DC Food Not Bombs is an adhocratic group that shares vegan and vegetarian meals to promote healthy eating, peace, non-violence, community, and the reduction of waste in our economies. Barrett Jones made this short video of some of the behind-the-scenes preparation and serving.
[Cross posted to DC Food Not Bombs]
Read the rest of this entry »In the face of our current economic downturn, as funding streams from foundations, corporations, and governments grow weaker, the question many non-profit organizations are asking is: how else can we generate revenue to support our mission?
In the traditional models, non-profits provided services to the community while businesses focused solely on maximizing profit — and then donated a percentage back to non-profit organizations of their choice. As a new generation of entrepreneurs emerge, social enterprise blurs the line between profit and social mission. For-profits are becoming more socially and environmentally conscious and non-profits are becoming less dependent on grants by generating revenue to support their social mission.
I walk in both the for-profit and non-profit worlds and see the benefits that each sector brings to social enterprise. In this social enterprise blog series, I’ll share examples of those who are reinventing business and social mission into this third sector. My first example describes how a non-profit organization and a for-profit business collaborate to leverage their strengths and financial sustainability.
Let’s Eat Pie!
Pie Ranch and Mission Pie share several commonalities: a devotion to pie, a founding member, a mission that includes youth education, and sustainable food production. Yet they were individually conceived and launched, and they succeed with different legal structures. Their autonomy and clarity of purpose is a critical element in framing their collaboration, and their differences yield some unique synergy where their missions overlap.
Pie Ranch is a non-profit farm that sits on two 14-acre triangular pieces of land along the central California coast. It offers a sustainable working farm and a food system education to urban and rural high school students and community members, mentors young adult farmers and marketing apprentices, and catalyzes strategic land use collaboration to maintain a healthy and vibrant agriculture in the region.
Mission Pie is a for-profit pie shop located in the Mission District of San Francisco. This women-owned business is committed to local sourcing, at-risk youth training for work readiness, and eco-consciousness in their café and operations.
Read the rest of this entry »
In a previous post, we explored a new Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program that helps low-income mothers buy more fresh produce at farmers markets. The new coupons are known as WIC Fruit and Vegetable Cash Value Vouchers, or FVC. This second post in the series looks at benefits of a similar nutrition assistance program already in place–the WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP)–and yet more stumbling blocks in implementation of such programs.
First, the good news.
According to a report by the Community Food Security Coalition based on USDA numbers, 2.3 million WIC participants received farmers market benefits in 2008, spending about $20 million. During that year, 16,016 farmers and 3,367 farmers markets were authorized to accept FMNP coupons. The USDA awarded grants to each state, amounting to $301,302 for D.C. in 2009, while Maryland received $341,338 (Virginia received $291,212 in 2008, but declined to participate last year).
Also according to the report, evaluation of the program in Washington state showed that WIC recipients who used vouchers increased their knowledge and consumption of fruits and vegetables, and planned to keep coming to farmers markets in the future. Several D.C.-area markets–including the Crossroads market in Takoma Park and three of the markets run by FRESHFARM Markets–established very popular grant-funded “double dollar” programs, which matched the value of vouchers, increasing shoppers’ buying power and farmers’ income.
This works out for everyone–at least until bureaucracy or lack of participation get in the way.
Liz Falk, the former manager of WIC and food stamp programs for FRESHFARM Markets, says she saw very little in the way of advertising for the WIC FMNP. D.C.’s WIC administrators and the Department of Health could not — or would not — devote much funding to develop and distribute marketing materials, and different agencies were reluctant even to add each others’ information to existing materials. The situation will likely hold true for the FVC program.
More worrisome still: Falk says that “red tape is covering so much of what’s possible with these programs.”
The program’s certification process itself is problematic. As our first post mentioned, D.C. offers just one training for farmers who want to participate in the WIC FMNP, Senior FMNP, and FVC programs. (It’s set for this Wednesday, March 10 in Greenbelt, MD, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.)
By contrast Maryland offers multiple trainings on 13 different dates in Greenbelt, Annapolis, Hagerstown, Baltimore, and Denton. Each lasts an hour–from 10 to 11 a.m. or 1 to 2 p.m.
Read the rest of this entry »
The future Columbia Heights Community Marketplace is developing fast! Farmers are lining up with local, healthful food, arts and entertainment schedules are getting laid out for the season, and residents are continuing to step up and offer ideas to make the market a diverse event. (For previous posts about the market, see here and here). As the June 5th grand opening approaches, we now are turning our attention to advertising and making sure that all of DC knows about this exciting addition to the NW community.
That’s where our local artists come in! We need a logo for the market that will be printed on sandwich boards, lamp post signs, canvas bags, t-shirts, and market stall banners. If you’re an artist, know an artist, or just want to give it a shot, please submit a logo design! The logo should have the text “Columbia Heights Community Marketplace,” but the rest is up to you. Keep in mind that the market will be a diverse community event that will incorporate not only fresh, local food, but also music, dance, youth outreach programs, and community services.
Please send your logo design to CHCommunityMarketplace@gmail.com as soon as possible. Submissions will be accepted through Tuesday, March 16th. HOWEVER, we are on a tight time schedule, so please send them in as soon as you can! We look forward to seeing all your ideas.
Read the rest of this entry »
Most days, clients of Bread for the City’s pantry take a number, wait their turn, and receive a standard bag of pre-packaged groceries. These bags are carefully balanced to provide a rounded set of food items – canned fruit and vegetables, a packet of rice, a meat item, etc, in proportion with the size of a client’s family. Recently, however, we started to change things up a bit.
In the past few years, as part of our mission to serve and care for people in an atmosphere of dignity and respect, we’ve overhauled our pantry menu to feature an array of more nutritious items. The results of that Nutrition Initiative were really positive: healthier diets and higher client satisfaction.
Now we are experimenting with pantry innovation once again: exploring opportunities to enable client choice in our pantry menu. We envision a food pantry in which people can select which food they bring home, just like they would at a grocery store.
To be sure, this would be a logistical challenge. But there’s quite a few reasons why client choice would be an effective process. For one, Bread for the City is not the only source of food for our clients; many clients may already have sufficient amounts of certain kinds of food, but may be 
in greater need of others. Some of our clients have special dietary needs that make certain foods especially important, and others not helpful at all. And most of all, as our nutrition consultant Sharon Gruber says: “one of the things that is most debilitating about a low-income lifestyle is a lack of control, and food is one of the most basic things that we can or cannot control in our lives.”
Over the last two years of leading service projects in Washington DC, I have volunteered with several soup kitchens and homeless shelters. I respect and admire the work these organizations do. They help some of our most forgotten citizens.
One thing I love about some of these organizations is that they do great work rescuing unwanted food. For example, last year Bread for the City started its Glean for the City program, which gathers vegetables from local farms — all for free. And one of the better known examples of food-reclamation in the country was founded here in DC in 1989 — the DC Central Kitchen started off making meals for the homeless from the leftovers from the Presidential Inauguration festivals. These days, they rescue more than 600,000 pounds of food a year.
But in some cases at several service organizations, I see a large amount of food waste ends up in the trash. I often wonder: Can these organizations compost? Is there a way to ‘close the loop’ on this process, to give back to fields that produce the food? In response to these questions I raised to the DCFoodforAll Google Group, representatives from the Common Good City Farm, located near Howard University, say that the farm will start accepting compost from community members.
This may be just the start of a series of such community composting opportunities.
Read the rest of this entry »Beet Street Gardens is a demonstration project combining two of my greatest passions—community gardening and harm reduction. The basic model of Beet Street is to bring gardens to social service organizations which work with marginalized adults, teens, and their families.
Read the rest of this entry »[UPDATE from our friends at Common Good: The Council has explicitly APPROVED the funding reprogramming for the Park at Gage Eckington. So we are back on track! ~Thomas appears to have changed his position, with Graham's encouragement.]
Common Good City Farm – featured often here on the DC Food For All, a key locus of the local urban agriculture movement – is located on a 3-acre site where the Gage-Eckington School once stood. For over two years the communities of LeDroit Park, Bloomingdale and Eckington have worked with the Mayor and his offices to make sure the site turns into a public community park space. It has been a true grassroots effort, with many people pitching in to overcome challenges and build a community center for health, recreation, and education.
Today it faces another challenge.
This morning, the community discovered that Councilmember Harry Thomas (Ward 5) added an item to the DC Council agenda to “Disapprove” of the funds for the park being as planned allocated to the Mayor’s office.
Such a resolution would essentially stall progress on the development of this site and support for Common Good City Farm. This action is in baffling contrast to Thomas’s own previous declarations — such as an assurance that he wrote to constituents, stating that he “I will continue to support a contract process that moves this project forward and ensures its completion.”
Please help Common Good City Farm and all of our neighbors. As soon as you can, please write to or call the office of Harry Thomas, Committee on Libraries, Parks & Recreation (hthomas@dccouncil.us (202) 724-8028) (or the other committee members listed below).
Declare your support for the Gage-Eckington park development, and your opposition to Thomas’s resolution. Assure our leaders that we will hold them responsible for obstruction of positive community development such as this.
Committee Members:
David A. Catania dcatania@dccouncil.us (202) 724-7772
Kwame R. Brown kbrown@dccouncil.us (202) 724-8174
Phil Mendelson pmendelson@dccouncil.us (202) 724-8064
Yvette Alexander yalexander@dccouncil.us (202) 724-8068
After 9/11 we were told that if we had only connected the dots, we might have stopped the attacks. If we had assembled the fragments of information we had, we would have put together a picture. The same is true in understanding poverty. We have to connect the dots among disparate problems faced by struggling families, problems that may not seem related, yet interact and reinforce and magnify one another.
So the concept of BRIDGE, to map the social services available in the Washington area, may give both providers and individuals a way of connecting the dots, of navigating among the varied agencies to address disparate problems. It can provide a gateway into the multiple forms of assistance that many families need.
-David ShiplerPulitzer Prize Winning Author of The Working Poor
From food pantries and meal programs, to shelters, job training, health services, arts and recreation programs, community gardens, and overall case management, a wealth of non-profit organizations and service providers exist to serve DC citizens in need. But a disconnect often exists between knowledge and access to many of these invaluable services. The BRIDGE (Bridging Resources in D.C. to Guide and Educate) guidebook, a pocket-sized publication created by students in The George Washington University’s Human Services program, seeks to “bridge” these gaps between availability and access to the valuable social services throughout the district.
The BRIDGE guidebook, featuring 64 pages of information about over 550 social service sites throughout the District, is now available for service providers and individuals throughout the District of Columbia.
Read the rest of this entry »