Just a Grocery Card

It’s just a $50 grocery store gift card.

And yet for our neighbors in the Neighbor Care ecosystem, it’s something more. It’s the chance to walk into a store “just like everyone else.” To choose. To decide what they want to eat.

No forms. No referral to a food shelf. No performing gratitude for the cameras of charity.

We’re not oblivious to what it costs someone to present themselves as “in need.” The stigma. The dependency. The quiet erosion of selfhood that comes from being sorted, assessed, and “served.”

So we do something different. We invest a little more of our privilege. A few more of our dollars. And we honor our neighbor’s agency. Not because our neighbors won’t misstep. The journey is long, and we all misstep. But because we’re interdependent. Every exchange either reinforces the old transactional conditionality or helps transform it through relationship. We choose relationship.

At Green Mountain Justice, we claim equity as a core value. If we believe our neighbors are inherently equal and worthy, how could we subordinate their humanity to our own comfort or convenience?

Here’s what we’re learning: transformation happens in relationship. Not in programs. Not in referrals. In the space between two people who see each other as neighbors.

And our marginalized neighbors are teaching us something else. The systems we’ve built? They need transforming too. Desperately.

Relationship, not transaction. That’s where the work begins. One connection at a time.