Urban Seeds is the lead organization for Nourish, Community Food Buying Club (nourishevv.org). Thanks to a generous 2019 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. Nourish 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.
• More recently, we have been granted additional funds to ease the transition in the year of Covid from Relief to Recovery, with the longer-term goal of our community’s settling into Restoration/Resilience. Our 2021-22 themed grocery boxes will be underwritten at 50% to further make nourishing food available to the children and families in our community.

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. Read more, here.