When Double 8 Foods stores closed across the city last year, many communities were left in the lurch, with few convenient options for finding fresh, affordable food. Local community empowerment organization Kheprw Institute (KI) wasted no time in looking for a fix.
“One of the things we’ve always done here is hold community conversations and provide space for discussions around critical issues,” said Imhotep Adisa, KI’s executive director. “So we launched a series around food. I think the week following the closing of Double 8, we had four or five conversations about the different elements of the food challenge.”
In that series of discussions, KI and community members explored the topic of alternative food sources, including an initiative called Fresh Stop, which brings community members together to purchase fresh produce from local farmers and gardeners at a wholesale price.
KI consulted with New Roots, an organization that operates at least nine Fresh Stops in the Louisville area, and Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, which has run its “Tab Fresh Stop” in Indianapolis for three years.
Sally John, who founded the Tab Fresh Stop, said she was inspired by her son Jeremy, who started two Fresh Stops in Washington, D.C.
“I thought they sounded really interesting, and I wanted to have my church do one,” John said.
She began by organizing a class at the church about food insecurity and food justice, to gauge interest in the project. Right away, people were on board.
The Tab Fresh Stop launched in summer of 2013 and has been ongoing for three seasons; a typical Fresh Stop season runs from early June to mid-November. The Tab Fresh Stop is held every three weeks on Saturday. For anyone who wants to participate, they can order their share through the church by Sunday night before the Fresh Stop.
“Because we have a big order, they give us a better price, and we sell our shares at $25 or $12, depending on your income level. Everybody gets the exact same thing,” John said. “We usually have about 30-some shares. We usually have about 10 or 15 different fruits and vegetables and sometimes fresh eggs…
“You get a really, really large amount of food, especially if you pay $12. But even with $25, you still get a good deal.”
On the Fresh Stop Saturday, people who ordered shares come to the church between 10–11 a.m. to pick up their order. John said the Tab Fresh Stop is about more than just stopping by to get your food — people also share recipes that can use the produce from the shares, and sometimes a cooked sample is available, usually of one of the most unusual or obscure vegetables.
“You have to be kind of a risk-taker. I have people tell me, ‘I don’t want to order Fresh Stop, because I don’t like all different vegetables. I don’t want anything to go to waste.’ But it’s a lot of fun to get this big bag of stuff and figure out what to do with it,” John said. “And I’ve eaten so many vegetables I never would have bought before. It’s just an excellent way to put more healthy food into your body.”
To make the shares even more affordable for low-income community members, the Fresh Stop accepts SNAP benefits. The Tab Fresh Stop has also qualified for a government subsidy program called Fresh Bucks.
“If you use your SNAP card, you can get your produce for half price,” John said. “For our last (Fresh Stop), seven of our shares were $6 instead of $12.”
After learning more about how Fresh Stop works, Adisa said KI decided to adopt the model.
“What really resonated with that particular model was its heavy emphasis on community engagement, some sense of self-reliance and self-determination, in addition to healthy food and providing distribution sources for local farmers, primarily, at least for Kheprw, the idea of residents empowering themselves to address an issue in the community,” Adisa said.
The KI version of Fresh Stop is called the Community Controlled Food Initiative (CCFI).
“It is modeled around the Fresh Stop initiative, but it’s a particular flavor we’re looking to launch that’s heavy on the idea that food and economy go hand in hand,” Adisa said. “At the end of the day, food access is fundamentally an economic issue more so than a food desert issue. If we can get our hands around the economy and increasing economic opportunities as we address the food issue, we believe this approach can address those two simultaneously.”
Adisa said the specific economic opportunities they hope to include with CCFI haven’t been built out yet, but could include aspects like hosting a market where neighborhood gardeners can distribute their crops to the community.
“We’re looking not only at food but how can we use bringing folks together and putting together some minimal infrastructure through our social capital that will allow folks to create economic opportunities,” he said.
Tysha Ahmad, who has been working with Adisa to organize the CCFI, said she envisions a community that’s willing to collaborate to solve its own food issues.
“I see one of the visions being able to pull in the community itself, because there are a lot of local gardeners in the area that do some gardening and would be more than willing to give away or sell their produce,” she said. “We have an issue of not having good, healthy food, which is something we share with a lot of different neighborhoods that are experiencing the same thing we’re experiencing. So why not fix that ourselves as opposed to having the city come down to try to figure it out?”
Mimi Zakem, another member of the KI team working on the CCFI launch, said community members could also have an opportunity to be involved in educating one another at KI’s monthly Good Food Feast event, which is held the second Saturday of the month at 4 p.m.
“That’s a place where we can educate about healthy food, but also when we have the (share) collection, we’ll prepare some of the food that’ll be in the share,” she said. “The important part is, it’s people in our community doing that education. I think there’s a lot to be said for that model of educating one another and ourselves. It goes along with the whole community-controlled model.”
KI hopes to officially launch the CCFI in June. In the meantime, it’s already collected hundreds of dollars in share orders, which Adisa said demonstrates the community’s enthusiasm for the initiative.
Zakem said she’s noticed community members seem eager to participate.
“People who’ve heard about it sometimes just come in to ask about it,” Zakem said. “Once people get the word, they want to be involved.”
Ahmad said the group is currently working on contacting farmers to see who is interested in participating in CCFI.
“We’re tracking them down, calling them, emailing them. Once farmers markets start up, we’ll be hitting the ground there to get more contacts,” she said.
Adisa said he hopes the CCFI can serve as a model to others in the community who will then create similar initiatives in their own neighborhoods.
“If we can be of assistance in that effort, we stand ready to do so,” he said.
Adisa said the CCFI will address food access and so-called food deserts, but the larger issue — poverty — will still loom.
“I struggle with the term food desert. Often food desert is a term that can be used to leverage economic resources that either intentionally or unintentionally support gentrification,” he said. “I always say I live in an economic desert, not a food desert. If you solve the economic problem, you solve at least the food access problem. Fundamentally, food access and healthy foods is, at the end of the day, a question of poverty…
“So endgame for me is how do we eliminate or reduce economic challenges that exist in communities that are fundamentally called food deserts and are too often dominated by people of color who are economically challenged.”
To contribute produce, purchase shares or learn more information about the Kheprw Institute’s Community Controlled Food Initiative, email food@kheprw.org, visit ccfi.kheprw.org or call (317) 329-4803. For more information about the Tab Fresh Stop, visit freshstop.org/Tab.
