Through an equity-based process designed and led by the Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD) Collaborative, the Kresge Foundation has awarded $1.065 million in grant funding to eight organizations that are building Equitable Food Oriented Development projects in their communities.

Equitable Food Oriented Development is a development strategy that uses food and agriculture to create economic opportunities, healthy neighborhoods, and explicitly seeks to build community assets, pride, and power by and with historically marginalized communities of color. EFOD projects increase long-term community health through asset-building and ownership of food enterprises, self-determination, and through celebrating local identity and resilience.

These projects provide critical infrastructure needed to create access to healthy food, support new and existing businesses owned by Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and build a strong pathway for crisis-resistant community-driven revitalization, said Stacey Barbas, Kresge Health Team senior program officer.

“With the realities laid bare by the effects of the pandemic on small business owners and nonprofit leaders of color, the community leadership and equitable economic opportunities bolstered by EFOD initiatives are especially important,” Barbas said. “These grants reflect an important investment in the justice-first, community-led economic development work that is being led by communities of color across the United States.”

The organizations will become part of the national EFOD Collaborative and serve as examples for how Equitable Food Oriented Development builds opportunity and drives neighborhood self-determination.

“EFOD funding will help bolster Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s capacity to manage a project of this magnitude. We are grateful for the leadership that the EFOD Collaborative has shown in forging a new way of funding organizations doing food related work that is not only designed to provide greater access to high quality food, but also to shift power,” said Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

Kresge awarded a total of $1,065,000 in new grant funding to:

• Black Food Sovereignty Coalition, Portland, OR – This grant will support the development of the Black Food Sovereignty Coalition’s Black Food Economy Project and Community Co-Pack facility by creating a local Black-owned network to expand food-based economic opportunities in Portland, OR, and the surrounding area.
• Boston Farms, Boston, MA – This grant will support Boston Farms Community Land Trust’s network of public farming space in acquiring city-owned vacant land, building out farm infrastructure, and supporting neighborhood farmers to grow sustainable food.
• Detroit Black Community Food Security Network Inc., Detroit, MI –  This grant jointly funded with Kresge’s Detroit Team will support Detroit Black Community Food Security Network’s ongoing work of building the Detroit People’s Food Cooperative, a consumer-owned grocery store that will serve as the anchor tenant in a 34,000-square foot mixed-use development  in the city’s North End neighborhood.
• Dreaming Out Loud, Washington, D.C. – This grant will enable Dreaming Out Loud to build out its farming infrastructure and community-based farm programming at the Kelly Miller school, a 2-acre site in Washington, DC, to increase local food production and economic opportunities to new farmers, food entrepreneurs, cooperatives and micro-enterprises from within low-income urban communities.
• El Departamento de la Comida, Caguas, PR – This grant will support El Departamento de la Comida in building a local food hub and commercial product kitchen in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where the community’s food system is still recovering from the effects of Hurricane Maria in 2017.
• Floreciendo (DBA: Oakland Bloom), Oakland, CA – This grant will support Oakland Bloom’s 8th Street Kitchen Collective, a cooperatively owned commercial kitchen designed to provide hands-on training and commercial experiences for refugees and immigrants with low incomes that will help them build skills needed to start their own food businesses.
• Fresh Future Farm, North Charleston, SC – This grant will support Fresh Future Farm’s development of an incubator kitchen to generate on-farm and producer revenue to reinvest in the production of farm products in the historically marginalized community in the Chicora/Cherokee neighborhood of North Charleston, SC.
• Project New Village, San Diego, CA –  This grant will support the development of Project New Village’s Good Food District Hub, a mixed-use development that integrates food, jobs, health care, housing, and education in Southeastern San Diego.

The Foundation also provided $210,000 in grant funding to the EFOD Collaborative to create a complementary network of community-based BIPOC technical assistance providers to provide thought partnership and guidance to grantees and other EFOD projects through the Collaborative.

To learn more, visit www.efod.org.