Heather Deaton
Wealth advisor and financial planner
Ellenbecker Investment Group
Nonprofit served: Fondy Food Center
Service: Board president
It was about a dozen years ago when a staff member from Fondy Food Center came to Heather Deaton’s Wauwatosa church to give a presentation on the nonprofit’s mission to provide fresh, locally grown produce to underserved Milwaukee neighborhoods.
A wealth advisor at Pewaukee-based Ellenbecker Investment Group, Deaton was just beginning to get more interested in sustainable food systems – at least on the micro level. She had recently joined a community-supported agriculture program and was exploring starting her own vegetable garden.
“They said you can go to the (Fondy Farmers Market) and get a bag of greens – like a trash can-size bag of greens – for $3,” Deaton recalls, still with an air of wonder in her voice. “This was in like 2011, so that bag of greens might cost about $6 or $8 today, but I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to check this out.’”
Visiting the market soon after, she felt an almost instant pull to become part of Fondy’s mission to not only increase access to healthy, fresh foods, but also support Black, brown and immigrant farmers.
“I just remember feeling this sense of hope and community that the vendors and farmers have amongst each other and with the shoppers,” Deaton said.
In those early days, Deaton did a lot of what she still does today as board president: help out in any way she can.
She started off volunteering at the weekly farmers market but soon began working on committees and helping with the nonprofit’s annual fundraising gala, the Fondy Farm Feast, a farm-to-table dinner at the Fondy Farm at the Mequon Nature Preserve. A 40-acre patchwork of small farms, the Fondy Farm provides land to growers who sell their produce at the Fondy Farmers Market.
But it’s clear from talking to Deaton that her main passion is the farmers market.
Some days you’ll find her setting up before the market or sweeping up after it, or working the EBT booth, which allows customers receiving food assistance to cash in a portion of their food benefit dollars for tokens they can spend at the market. The farmers can then redeem those tokens for money.
By volunteering, Deaton says she gets to see the market in action but also help speed up those transactions.
“When I see that line backed up, my first thought is, ‘The strawberries are all going to be gone.’ I don’t want somebody missing out on these great farm products just because they’re standing in line,” Deaton says. “There’s a lot to running a market, and the Fondy staff is a small but mighty team so being able to help with time and talent is a really important part of volunteering. And that speaks to my core values of service, too, which is doing what you can to help out, removing obstacles.”
And in the end, it’s the relationships that keep Deaton tied to the work, especially the connections she has made with the farmers.
“When I buy something and I know the farmer who grew it, tended to it, watered it, harvested it, cleaned it and packaged it, I feel much more tied to the success of that piece of produce,” she said. “If I have strawberries that go bad in the refrigerator, and I got them from a farmer I know and they know my name, it feels different. … When it rains and rains and rains, or it’s cold, cold, cold, I think of my farmer friends. I didn’t do that before Fondy.”
