Roses to Margaret Griffin and the participants in Farmer Foodshare, for providing a lot of delicious and healthy fare for local households.

Griffin is the founder and co-director of Farmer Foodshare, which provides fresh, locally grown food to people at risk of hunger. The program is a true win-win: it provides local folks in need with great food, and it supports local farmers and enhances community economic development.

This Thanksgiving season, the program collected 32 cases of fresh vegetables, including winter squash, green beans, collards, kale, mustard greens, eggplant and yellow squash. Fresh farmer food was in every one of the 420 bags of holiday meals the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service distributed.

Among those who pulled together to make it happen were: Carrboro Farmer's Market and South Estes Farmer's Market farmers, shoppers and market managers; Farmer Foodshare volunteers; Society of St. Andrew N.C. volunteers; local organic food distributor Eastern Carolina Organics; Weaver Street Southern Village; and IFC staff and volunteers.

The project is a community effort to nourish our neighbors with a full, complete holiday meal including turkey, dressing, desserts, rolls and vegetables.

Roses to Jon Shain and the rest of the local musicians who perform every year during Thanksgiving week to raise money and food for local folks.

Ten years ago Shain organized the first Pre-Turkey Day Jam, pulling together a loose collection of musicians to play at the Cat's Cradle the night before Thanksgiving, with proceeds going to local hunger relief operations.

A decade hence, and the event has become an annual tradition (although it has evolved into a Post-Turkey Day Jam, held the day after Thanksgiving rather than the day before).

But the idea is the same: Rock out and do good.

Roses to Extraordinary Ventures, a local organization that combines a fairly standard service - renting conference rooms for businesses, civic groups and others - with a remarkable one: Providing employment, counseling, training and experience for young people with autism and other developmental disabilities.

The program currently employs 55 workers who clean up, brew coffee, set up chairs and tables and otherwise prepare and care for the space. These workers are people who not so long ago would have been widely considered unemployable due to their disabilities.

But as Extraordinary Ventures has shown, they are capable of working, of drawing a paycheck and gaining not only an income but the sense of self-worth, purpose and pride that comes from doing a job well. And some of the young folks who work at Extraordinary Ventures have been able to take the skills they've learned and the confidence they've built to jobs elsewhere.

The program builds skills and expands social opportunities, and more than anything it gives its participants something that many of them otherwise might find rare outside their own families: The knowledge that they are needed, productive and valued.