During the summer season, the harvest from local growers is in full flush. Tomatoes, sweet corn, blueberries, peaches, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, onions and many other staples of summer meals are available, with much more to come. From early July through fall, our food club normally provides enough food to supply a small family with almost all the vegetables and fruit they can eat. Our most recent bounty included blueberries, fresh red potatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbage and broccoli, provided to members at half the price they would pay at markets.

As I prepare for publishing Source for Sensitive People this fall, I am reflecting on our food club and our involvement in it. Source for Sensitive People is the first book in a set of three short books I call "Circle One: Empowering Oneself." In this trilogy, I focus on living a full, empowered life as a sensitive person.

Empowering oneself is first and foremost about caring for one’s needs as a sensitive person who has strong emotions, passions for peace, beauty and love, and ideals for a better human world. When I wrote this short book in the late 1990s, I outlined what I was learning about caring for and protecting myself as a sensitive person. A good portion of Source for Sensitive People is devoted to that topic and I spent many years during that time strengthening myself by following the notes I had made about emotionally nourishing myself, my family and people in my face-to-face community.

As we grew stronger and happier, my wife and I found ourselves moving out into our community, seeking to improve the personal world around us. It was important to us that we tried to work for the best interests of everyone involved, conflicting with people only when there seemed no other alternative. Empowering oneself is about empowering ourselves, and as time passed, we did a lot of work helping people around us achieve practical things they needed. This ranged from my wife babysitting and caring for other children to me leading work to hold town hall meetings and support local produce through our food club.

The food club is an example of how caring for our community has returned to us in abundance. Beginning when we became involved in the local food movement, we realized that bulk food prices at the local produce auction were very inexpensive for very high quality food. At the time, we could buy eight quarts of strawberries for sixteen dollars and forty medium watermelons for twelve dollars. But how could a single household use so much food?

The answer was to combine the purchases for several households, buy the bargains in bulk and split out the shares. After a couple of years of trying different schemes, we found a way to do this effectively and membership boomed. We grew from a handful of households in 2011 to around sixty or so in a few years. The produce auction flourished and so did our community, with individuals, couples and young families becoming the center of our club.

The food club has many benefits—it provides income to local growers and the local economy; healthy, fresh food to people in my town and cost savings to young families on a budget. It also supports our local produce auction in its mission of supporting local communities and providing healthy, inexpensive food to a region where there are only a few grocery stores providing produce. By providing local produce, it cuts the secondary carbon footprint of everyone in the club who would otherwise buy produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to stores in our community.

We’ve made friendships with local growers, been inspired by the hard work and ingenuity of idealistic food activists, and found ourselves the center of the club’s activities. Most tangibly, we’ve received an abundance of fresh, healthy, tasty and inexpensive food in our home for nearly a decade. Without the club, this would be much more difficult and expensive for my wife and I. Through our volunteer work, we flourish.

As our community benefits, our family, friends and neighbors benefit as well. While some would see volunteer work like this as self-sacrificing, I have learned it is like regular physical exercise—essential for my own well-being. By being a sensitive person, my desire to make the world a better place has moved my life and my family’s life into a better place, making our sensitivity and ideals a strength that gives back to us.