Our Mission & Vision

Our Mission

The Hannah Grimes Center cultivates rural economies of shared vitality by providing education and support for essential, locally-rooted endeavors, sharing resources, and building engaged networks.

Our Vision

We envision a world of thriving, interconnected, place-centered economies where everyone’s needs are met in ways that strengthen the living systems we are part of and depend upon.

Our Values

Recognition of Interdependence: We understand ourselves as inextricably entangled with all living systems — social, ecological, economic — and act with care and reciprocity for the whole.

Dignity, purpose, and belonging: Every person has unique contributions to offer and deserves meaningful participation, dignity in work, and a place in the web of community life.

Enough-ness: We orient toward enough — divesting from logics of endless growth in favor of shared abundance, sufficiency, and long-term stability.

Relational accountability: We recognize that our ideas and actions ripple well beyond our era and species; accordingly, we act as careful stewards of resources, relationships, and responsibilities and hold ourselves accountable not only in the present time, but also to those who came before and those yet to come.

Place-embedded vitality: We are committed to understanding the history, culture, and capacity of the unique people and ecologies of rural places.

Collective stewardship: We strengthen our world by sharing what we can: governance, wealth, infrastructure, tools, and more.

Entrepreneurial spirit: With courage and honesty, we experiment, innovate, and iterate openly, responding to what works, what doesn’t, and the signals emerging around us.

From Employees to Entrepreneurs: Bending Branch Farm

In 2021, Dan Field and Megan Baptiste-Field reached out to Hannah Grimes as they prepared to take a bold step: transitioning from employees to owners of Main Street Cheese in Hancock, NH. After purchasing the herd of Alpine dairy goats, they cared for and rented the facility and launched their own business: Bending Branch Farm.

How Hannah Grimes Helped

Dan joined the inaugural Food Business Lab cohort at Hannah Grimes and ultimately won $5,000 in the program’s final pitch event.
In 2022, he participated in the PitchFork Challenge, winning the $10,000 prize.
Dan participated in the Seedlings Loan Boot Camp pilot program in 2024-25.

Dan is now in his third year of the Business Incubator Program, supported by a Hannah Grimes scholarship.

What They’ve Achieved

Since partnering with Hannah Grimes, Bending Branch Farm has:

Relocated to a new site in Marlborough, NH
Invested in efficient milking equipment using PitchFork prize funds
Launched raw goat milk and meat sales
Experimented with new goat cheese products
Continued to grow with the help of 1:1 coaching and community support

In Their Words

“The Food Biz Lab was instrumental in helping us launch our business and feel confident that we have a roadmap for success. There is no way we could have gotten things up and running as quickly as we did without the help from the Food Biz Lab and the Hannah Grimes coaches.”