been looking for for more than 50 years.
Part of something bigger
We are the Port Townsend branch of the Neighborhood Food Project, a national nonprofit that traces back to a kitchen table conversation in Ashland in 2008. What started as 26 volunteers and a batch of green bags has grown into a network of more than 25,000 people across 12 states, all following the same simple rhythm we follow here: fill a bag as you shop, set it out on the second Saturday of every even-numbered month, and a coordinator does the rest. Their motto says it well: Building Community, Sharing Food.
Where the food goes
Every green bag collected in Port Townsend is delivered the same day to the Port Townsend Food Bank, part of the Jefferson County Food Bank Association, where it is weighed, sorted and put straight to work. Nothing leaves the county. The food your porch sends out on a Saturday morning is on local shelves that same week, feeding the same community that gave it.
Room to grow
We focus on Port Townsend and grow one group at a time, so nobody gets overwhelmed. If you live in Port Hadlock, Port Ludlow or the Tri-Area and the idea of neighbors feeding neighbors speaks to you, the Neighborhood Food Project can help you start a Food Project of your own.