This is my story.
My name is Dan Bosley and I am the pharmacist and owner of Keeseville Pharmacy. For the past 18 years, I have been serving the community of Keeseville and its neighbors.
Two years ago my path crossed with AdkAction as we endeavored to create a daily farmers’ market within the small footprint of retail space in my pharmacy. We did this because the grocery store just down the street had closed several years earlier and hope of it reopening was long gone. Many folks were having a hard time finding transportation to get to grocery stores 20 minutes away and our community needed a small grocery option of some kind, and we decided to try to fill that need. What started as a very small grocery section, under 100 square feet, has now expanded to about 500-600 square feet of my store filled with fresh local food from over 25 vendors.
Looking back to the fall of 2017, I would never have dreamed that this Farmacy experiment would have taken me on such a path. I used to serve my community by filling prescriptions with care and compassion, but I never imagined that I could serve the community as a whole.
“AdkAction’s insightful plan and resources plus my pharmacy’s physical space and staff have added up to more than a sum of parts. We have created a project that squarely addresses food injustice and bridges the health gap between medication and behavior change.”
AdkAction provided the equipment, technical support, marketing, promotion, inspiration, and insight into the issues our communities are facing. I have provided the retail space, staff time for day-to-day operations, and an open mind. Together, we have been able to learn how to make high-quality food available to anyone who wants it. We have hosted cooking classes to demonstrate how to cook from scratch on a fixed budget. Our “Double up Food Bucks” program which matches, dollar-for-dollar up to $10 per day all qualified SNAP (food stamp) purchases with credit for FREE LOCAL FRUITS AND VEGETABLES!
I am extremely passionate about this project. I think it’s important for you to know that this project has received local, regional and even national attention. I have been asked to speak at conferences around the country and many of my pharmacy-owner colleagues are extremely interested in replicating the model. How cool would it be to see “Farmacies” all over the country and to know that we started the movement right here in the Adirondacks?!
Also important to mention here is that not only did I (the Farmacy project) receive the national Upsher-Smith Award for Excellence in Innovation from the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York this past summer, but was also just featured on the cover of America’s Pharmacist, a national journal that was released in early December 2019.
