Robin Mallery

For those of us who are active in the nonprofit world, that familiar phrase is one way to define the phases of outreach, programming, and community impact. The majority of the work we do in the Food Justice sphere will fall under either a Relief, Rehabilitation, or Restoration umbrella.

The old adage “Give a man a fish…” is the perfect segue to a discussion of The Three Rs, through the Urban Seeds lens.

Our 19-week cooked-from-scratch meal share initiative, begun at the onset of Covid, is a marvelous example of a Relief effort. We saw a need to provide fresh, nutrient-dense meals to children and their families in our community to compliment the foods that were being provided by other agencies and organizations. While we have offered numerous cooking demonstrations and food samplings over the years (which is an example of rehabilitation), we had not undertaken sharing full meals…Read more here

In America’s farming community a 2012 Agriculture Census found that 8 percent of American farmers are minorities; of this 8 percent, less than 3 percent are African Americans. The history of these farmers is long and vibrant.

The Indiana Black Farmers Co-Op is an organization that unites Indiana’s Black farmers in their mission to improve the community through engaging youth, fostering community, and improving food access in the areas that are in need of it. The Co-Op’s members sell their products at the Indiana Black Farmer’s Market in Indianapolis and collaborate to ensure a wide variety of products are available.

Here in Southern Indiana is Lyles Station; one of the last remaining African American settlements in the state. It serves to preserve the heritage of this early 1800’s settlement with it’s museum, programs, and tours. Among it’s history is a tradition of agriculture which remains today.

On the national level is The National Black Farmers Association which represents African American farmers and their families in the United States. It’s education and advocacy have focused on civil rights, land retention, access to resources, agricultural training, and rural economic development.

These groups and the farming communities working alongside them are driving towards the betterment of our agriculture systems, the education of our communities, and improving the connections between farmers and those they serve. In preserving their heritage it carries their legacy into the future.

Urban Seeds is the lead organization for Nourish, Community Food Buying Club (CFBC). Thanks to a generous grant from Welborn Baptist Foundation, we are able to collaborate with several community partners to initiate this project with the goal of diminishing nutrient-insecurity in the Evansville area. The CFBC has two key strategies:

• To provide nutrient dense staple foods via an online shopping platform at prices that will be, on average, 40% lower than big-box shopping, and
• To facilitate an educational series that will empower families to cook nourishing and culturally familiar meals at home.

There is a delicate balance between the importance of filling empty bellies and that of embracing our moral obligation to fill those empty bellies with foods that nourish–as opposed to deplete–our health and well-being. Families living with nutrient-insecurity are often relegated to the lowest nutritional value foods due to the low cost of those foods. Unfortunately, those foods happen to be highly processed with additives and chemicals, some of which are linked to diminished learning capacity and behavior challenges in children, as well as being associated with chronic disease states later in life, such as obesity and diabetes.

The goal of the Nourish is to increase access to more of the high nutritional value foods, more whole in their nature and lower in processing, to truly nourish the children in our community so that they may grow into our next generation’s leaders. As important is our embrace of building trusting relationships with our members so that they will be responsive to resilience-building and restorative behavior change leading to regular family meals, cooked fresh.

Nourish will increase access to nourishing food for our members by providing nutrient-dense foods at wholesale prices.

• Members will use an online procurement platform to order perishable and non-perishable foods. Ordering will close on the 1^st and 3^rd Thursdays of each month at 5 PM. Food items will be delivered to Trinity United Methodist Church at 216 SE Third St, Evansville IN 47713 on the 2^nd and 4th Tuesdays of each month at 10 AM.

• Upon delivery by CRS OneSource, the food items will be aggregated into temperature-controlled bags and/or boxes per each family’s order.

• Tri-State Food Bank will pick up the family-specific ordered bags and boxes at 2 PM to deliver to our two receiving sites – Ivy Tech and Dream Center, where members will then pick up their individual family order. (Addendum: with Covid, and the closure of both the Dream Center and Ivy Tech, groceries will be delivered to the front doorstep of our member’s homes)

• Nutrition classes and cooking demonstrations will be provided on the 1^st and 3^rd Thursdays of the month, to coincide with the ordering closure and rendering of payment for orders. Class attendance will be incentivized with points being awarded; these points will be redeemable for kitchen tools, with a quarterly drawing for more points providing the opportunity to redeem for small kitchen appliances such as a blender, insta-pot, pots, and pans. (Addendum: with Covid, in-person education classes and shared food tastings have stopped for now; online resources have been made available via our members only FaceBook page and in emails, as well as printed/included in grocery orders.) UPDATE: Partnering with the Nutrition Services and Dietetics program at USI, we will soon have specific videos for each of the class topics developed after careful focus group information gathering, made available on the Nourish YouTube platform.

• Following nutrition guidelines and SNAP staple food requirements, the following foods will be ordered in bulk and stored on site; shelves for the dried goods and refrigerator and freezer for the perishable items.

• • Legumes & grains
  • Pasta, bread, flour
  • Fresh, frozen, and canned produce
  • Meat, mostly frozen but some fresh
  • Eggs
  • Cheese
  • Various dairy produce to include milk, yogurt, sour cream, butter
  • Baking ingredients to include flour, sugar, yeast, corn meal
  • Condiments & sauces
  • Dried herbs & spices

• Staffing
  • The Nourish program coordinator is a 12-hour a week position. The coordinator will be on site for the entirety of the 10 AM – 2 PM shift on the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesdays of the month
  • Volunteers will be on site during the food aggregation days with no more that 5 adults present at any given time, under the supervision of the staff
  • A ServSafe-certified Food Handler will be on site at all time during the delivery, sorting, and aggregation of food
  • The site is not open to the public

• Partners
  • Welborn Baptist Foundation is providing the grant funding for Nourish
  • Deaconess Health Care is providing the access to their food procurement wholesale pricing
  • Trinity United Methodist Church is providing the kitchen space with required grease trap for food aggregation and storage
  • Urban Seeds is the fiscal agent and will provide administrative oversight to all aspects of Nourish
  • Tri-State Food Bank will pick up the aggregated food bags/boxes to deliver to two sites (Addendum: with Covid, this aspect is on hold for now)
  • Purdue Extension is providing RD’s to teach some of the educational classes (Addendum: with Covid, this aspect is on hold for now)
  • YMCA is providing use of their kitchen for some of the cooking demonstrations, and is providing child care for parents while they are in class (Addendum: with Covid, this aspect is on hold for now)
  • Healthy Communities Partnership and the Promise Zone are acting in an Advisory Board capacity

Nourish is a collaborative community project, managed by Urban Seeds

www.urbanseeds.org

urbanseeds.org@gmail.com

(530) 263-4827

5444 E. Indiana St., #353 Evansville, IN 47715

Read our Fall Newsletter!

Join Us on October 24th, 2019 from 3:00-6:00 pm for the Second Annual World Food Day event!  This free event will be held at Trinity United Methodist Church in Evansville.

Creating a vibrant local foods system – a system in which nourishing food is accessible by everyone in our community – is an ambitious and important goal. A thriving local foods system includes one or all of these opportunities:

~Supporting and purchasing from local farmers and food producers whenever possible.

~Providing education, in a culturally sensitive manner, so our community members understand the benefits of eating nourishing food, as well as the teaching of shopping and cooking skills.

~Growing outreach programs so that no child, or their family, is food-insecure by highlighting government support of food access for all.

~Pooling of food purchase resources for cost-effectiveness.

~Volunteering with a nonprofit or organization that engages in food justice and food access activities, and learning more about our own local foods system in the Evansville area.

When we support our children and their families with the availability of foods that provide the building blocks for healthy bodies and engaged minds, we are all contributing to a strong community.

Food Day is an international celebration of and movement toward more healthy, affordable, and stainable foods systems. Created by the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Day aims to bring us closer to a food system of access to “real food” that is produced with care for the environment and the animals that are part of our food chain, and the women and men who grow and harvest our food.

Our goal for the Evansville World Food Day is to educate our Evansville area community about how they can be part of a vibrant local foods system by highlighting where, who, and how our food is grown in the Tristate. We want the community to know that nourishing food is available in our area, and we want them to know of the resources available for increasing their knowledge for shopping, cooking, and enjoying nourishing foods.

If your organization or business would like to participate in this free event please email or phone with any questions you might have to Urban Seeds at 812-430-4180 or urbanseeds.org@gmail.com.

The deadline for submitting your application is Monday October 15th, 2019.

Food justice is the belief that healthy food is a human right; so everyone has an inherent right to access nourishing, fresh food. Access considerations are a mixture of location, affordability, and cultural appropriateness. Food justice affects all of us because food is so deeply tied to our culture. We build community around food; it’s a way we share our love. Being able to enjoy and prepare food that actually nourishes the body and keeps us healthy is connected to our ability to thrive.

When we think of access to food, location might not be something we view as a barrier. For so many of us we enjoy the privilege of being able to drive a vehicle to a store we choose to obtain the food we need. Take away access to this vehicle and how would you navigate your way to get these groceries? If we are lucky we have a grocery store within walking distance and the physical ability to not only walk there but to carry groceries back to our home. Let’s say we don’t have a store within walking distance (as about half of Evansville residents don’t), now how are we going to get to the store? Let’s say we take the city bus. We now have to plan for the time the trip will take as well as, again, carrying our groceries back to our home by hand. Add having to bring children along with you if you are unable to access child care and this can become a daunting task. Now imagine having to do this about twice a month to get the food you need.

Affordability can be a monumental barrier in accessing nourishing food. In the previous discussion of location, the majority of avenues to get to a place that will have the groceries we want all have a cost associated with them. Assuming walking isn’t a reasonable option, the most convenient mode of travel is overall also the most expensive (personal vehicle). Other convenient options such as a taxi or Uber add up in cost, and if you are working under the constraints of a tight budget, that budget just got even tighter. Additionally, there is the obvious cost of the food itself. Too often the least expensive items are highly processed foods of low nutritional value. This presents a very obvious challenge when we are trying to feed a family on a budget. If the healthier, more nourishing items are financially out of our reach then we must nourish ourselves with foods that are devoid of much nutrition. This sets our bodies and psyche up for feelings of deprivation which may lead to chronic disease, or hopelessness as we then try to fill up with more of the same kinds of foods. It’s easy to see how this cycles continues over and over.

Cultural appropriateness as it relates to food is more nuanced. One aspect of food justice is to provide the avenues that allow us to feed our families with dignity. This means that the food I am familiar with, enjoy eating, and know how to prepare may not look the same as yours. If I provide you with a giant box of lovely, nourishing foods that you have never seen before, my good intentions fall flat. Not only are you not familiar with how to prepare these unfamiliar foods but perhaps nobody in your family will enjoy eating them. Different ethnic communities and cultural backgrounds eat different foods. This is more than just health, this is culture. We should all be able to maintain our great grandmother’s special dish or be able to prepare that dish that our dad always made for us, and we loved. These are things that should not be trifled with and need to be protected.

If you would like to find a way to help improve food justice there is much you can do. Choose a community you want to be part of; whether it is supporting a non-profit like Urban Seeds, a community garden, a faith-based group, or a food policy council. Choose the avenue that calls to you to engage with others working toward systemic change. Getting out there and participating in the discussion is vital.