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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Since 1972 the WIC Program, which is meant to improve the nutrition of low-income pregnant women, breastfeeding women, and infants and children under the age of five, has remained unchanged. For decades the federal program has operated “WIC stores” which only sell food for vouchers issued by the state WIC program and do not accept any other form of payment. These stores have offered a very limited menial selection of fresher food choices to clients who often need such foods the most. Some have also criticized WIC for preventing small producers, retailers and nonprofits to participate in the effort to bring healthier foods to low-income families.

In the last month a flurry of discussion and activity has been
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In January 2008 I made two trips to New York to build bridges with important movements.

Green for All Planning Retreat: In early January I attended a planning retreat for Green for All in upstate New York. Green for All is a new initiative to “to help build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty.” While I arrived at the retreat feeling skeptical, three days of explorative conversation and strategic planning with 30 extraordinary organizers, visionaries and leaders left me feeling that Green for All has the potential of being a very important movement.

Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY): I was able to keynote at the annual conference of NOFA-NY, an organization
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For years food justice organizations, urban agriculture projects and small farmers have been trying to figure out how to adapt the popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model to enable low-income people to participate and have access to healthy and fresh farm produce. While offering the usage of food stamps as a way of participating in a CSA seems like one obvious way of reducing the barrier for low-income consumers, the USDA harbors a host of restrictive regulations that make it very hard to use food stamps through CSAs. As a result of these regulatory barriers few efforts have been successful at making CSAs available to low-income participants.

A recent article posted on localharvest.com, an organic and local food website,
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People’s Grocery is a partner with Green for All in advancing a movement for green jobs and economic opportunities for low-income communities that help move our society towards greater sustainability through greener energy systems and food systems. Below is an announcement of a momentous and historic event being organized by Green for All. People’s Grocery is a sponsor of this event and will be present in Memphis in April.

THE DREAM REBORN
Honoring Dr. King’s Legacy • Celebrating Our New Leaders •
Creating Green Pathways Out of Poverty

April 4-6, 2008
Memphis Cook Convention Center, Tennessee,

A conference to Inspire, Educate, and Empower!

Join: Majora Carter, Green For All & Sustainable South Bronx; Van Jones, Green For All;
Rev. Yearwood Jr., Hip
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On Wednesday Feb. 13th at 12pm a very important event will be taking place to try to turn the direction of the 2007 Farm Bill in favor of farmers, urban folks and the environment. People will gather at the Farmers’ Market at UN Plaza to call upon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Joe Baca and Dennis Cardoza, who are likely to sit on the Farm Bill conference committee, to pass a Fair and Healthy Food and Farm Bill as soon as possible that stops subsidizing corporate agribusiness at the expense of public health and invests our tax dollars into creating a sustainable, healthy, community-driven and just food system.

This is such an important issue right now
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