STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

The 50-state Interdependence Relay is coming to The Hunger Coalition in Bellevue.

And Wood River Valley residents are invited to come together for a special community meal and gathering with conversations centered around the nation’s anniversary as part of the year-long national relay celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

We're very excited and honored to be chosen,” said Amanda Moulton, community kitchen supervisor for The Hunger Coalition.

The drop-in event is being held from 4 to 7 p.m. Monday, June 1, at The Hunger Coalition’s Bloom Community Food Center at 110 Honeysuckle Lane. It will feature a free meal with the idea that “Good food is a right.”

Attendees are invited to bring a favorite handwritten recipe that includes potatoes on a 3-by-5-inch card or write one up to represent Idaho in the project.

The Interdependence Relay is a year-long series of 50 community gatherings in 50 states.

The Hunter Coalition was chosen to be the official host for Idaho because of the way it uses community meals, food distribution, gardens and volunteer programs to support food access and strengthen community connection.

The nationwide grassroots “relay” is reimagining how to connect the country through a simple idea: what happens when local communities actively pass meaning from one place to the next.

It was founded by writer and community organizer Garrett Bucks whose Barnraisers focuses on strengthening local ties and creating spaces for meaningful engagement. The Barnraisers project was founded in 2016 to address an increasingly lonely and angry country by training big-hearted folks to meet their neighbors, build community and work towards a more hopeful world.

At the center of the relay is a hand-crafted Relay Box with 50 compartments, which moves from state to state collecting each community’s commitments from handwritten declarations to locally chosen objects that reflect place, identity and lived experience.

As it travels across the country, the box is meant to become both archive and record of a larger experiment of what it looks like for Americans to practice interdependence in real time.

The Interdependence Relay supper will be held Monday evening at the Bloom campus in Bellevue.