Through a process designed and led by the Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD) Collaborative, The Kresge Foundation has awarded $1 million in new grant funding to eight organizations that are building EFOD-aligned projects in their communities. These investments are in addition to more than $1 million in grants Kresge awarded to the eight EFOD projects in 2020.

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 create critical infrastructure needed to support access to healthy food, develop new and existing businesses owned by Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and build a strong pathway for crisis-resistant community-owned revitalization.

The organizations are a part of the national EFOD Collaborative and serve as examples for how Equitable Food Oriented Development builds community health, creates economic opportunities and drives neighborhood self-determination.

Kresge awarded a total of $1 million in 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 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 support a second year of Dreaming Out Loud’s social enterprise farming and food production work and help the organization build out its incubator support to increase 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 provide continued support for El Departamento de la Comida in building a hyper-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 Understory Worker 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 in partnership with the region’s Black farmers 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 continued 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 support the expansion of a 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.