People’s Grocery featured in best seller by Van Jones
Van Jones, founder and President of Green for All, a national organization based in Oakland that is dedicated to “building an inclusive green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty”, has just made the New York Times best-seller list for his new book The Green Collar Economy. Van is the first black writer to make the bestseller list for an environmentally-themed book.
Here is an excerpt about People’s Grocery in The Green Collar Economy:
Back in Oakland, Brahm Ahmadi shares this core belief. He’s the
son of a Midwestern mother descended from generations of farmers in the Iowa-Missouri area and an Iranian father from merchant
families in Tehran and Tabriz. Ahmadi understands the deep significance of food and simultaneously believes in the potential for
entrepreneurship to create innovative solutions.
Ahmadi started out in the environmental justice community,
defending the poorest communities from toxins. Yet that work took
its toll. Ahmadi realized that he and his colleagues were good at
articulating the problems and being angry about them, but they fell
short on inspiring hope and possibility.
So now, as the executive director of the People’s Grocery, he’s
all about solutions, particularly as applied to the community of
West Oakland. It’s a place facing multiple challenges, where residents’ economic as well as mental, emotional, and physical health
issues compound one another. The lack of amenities and services
(which fl ed to the suburbs), the police brutality, the environmental
toxins—in West Oakland all these have converged to create a crisis
situation. Chronic diseases are at epidemic levels. There are severe
mental-health challenges. Overall, there are a lot of struggling families and individuals.41
“Food is our medium for achieving broader outcomes in com-
munity development and public health and addressing disparities in
opportunities and quality of life,” says Ahmadi. “We chose food as
our tool because it’s intimate and universal, regardless of differences
in culture or personal preferences. On a fundamental level, we all
have to eat every day, and we have that in common.”
“We’ve taken risks, in the entrepreneurial tradition, which isn’t as
common in the nonprofi t world,” says Ahmadi. The risks are paying
off. People’s Grocery has expanded from its three urban gardens in
Oakland and signature Mobile Market to a two-acre farm in nearby
Sunol, growing nearly eighteen thousand pounds of produce. These
enterprises not only provide healthy foods and good jobs; they also
educate community members.
Ahmadi says: We get started with a conversation about individual food
consumption, the meaning of what you eat, and the history
behind why certain food is or isn’t available to you. From there
we connect the dots to the structural and systemic issues of the
food system: considering the global environmental footprint of
food production, how far food travels, and equity issues related
to farmworkers and the struggles of small farmers . . . connecting those to the struggles of low-income urban consumers.
Despite its public image, there is significant spending power in
the community. People’s Grocery has assessed West Oakland as an
approximately $50 million food market, of which about 70 percent
is not captured locally. That’s a lot of money being sent outside the
neighborhood and thus not contributing to local jobs and wealth.
Ahmadi dreams of completely localized food systems that are regionally based, with the majority of the food that consumers consume coming
from within a few hundred miles of where they live, so that
consumers have direct knowledge of the farms and farmers,
and how and where that food is produced. A revolution in
terms of environmental stewardship and reducing the carbon
footprint in the food system. And finally, dignified job creation
