We’ve all seen the stacks of pasta, sugary cereal and apple sauce in the food donation bins, but does it have to always be that way?
Part of the City of Boise’s plan to spend its American Rescue Plan Act funds is to put $150,000 toward building a new sustainable food system to better distribute locally grown fruits, vegetables and meats to low-income residents in need. The idea is to create a “hub and spoke” system where one nonprofit could make connections between farmers growing products and the community organizations distributing it so more hungry people can have access to more products.
Earlier this month, the Boise City Council moved to allocate the first part of its ARPA grant to the nonprofit City of Good, which is working in partnership with the Boise Farmers Market and the Idaho Botanical Garden. The organization, which launched as COVID-19 first hit, will spend the next few months planning their distribution system and then once they have a plan together it will be submitted to the City of Boise for approval in the fall of 2023. From there, it could receive more funding to implement the plan, but specifics are not available at this time.
The system could include things like a new permanent home for a farmers market at the Idaho Botanical Gardens, cold storage to keep fresh food from being wasted, refrigerated delivery vans and resources to bring a wide range of culturally appropriate food to refugee families and others who may not be comfortable with typical American products found in most food pantries.
“There was no one organization looking at the whole of the landscape and making the connections and creating opportunities like ‘hey I know we have a farmer over here and hey I know we have the need over here, let’s be the conduit and connect the entity getting the food out with the person who is growing it’,” Boise’s Strategic Initiatives Manager Chloe Ross said. “City of Good has been doing that to a certain extent already but never at this scale.”
City of Good launched as Idaho’s restaurants and major farmers markets were shuttering due to COVID-19 in March 2020.
Britt Udesen, City of Good’s executive director, said the nonprofit started as a way to ensure healthy food was still able to feed people at a time when many people were getting furloughed or losing their jobs due to the spreading virus. The organization’s first project was to help create the drive-through format for the Boise Farmer’s Market where customers could make orders online for their favorite locally grown products and pick them up in their car on Saturday mornings.
City of Good purchased the computer software to recruit and manage volunteers for the market and still maintains the system, but Udesen said the Boise Farmers Market was responsible for the “herculean” effort it took to launch the drive-through market.
The group also hired local restaurants to make meals for Boiseans facing food insecurity. But, now that things reopened to their full extent after vaccinations became available, the organization has pivoted to healthy food access and food insecurity in a different way. Udesen says the group has delivered food to families at Interfaith Sanctuary, community school pantries and the elderly. They’ve delivered more than 85,000 meals and several tons of fresh produce.
For the next six months, her team will be focused on doing a community needs assessment and determining what the grant funds should be spent on to build out their distribution system.
“We’ll be partnering with other partner organizations to do a community needs assessment to understand where the gaps are, where the strengths are and how this food can support that,” Udesen said. “I’m even more excited about the fact that we have the time and resources to research what that best looks like.”
Details are still being worked out, but the grant will generally fund a portion of 1,600 square foot building next to the Boise Farmers Market’s permanent home at the Idaho Botanical Gardens for a mobile market, refrigerated distribution vans, cold storage and a facility to process food before it goes out for distribution.
Clarification: An earlier version of this story had imprecise information about the food hub grant and City of Good’s work on the drive-through market and new permanent market. It has been corrected to reflect that the grant is $150,000 for planning initiatives and there is no guarantee of more funding, City of Good was responsible for the drive-through market’s software and the grant will only fund part of a building at the new permanent market home.
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