Brahm’s Blog

As of January 1, 2010 People’s Grocery ended its farming efforts at the Sunol Agricultural Park. We decided to stop farming in Sunol so that People’s Grocery could pursue new opportunities in Oakland that have emerged since we began farming in Sunol in 2006. These new opportunities will enable People’s Grocery to have a stronger presence in West Oakland and to engage West Oakland residents more deeply in our urban agricultural work.

While farming in Sunol was a critical step in building our experience and capacity to grow healthy produce, the farm was too far away from Oakland to be able to regularly engage local residents in our work as volunteers and participants in larger numbers. Additionally, People’s Grocery’s long term goal in urban agriculture is to build local capacity within or near West Oakland for fresh food production. We now have the opportunity to focus more locally and build on the experience and track record we got while farming in Sunol to achieve this goal.

People’s Grocery is very appreciative to the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) and SAGE for providing us with the opportunity to be a part of the Sunol Agriculture Park. These two agencies brought lots of vision to what the Sunol Agriculture Park could become and worked hard to make it a reality. Without a doubt, People’s Grocery couldn’t have had a farm without the support and partnership of the SFPUC and SAGE. We also want to thank the farmer partners at the Sunol Agriculture Park: Baia Nicchia, Iu-Mien Village Farms and Terra Bella Family Farm. We had a blast working and collaborating with all of these groups and wish them all great success in their continued endeavors.

People’s Grocery is now in the process of developing two new urban farm sites in West Oakland. The first is at the historic California Hotel, where we have formed an agreement with the Eviction Defense Center to establish a greenhouse and community garden and to outreach to the residents of the California Hotel. Click here to read more about the California Hotel and our efforts to turn it into a model site in West Oakland.

The second site we are working on is on the corner of Filbert St. and 30th St. in West Oakland. It is a 1/3 acre property that has tremendous potential to become an urban farm and training center. People’s Grocery is working with the owner of the property, the Northern California Community Loan Fund (NCCLF), to develop site plans, secure a conditional use permit and establish a lease with NCCLF. We are grateful to NCCLF for presenting this opportunity to People’s Grocery and providing us with funding in support of the planning and development of the site.

With the changing of the year from 2009 to 2010 come many changes for People’s Grocery (read about our new Executive Director who begins on January 11). Moving our agricultural efforts from Sunol to Oakland is a significant change. But it is only through change that new possibilities can emerge. We’re excited about the possibilities that are on People’s Grocery’s horizon as we move into 2010.

Happy New Year!

As People’s Grocery prepares for Nikki Henderson to take over as the organization’s new Executive Director on January 11, 2010 I want to make sure that everyone understands why I’m stepping down as Executive Director and what I’ll be focusing on in 2010.

First of all, I want to assure everyone that I’m not stepping down as People’s Grocery’s Executive Director for any negative reasons. On the contrary, I’m stepping down because we have arrived at a moment of opportunity to more fully pursue People’s Grocery’s mission and vision of building a community food system in West Oakland. As some of you know, it has always been a goal of People’s Grocery’s to open a social enterprise retail food store in West Oakland. In fact, more than just creating a food retail store, our goal has been to create a new social enterprise model that can solve the problem of providing access to healthy foods in inner city areas in a way that is sustainable, scalable, and able to make an impact on public health and in creating economic opportunity for West Oakland.

This design process has included some critical questions such as:

• How do we create a model that can overcome the numerous challenges of developing retail stores in inner city areas like West Oakland?
• How can we reposition grocery stores as public health centers and as components of our healthcare system?
• How can we create a store that is the equivalent in the food retail industry to what micro-financing has been for the financial industry?
• How do we leverage what is good about both nonprofits and for-profits to improve public health and create economic opportunity?

Over the last two years we have been engaged in a planning and design process that has grappled with these and other critical questions for inner city food systems. We are now at a place where we think we are getting to something that can really work. However, through this process, we have come to understand that People’s Grocery, as a small nonprofit, can not provide the focus and dedicated resources required to fully implement a project of this magnitude. With all of People’s Grocery’s programs continuously growing it has been hard to muster the resources and capacity needed to make this model store a reality. So, in mid 2008, I and the People’s Grocery Board of Directors decided that, in order for the store to become a reality at the scale and level of innovation we envision, the project would have to be housed under a separate organization that could solely focus on the store itself.

It is in support of this decision to create a separate sister company that I am leaving the role of People’s Grocery’s Executive Director. In 2010 I will be dedicated fully to creating and leading this new company. The decision to hire a new Executive Director so that I can focus on the retail store (rather than hiring someone to lead the store so that I could remain the Executive Director) was based on a shared belief that I have a unique vision and understanding of the business model for this new enterprise and that, as a co-founder of People’s Grocery, I am well positioned to share this vision, to rally our networks in support of it and, most importantly, to ensure that this new venture works closely with the existing People’s Grocery organization to implement the collaboration necessary to achieve what will now be the shared mission and vision of the two organizations.

While we are setting out to create two distinct organizations — the nonprofit People’s Grocery and a for-profit company — the reality is that what we are really doing is creating a single “hybrid social enterprise” model in which the two organizations will work together to create change in West Oakland and beyond. So, while I’m leaving the nonprofit that I co-founded and have led for the last seven years, I am not going very far away at all as I will be running a new company, side by side with Nikki as she runs People’s Grocery, that shares the same mission and will work collectively with People’s Grocery to realize the vast possibilities that can only come from this kind of shared leadership and collaboration.

Happy New year to you and all of the great possibilities that lie ahead in 2010.

For some time now People’s Grocery has been working toward launching a new for-profit company that will develop and operate a grocery store in West Oakland (I personally will begin working on this venture as its CEO starting in January 2009 when a new Executive Director will take over the leadership and management of People’s Grocery). We envision that this for-profit venture will partner closely with our existing nonprofit organization in areas of nutrition/health education, job training, and agricultural production. We have been talking about this relationship as a “hybrid social enterprise” because it is the inter-relation, collaboration and complementary relationship between the two entities that will result in the comprehensive model we’re interested in creating.

While the hybrid model that People’s Grocery is setting out to create will be a pioneering model in many ways, I have recently learned about two existing enterprises that are already using a hybrid non-profit/for-profit approach in their food retail stores. The first is the Community Mercantile Food Coop in Lawrence, KS. The coop itself is a full service grocery store specializing in organic and naturally produced foods. Then there is the Community Mercantile Education Foundation, a non-profit organization which provides nutrition education to the customers of the coop retail store.

The second mode that I more recently learned about is the J.U.I.C.E Project, which is based in St Louis, Missouri and is working on “reinventing the corner store”. While the J.U.I.C.E Project is different from the model People’s Grocery is developing with regard to scale of the operation and format (we’re interested in a creating a bigger store than just a corner store size format), the J.U.I.C.E Project is implementing many ideas similar to our own, including developing a for-profit/non-profit hybrid social enterprise.

Here’s what Shawn McKie, co-founder of the J.U.I.C.E. Project, said about the roles of the non-profit organization and the for-profit company in their hybrid social enterprise model: “What makes The J.U.I.C.E. Project innovative is that our hybrid business model offers a full circle of support. The non-profit arm provides outreach to urban underserved youth through media/health literacy workshops and art for social change programs (emotional support), whereas the for-profit arm offers instrumental support by making fresh fruits and natural snacks items more accessible to this population in terms of cost and location.”

Clearly there is a trend of innovation and ingenuity taking place in small food stores and nonprofit organizations where entirely new models are being developed. While there has certainly been some cool innovation among larger food retailers as well, such as the Whole Planet Foundation that is connected to Whole Foods Market and provides micro-finance to poor entrepreneurs in the developing world, examples like the Community Mercantile Food Coop and the J.U.I.C.E. Project are doing more than just offering a peripheral benefit outside of what their retail stores offer. In these cases the nonprofits’ activities are interlinked into the for-profit business models themselves in such a way that the business models simply wouldn’t be what they are without the non-profits contributions.

These are the kinds of new models that People’s Grocery sees as being needed to solve the complex issues of food insecurity and public health in inner city areas. And we’re glad to know that there are other pioneers out ahead of us blazing a new path of social innovation and entrepreneurship.

The term “food desert” has become a popular way of talking about low-income communities that don’t have fresh food outlets and where residents have to travel great distances to get to grocery stores or other sources of fresh foods. While perhaps a catchy and attractive phrase to the media, academia and policymakers, “food desert” is an inadequate way of applying a honest analysis and description of what is actually occurring in low-income communities and communities of color (urban and rural).

“Food desert” only describes the symptoms or effects of the problem of there being no food easily available in an area. The risk in using this description is that it fails to address the root causes of the problem and doesn’t reveal the underlying structures of economic and social inequity that create food deserts in the first place. Without going beyond the surface level symptoms and addressing the deeper root causes, we run the risk of not solving the issue of food insecurity at all and, perhaps, making it worse. The challenge is that naming the root causes, especially when it implicate patterns of racism or class disparity, can be difficult, uncomfortable and, for some, even uncouth.

So “food desert” has emerged as a safe and neutral way to avoid rocking the boat with an analysis of social inequity and structural racism. But it is dangerous to falsely diagnose and describe a problem because the result will be a false prescription of the solution. The approaches and strategic choices that come with a diagnosis have huge implications for how, and even if, a problem is sustainably solved.

No one in West Oakland has heard of or uses the phrase food desert. But people do talk about racism, exclusion, etc, all of the time. So People’s Grocery uses the language that local people understand, use themselves and reflects their experience. We don’t use expressions that attempt to prescribe what people are going through that don’t really name the substantive and essential issues they see and experience. We should start using terminology that truly reflects the views of the grassroots constituents we’re working with and rely less on trendy and abstract language. After all, the terms will change over time. What matters most is whether the conditions will change.

In a San Francisco Chronicle editorial published on the July 30th entitled “Dieting goes federal”, it is noted that the Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists that one of the most important things we can do to change our national health is to “bring grocery stores to poor neighborhoods”. This is not a new idea to most people.

As author and journalist Pamela Paul stated in an article published in November 2008, “Your weekly run to the grocery store is the foundation for your good health.” Most of us understand this and can make an easy connection to the health consequences of not having access to grocery stores. A 2002 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that, for each supermarket in low-income census tracts, residents increased their intake of fruits and vegetables by an average of 32%. Clearly, being able to purchase more fruits and vegetables in any community is a step toward reducing the conditions that lead to preventive chronic disease.

But I want to take the good idea of bringing grocery stores to low-income neighborhoods a step further. While having a grocery store in a community can result in healthier consumption, the conventional model of grocery stores today aren’t necessarily maximizing the impact and role they could play on consumer health. My observation is that grocery stores are often poorly utilized as venues for addressing public health issues. Which is a real lost opportunity given that grocery stores are one of the most common places that most Americans go to fairly regularly and could serve as a natural place to engage the public.

At People’s Grocery we’re developing a design and plan for a food retail store for the inner city marketplace that reframes the role of the grocery store in society from being just a food sector business to being a preventive healthcare model that operates as a public health center and consumer intervention site. From the perspective of this kind of grocery model the preventive health and nutrition education and services offered in the store would be as important to the business as the products it sells. After all the goal of the store would not just be to sell food to make money for investors, but to change eating and lifestyle behaviors in communities that are highly impacted by the prevalence and associated costs of preventive chronic disease.

This reframe can also apply to agriculture, which is another area of People’s Grocery’s work. The entire agricultural sector could come to be understood as an essential component of improving public health and, therefore, be seen as an extension of the healthcare system itself. If this occurred then entirely new partnerships between the health care sector and the agricultural sector could take place that could provide a big economic boost, as well as a new dignified role, for farmers.

While we work to meet the food purchasing needs of low-income people, why don’t we also take advantage of the opportunity to think outside of the box and deliver even more innovation into the enterprises we’re creating? Our communities need more than just food - they need education, supportive services, a community environment, jobs and training opportunities. Thinking differently and newly about things that have been around as long as farms and grocery stores could result in big breakthrough opportunities to achieve much greater impact.

Many groups around the country are demonstrating that urban agriculture can in fact be a viable job creation and economic development sector in neighborhoods faced with high unemployment. Particularly strong examples of these kinds of efforts are active in Northern and Midwestern cities such as Detroit, Milwaukee and Chicago. But there are models emerging throughout the country and most metropolitan areas.

While there are still skeptics who don’t yet believe that urban agriculture can become a real sector in the green economy because of it’s limitations in scale or efficiency, there is a strong argument emerging in the context of climate change, peak oil and natural resource decline that may fundamentally change the way the job creation potential of urban agriculture is perceived. Because many of the assumptions that built our industrial society are beginning to change or disappear, the stage for new opportunities is being set.

For example, the old model of classical economic theory asserted that labor was the primary scarce resource and that natural resources were abundant. This economic model caused “labor efficiency” to be treated as the basis of the industrialized agricultural model and achieving efficiency in labor by developing methods of mechanization, petro-chemical inputs, mono-cropping and cheap migrant labor were the hallmarks of industrial success in the corporate food system. Yet the resulting damage of these practices to small farm families, communities, the environment and human health have led our food system to be unsustainable and unjust.

Newer understandings of economics in the context of climate change and peak oil show that labor is now less of a constraint than natural resources. So labor efficiency is becoming less critical than oil efficiency or fertilizer efficiency. Newer studies underline one thing - increased labor and better paid labor in agriculture of all forms is inevitable as natural resource and oil supply decrease.

So we now face a real possibility that agriculture may once again become a net job creator in our society. This will require a new model for how the costs of mechanization and petro-chemical inputs are replaced by the costs of added labor, how people will be trained and paid better, and how food will be priced to reflect these changes. However, when it all shakes out in the end it’s clear that increased labor in agriculture may become an acceptable and pursued standard. For communities faced with high unemployment and in need of jobs, this emerging trend could change the game for the creation of local jobs and the strengthening of local economies in those communities.

Imagine the day when thousands of Americans have dignified jobs growing healthy food for their communities in a sustainable and just manner. The day may not be far off now.

The Capital Press released an article on a panel I spoke on at the Organic Food Summit that was entitled “Pricing, Access and the Untapped Consumer”. Click here to read the article. Or read it below. Most of the statistics came from my own presentaation.

Ethnic growth changes organic market

By Patty Mamula
For the Capital Press

Stevenson, Wash. - Despite a weakened economy, cultural, social, political and scientific shifts have bolstered the opportunity for marketing organic food, attendees of the Organic Summit were told.

One area where opportunity for organic marketing have grown strongest is in densely populated underserved urban areas, often called food “deserts.”

In a session on “Pricing, Access and the Untapped Consumer,” Brahm Ahmadi, executive director of People’s Grocery in Oakland, presented some eye-opening statistics.

Ethnic growth in the United States went from 13.8 million or 17 percent of the total population in 1980 to 26.4 million or 25 percent of the population in 2000. Forecasts predict ethnic households will represent 47 percent of the population in 2050.

By 2030 California’s ethnic groups will comprise 70 percent of households.

The buying power of ethnic groups follows the same growth pattern. For Hispanics, total spending in billions of dollars increased from $223 in 1990 to $490 in 2000 and predictions for 2012 are for $7.2 trillion.

Because ethnic consumers account for 37 percent of all supermarket sales, that’s powerful marketing information, he said.

East Coast supermarket chain Pathmark has opened half of all its stores in low-income urban areas. They are its “star stores.” Pathmark says, “Why do we open stores in the inner city? Because that’s where the people are.”

As an example of buying power, Ahmadi said that the retail demand for food in Harlem is approximately $116 million compared to the New York metropolitan area where it’s $53 million. Likewise, in inner city west Chicago, the per-acre spending on groceries is $85,018. Whereas in Kenilworth, one of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, it’s $37,754.

“Yet, inner city markets are underserved by 30 to 70 percent,” Ahmadi said.”The poorest ZIP codes in the largest metro areas have 30 percent fewer grocery stores than other areas.”

People end up leaving the neighborhood to shop for groceries. Inner city Oakland loses $250 million in food retail expenditures annually because of out shopping that spirals into even more economic loss due to lack of employment, tax revenue, the absence of the multiplier effect and the heavy cost of travel time for shoppers since 40 percent don’t own vehicles.

Unfortunately, a seemingly endless stream of barriers to food retailers matches the inner city need. These include lack of access to capital and financing, land availability and readiness, site preparation and clean-up costs, higher operating costs, dissimilar purchasing patterns to suburbs and prohibitive regulations and zoning.

Breaking Barriers

Caroline Harries, from the non-profit Food Trust in Philadelphia, talked about how her organization created public/private partnerships to overcome many of these barriers. The Food Trust was developed in 1992 to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved areas and it started with farmer’s markets, adding 25 to low-income areas in Philadelphia.

“Our work with supermarkets was a natural outgrowth of this. We began advocating supermarket development in underserved areas, primarily as a public health issue,” she said.

In December 2003 Pennsylvania became the first state to commit public funds for supermarkets in underserved areas. Through the Fresh Food Financial Initiative, retailers can apply for grants up to $250,000 and loans up to $2.5 million per store. “We found those were the price points that made a difference,” Harries said.

To date, the program has supported 68 new stores, distributed $63.3 million in grants and loans and helped create 3,200 jobs. “It’s a marriage between public health and economic development,” said Harries.

Brian Rohter, CEO of New Seasons Market in Portland, talked about his company’s experiences opening the Concordia store in 2001. It was its third out of nine, soon to be eleven, stores and the first in an underserved urban neighborhood.

“The site for this store had been idling as a neglected vacant lot for six years in northeast Portland, traditionally the lowest income area of the city,” he said. “It’s an area where three neighborhoods overlap-a minority community, a high income and a modest income area.”

Because of that overlap the median household income ranges from $25,000 to $95,000 and the percent of the population with a college degree ranges from 7 to 51 percent. “This is not a demographic that an upscale natural food store would approach,” Rohter said. Several large corporate supermarkets had dismissed it sight unseen. “But, we identified it as a nontraditional opportunity for our store because we had local knowledge of the area, we had boots on the ground who really knew it.”

Although 75 percent of its products are natural and/or organic and it support small local farms, New Seasons also twin lines products. “We put Annie’s up next to Kraft,” said Rather.

The two biggest obstacles were the city of Portland and financing. With the city, it stressed overall economic development and emphasized the creation of living wage jobs. It started working with the community 18 months before the store opened, looking for help and advice on recruiting and hiring and involved local leaders in development.

The budget for the new store was a little over $3 million in 2000, and even though it had no problem raising funds for the first two stores, this one was different. It turned to family and friends for financial help. “We still came up $750,000 short and ShoreBank Pacific came to the rescue.”

The store opened Dec. 5, 2001, at 8 a.m. and by 10 a.m. it was their highest volume store.

Freelance writer Patty Mamula is based in Portland, Oregon. E-mail: pattymamula@earthlink.net

Michelle Obama gave a speech on Tuesday during a “harvest party” for the White House vegetable garden on the topics of health, nutrition, food deserts and our food system.  It was an outstanding speech not only from the perspective of health and nutrition, but from the perspective of food justice. Michelle did a fabulous job addressing the issue of food access disparities in inner city and rural communities and made some very poignant points. Click here to see the video of Michelle Obama’s speech. And here is excerpt from her speech on food access disparities:

“Unfortunately, for too many families, limited access to healthy foods and vegetables is often a barrier to a healthier diet. In so many of our communities, particularly in poor and more isolated communities, fresh healthy food is simply out of reach. With few grocery stores in their neighborhoods residents are forced to rely on convenience stores, fast food restaurants, liquor stores, drugs stores and even gas stations for their groceries.”

“These food deserts leave too many families stranded and without enough choices when it comes to nourishing their loved ones. And sadly this is the case in many large cities and rural communities all across this nation. So we need to do more to address the fact that so many of our citizens live in areas where access to healthy food, and thus a healthy future, is simply out of reach.”

“Many communities… are leading the way and taking matters into their own hands and tackling this lack of access on their own by growing and caring for a whole lot of community gardens….. there are more than one million community gardens that are flourishing all around the county. And many of them are in underserved urban communities that are providing greater access to fresh produce for their neighbors.”

“The benefit is not just the availability of fresh produce but also it gives the community an opportunity to come together around gardening and growing their own food and working together towards a healthier community and a better future for their kids.”

Times Magazine recently produced an article and a short video about an exciting effort by African American entrepreneur Karriem Beyah, 47, to address the lack of fresh food retail  in Chicago’s South Side neighborhood by launching a grocery store called Farmers Best Market. According to the article Beyah grew up on Chicago’s South Side and worked in the food industry most of his life, starting with his godfather’s neighborhood grocery store.

The video about Farmers Best Market and Karriem Beyah is very inspiring and a strong affirmation that it is possible for local entrepreneurs and residents to execute ambitious food retail ventures in inner city neighborhoods. Beyah is an example and role model to many of people striving to achieve similar goals in their communities. Check out the video: http://www.time.com/time/video/?bcpid=1485842900&bclid=0&bctid=24222955001

I will  be speaking on a panel with Michael Pollan, among others, in the evening on Friday June 12 as part of a screening event for a new documentary called FRESH, which “celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system.”  The screening will be held at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco (2961 16th Street).  The screening starts at 7pm and the panel will follow at approximately 8:30pm. Visit the FRESH website for more information or to purchase tickets: http://www.freshthemovie.com/.