The LA-based Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a city-wide coalition of 25 community, faith-based, labor, and environmental organizations, just released an exhaustive report entitled ” Feeding Our Communities: A Call for Standards for Food Access and Job Quality in Los Angeles’ Grocery Industry”. The report is based on several months of public hearings in which residents, industry experts, academics, workers and clergy gave their testimony regarding the practices of L.A.’s grocery industry.

The report describes a growing divide between the grocery industry’s treatment of L.A.’s high and low-income communities and charges that supermarket chains in the Los Angeles area are guilty of ignoring and mistreating the area’s low-income communities. The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores
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Saturday June 28 we held our first (of three) “Flavors of the Garden” Tasting Event at the 55th St. Garden. This event is a big thank you to all our many supporters, volunteers, donors, and friends (old and new). Loose Change Collective played jazz while guests tasted a beautiful array of different vegetables grown in our gardens and farm: zucchini, cucumber, carrots, snap peas, kale crisps, and jicama served with a choice of delicious dips: basil pesto, yam miso, yogurt dill (from Drea & Paco), salsa (from Arjuna Sayyed), and hummus. Thanks to Charlie Matthey for the lovely presentation of treats.

Special guest Chef Marc Swan of Local Flavors Catering created
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On June 3rd we launched the Grub Box to the public. The Grub Box is a market basket of fresh fruits and vegetables from our farm (supplemented by outside producers) that is geared at providing quality fresh fruits and vegetables to West Oakland families at low-prices on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. In the first week we’ve been promoting the Grub Box we have already received a lot of enthusiastic response from both the West Oakland community and the East Bay community at-large.

The Grub Box represents our attempt to bring innovation to the CSA model. The primary innovation in the Grub Box is that we’re connecting the West Oakland community to other communities in the East
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Tomorrow is the 2008 election for Oakland City Council. A central issue that candidates are addressing is the high level of concern among residents about crime and safety in various neighborhoods of Oakland. Many residents of West Oakland are hopeful that a new council member can resolve this problem in a positive way that builds the community up.

While it is certainly true that issues of crime and safety are high in West Oakland, these same problems have been used in past as excuses for supermarket operators to not locate in the community. For this reason we at People’s Grocery believe that it is paramount that we create a food retail model that can navigate the problems of the inner-city
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People’s Grocery has developed a unique knowledge base from our history and track record of marketing healthy foods and delivering nutrition education to the West Oakland community. However, there are keys areas of business expertise that People’s Grocery has not developed that are central to the development of our business model. For these planning areas we’re privileged to be receiving support and service from the following partners:

Skadden Arps: The largest law firm in the United States, attorneys of Skadden Arps are providing People’s Grocery with complete pro-bono legal counsel and services in all matters of business law, contract law, securities law, tax and personnel law.

Accenture and IBM Global Business Services: Consultants of Accenture and IBM are collaborating to provide
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Check out the recent media play that People’s Grocery has been getting:

CNBC’s “Street Signs” ran a “Green Collar Economy” series this week. People’s Grocery was featured on the April 23rd show, entitled “Growing Green”. Click here to check it out.

The Sundance Channel is running a new show called “The Good Fight”. Click here to listen to a 35 minute podcast interview about People’s Grocery.

Local Bay Area channel KRON 4 will run a segment on Bay Area Backroads about urban farming which will feature People’s Grocery. The show will air on Saturday May 3 and Sunday May 4 (same show both days) at 6pm.

Back in March 2007 I wrote a blog post entitled “Urban Grocery Store Gap” about the entrance of Fresh & Easy into urban neighborhoods and my concerns that this would eclipse the opportunity for local entrepreneurs to start grocery stores to meet local food needs and, thereby, capture local spending power for local reinvestment. When I wrote this article, I and many others were nervous that this company, which is a subsidiary of the UK-based Tesco (the third largest retailer in the world) would have extreme advantages over small and local competitors and would undermine our progress in engendering locally-owned food retail ventures.

I have to confess that I have since shifted my thinking about Fresh & Easy
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Much fanfare is being made about the upcoming Slow Food Nation conference, to be held from Friday, August 29 to Monday, September 1, 2008 in San Francisco. Among this fanfare were criticisms laid against Slow Food by Bruce Sterlings in the March 2008 issue of the online magazine Metropolis, where he accuses Slow Food of snobbery and elitism. Predictably, the response from Slow Food to this article on the Slow Food USA Blog was to attempt to deflect and counter every detailed point that Sterling tried to make in an effort to prove that Slow Food is not elitist and, if it is elitist in some regards, why it was justified for being so.

The question for
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The Global Oneness Project recently produced a short video about People’s Grocery. according to the website, the purpose of the Global Oneness Project is to explore “how the simple notion of oneness can be lived in our increasingly complex world”. They have produced lots of great videos in addition to the recent one about People’s Grocery.

Last week, the People’s Grocery film produced by the Global Oneness Project was featured on Karma Tube as the video of the week. This video has also been licensed to two TV networks, Link TV and Starfish media. .

I spent all of last week meeting and studying with the great people at New Seasons Market, an amazing values-driven grocery company in Portland, OR. My trip was paid for by Leaderspring, a two-year leadership development program for nonprofit leaders that I’m participating in. The purpose of my visit to New Seasons Market was to learn about their unique business model, how they run their business, how they build their values into the company and how they cultivate both employee and customer loyalty.

New Seasons is quite possibly one of the most innovative and inspiring food retail companies in the country. Almost every good thing that you could imagine a grocery store doing is being done by
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