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This article is part of Black Food Sovereignty: Stories from the Field , a series co-produced by Frontline Solutions and NPQ. This series features stories from a group of Black food sovereignty leaders who are working to transform the food system at the local level. How can a community reduce food insecurity?
Image credit: Steve Dubb Food is the cover story. Malik Kenyatta Yakini, Up & Coming Food Co-op C onference panel September 15, 2023 There is a wave of food co-ops opening in majority-Black communities, as NPQ has covered. But organizing a food co-op is not easy. The real story is Black self-determination.
In the series, urban and rural grassroots leaders from across the United States share how their communities are developing and implementing strategies—grounded in local places, cultures, and histories—to shift power and achieve systemic change. Over the years, I’ve seen corporate food giants pack up and leave our neighborhoods.
Image credit: Getty Images on Unsplash Consider a food bank discovering that its operating reserves are in banks that finance industrial agriculture, the very system contributing to food insecurity and displacing small community farms. Second, educate the staff and board. Its slow, but it works.
Image Credit: Oladimeji Odunsi on unsplash.com How do you support development across the food system in a way that builds community ownership and power for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities? This is a question that a group of food system activists of color have come together to address.
And, as in so many other cities, Louisville’s predominantly Black neighborhoods are subject to food apartheid. Downtown grocery stores have recently disappeared, exacerbating food apartheid: between 2016 and 2018, five grocery stores in Louisville’s urban core closed. Some of these projects were top-down in conception and execution.
Just as Hemstreets community built Opportunity Threads, Reverend Dr. Pastor Heber Brown organized within his community of Black parishioners in Baltimore to help form the Black Church Food Security Network. Like Hemstreet, Pastor Brown just got started, and worked to build community. million children.
Today, our communities face multiple challengesranging from accelerating climate change to growing income inequality, from refugee crises to housing crises, and from basic food access to self-serving financial systems. Instead, public banks partner with local banks to expand community-driven impacts.
Image credit: Ian Nicole Reambonanza on Unsplash This is the fourth article in NPQ ’s series titled Building Power, Fighting Displacement: Stories from Asian Pacific America, coproduced with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American CommunityDevelopment ( National CAPACD ). How does a refugee community organize itself?
Create community. Develop a community. Some organizations participating in Give Local America, like Infinite Hands Initiative and the East Hampton Food Pantry , use flyers and other print materials. People want to support you. You just have to be, as Gail Perry says, “ cheerfully aggressive ” about asking. Go old school.
This reliance on external drivers did not sit comfortably with Neugebauer, whose background is in communitydevelopment and social innovation. Bringing in money and resources to organizations is a really important thing to do, but we miss this opportunity to build a foundation of civic and community engagement, she told NPQ.
Image credit: Drew Katz Black Bostonian communities citywide have more than just something to say for themselves: their economies are building institutions that prioritize asset-based communitydevelopment and are creating the foundations for a local solidarity economy.
Volunteers comprise one-third of the nonprofit workforce ; voluntary human capital plays a critical role in delivering essential local services such as food security, disaster response, and youth mentorship. Advocate: Emphasize the vital role of volunteering in driving broader societal change and communitydevelopment.
This article concludes Black Food Sovereignty: Stories from the Field , a series that has been co-produced by Frontline Solutions and NPQ. This series features stories from a group of Black food sovereignty leaders who are working to transform the food system at the local level.
Image credit: TuiPhotoengineer on istock.com This is the fifth and final article in NPQ ’s series titled Building Power, Fighting Displacement: Stories from Asian Pacific America , coproduced with the National Coalition for Asian Pacific American CommunityDevelopment ( National CAPACD ).
A salient example is of organizations that are focused on communitydevelopment but invest in mass incarceration. For example, when GirlVentures , an outdoor girl and gender non-conforming education adventure program, moved to Oakland, CA, they looked for a local bank with social responsibility as part of its mission.
Goodmon and community groups quickly realized that the plans, while increasing housing availability, were also actively undermining housing affordability; they needed to organize a response. Out of those sessions, one clear realization emerged: “We need to do something if we want to have a Black Los Angeles.” The plan was ambitious.
Coproduced by Partners for Rural Transformation , a coalition of six regional communitydevelopment financial institutions, and NPQ , authors highlight efforts to address multi-generational poverty in Appalachia, the rural West, Indian Country, South Texas, and the Mississippi Delta.
For years, I have directed IFF , a communitydevelopment financial institution that specializes in nonprofit facilities lending. A Hierarchy of Nonprofit Facilities’ Needs After 30 years in communitydevelopment, I have come to think of nonprofit facilities as existing on a continuum of need.
Most practitioners working in communitydevelopment have accepted this as the reality of impact investing: The harder you drive for social impact in disadvantaged communities, the farther away you get from unbuffered full market return.
But to build cooperative intelligence, cooperative education needs to start at a much earlier age. Such, at least, is the thesis of work I’ve been involved in to create a cooperative education curriculum at the high school level in the Bronx. In Dare the School Build a New Social Order? ,
Like Clarke, I believe that Black communities must work toward owning and controlling the institutions that produce and manage our food, telecommunications, and other vital functions. Relying on institutions outside Black communities perpetuates the structure of colonial subjugation and subordination. But cash is insufficient.
The diffusion of new and innovative models of community-owned commercial real estate is enhancing resident power and self-determination. Another area of rapid growth is Black-led food cooperatives, which are forming across the country, including in Dayton , OH; Detroit, MI; and the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester.
In towns like Big Sandy, nonprofits like our health centers, food pantries, and Rotary clubs are a big part of the fabric of our communities. I currently sit on the board of the Montana Council on Economic Education. I currently sit on the board of the Montana Financial Education Coalition.
Image Credit: Abe Camacho on unsplash.com This article introduces a new NPQ series, Owning the Economy: Stories from Latinx Communities. Latinx and other immigrant community commercial corridors allow residents to access foods and products native to their country of origin and, therefore, help preserve their cultural identity.
Jerry Johnson , interim director of the Rural Education Institute at East Carolina University, got a two-year American Rescue Plan grant to promote and practice community-based democracy. A key activity was holding monthly potlucks to build trust among community members. Programs would come later.
Nelson Colón of the Puerto Rico Community Foundation, and Clara Miller, president emerita of the Heron Foundation—come from philanthropy. In a massive charitable response, vast networks of locally supported food pantries, coat drives, homeless shelters, community clinics, and free schools have been launched and sustained.
For example, we followed a team of founders who were committed to supporting “cottage” food entrepreneurs—mostly women of color who had excellent cooking skills but lacked business skills and ready access to fresh ingredients and licensed kitchens. Neighborhood book clubs were repurposed as platforms with which to educate pet owners.
Lawmakers of both parties seeking earmarks for nonprofits in their districts turned to the T-HUD funding program this year after earmarks were banned from House funding proposals for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services (HHS), and Education last year. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT3).
Image Credit: Daniel Xavier on pexels This is the fourth article in NPQ ’s series titled Owning the Economy: Stories from Latinx Communities. How does a small Latinx community organize itself to support homegrown businesses? Looking to expand and develop a permanent storefront, they participated in the food business course.
Through CSR initiatives, companies aim to give back to society by addressing various issues such as sustainability, communitydevelopment, employee welfare, ethical business practices, and philanthropic involvement. by donating food, funds, and resources to local food banks.
Neighborhood Initiativ e, a community-led housing and land trust in Boston. And we’ll also hear from Amaha Selassie of Gem City , a food cooperative in Dayton, Ohio. 00:01:38] We’ll be hearing from Minnie McMahon of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, a community-led Housing and land trust in Boston.
To participate, community members can purchase an ownership share in the enterprise, contingent on completing an eight-hour financial education course. This farm supports 20 immigrant and refugee farmers and emerging food entrepreneurs. Instead, earnings are generated by the trust itself.
From food banks to homeless shelters, nonprofit service organizations are the driving forces behind building better communities. They do the admirable and time-intensive work that makes our communities a better place to live, and technology plays an undeniable role in that. About the Author.
In August 2024, the Global Mercy, the world’s largest civilian hospital ship, docked at the port of Freetown for a 10-month field service to provide surgical operations and educational training by invitation of the government of Sierra Leone. Photo courtesy of Jody Ray. Building a good relationship with our partners is key to success.
The Ongoing Costs of Colonialism It is, of course, no secret that even as Native American communities make gains, the ongoing effects of US colonialism are enormousespecially, the report emphasizes, dehumanization, invisibility, and erasure of Native peoples. The US education system is a primary culprit. The effects are manifold.
4 Once on Prospect, I was awash in a sea of excitement and activity as over 150 residents, labor activists, students, and onlookers buzzed about, handing out food and water, playing with young children, stewarding informational tables, dancing to the music, and finishing a massive art project that immediately drew my attention.
Enter communitydevelopment financial institutions (CDFIs). Health and educational disparities, food insecurity, broadband inaccessibility, and deteriorating infrastructure are among the urgent challenges facing rural communities.
Fast forward to my family’s move to Portugal, where my mother was born, then to the United States, where, in 1998, I found a job with the Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) as an education and outreach coordinator. Connecticut and Delaware have also created similar community-rooted collaboratives. Preliminary Signs of Success.
KA: I had a good education in that movement about cooperatives. How do we do development? It was something that I knew existed, but I didn’t know how dependent I was on it until I got to college and started to pay my own food bills. SD: What led you to adopt cooperatives in particular as a strategy?
It was a smaller autonomous school called the School of Social Justice and CommunityDevelopment. But at a certain point, Akuno realized that his education work was not effectively challenging relationships of power. I am an educator. We had to educate them. As Akuno put it, I am bringing in 110 kids.
“In cities like Richmond, California, and Boston, Massachusetts, which had experienced ‘food apartheid,’ the need for locally grown, healthy food supported the rise of urban farms that employed returning citizens. And over time, instead of starting new foundations, wealth was given over to democratic loan funds to redistribute.
Black Americans especially have faced pervasive discrimination in education, the workforce, and the ability to build wealth through property ownership. The number of people going hungry increased from 35 million in 2019 to 50 million in 2020, overwhelming food banks around the country. That’s not what happened, of course.
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