Building bridges to better food access

Based on interviews with: Richard Coffin, Leah Eby and Janet Lewis-Muth

When I show up for my weekly shift at the Northfield LINK Center, the building is usually pretty quiet. The LINK is the front desk of the Northfield Community Resource Center, and at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday, there are not too many people around. I pull our computer out of the office and set it up in case anyone comes in to use the Internet. During my shift, though, hardly anyone does come, and I get a lot of studying done.

At the LINK Center my job is to point people to resources in Northfield that help with anything from housing needs to immigration paperwork. Some times of the day are busier than others, and I have worked shifts where I spent almost every minute looking up phone numbers, making calls for clients and searching through binders full of resources for the perfect match. Even on these busy days, though, the LINK Center is only the beginning – albeit an invaluable beginning – of the work that Growing Up Healthy (GUH) and the Healthy Community Initiative (HCI) do in Northfield. GUH is a program of HCI, and the LINK Center is part of GUH's mission in Rice County. I learned about GUH's work indirectly from my job at the front desk here, getting emails about activities like the Multicultural Cooking Club and work days on a trailer renovation in the Viking Terrace neighborhood. The organization is all about community connectedness. Recently, they have been especially focused on forging ties between traditionally divided sectors of Northfield.

“Now we're really focusing on bridging relationships,” Leah Eby, coordinator of GUH, explained to me. “In the past we've done a lot of work making bonding relationships within the neighborhoods themselves and getting neighborhood members to know each other and doing that community-building there, but we've had so much success with that, I think the next step is making connections from individual communities out towards other communities within Rice County.”

In particular, those bridging relationships often focus on Northfield's marginalized populations. One of these is a primarily Latino neighborhood in the Viking Terrace area, where GUH has done a lot of its work in the past. And this is where working for sustainable food access comes in: GUH's Multicultural Cooking Club sprang up when Greenvale Park Elementary School wanted to make sure Latino students were included in an initiative to have parents donate food for teacher conferences. People from the school were concerned that income might be a barrier for some Latino families, and so they approached former GUH coordinator Janet Lewis-Muth.

“They felt like the Latino kids never got the kind of attention from the teachers in gratitude for the food that their parents had brought that the white kids were getting,” Janet explained. “So somebody from the school approached me and said, 'We would love to ask Latino families to be a part of this, but we don't want to ask people who don't have enough money to put food on their own table...' It's a complicated issue.”

GUH stepped in to provide food and cooking supplies and asked a group of women to come make tamales. The tamales went to the school, teachers and students alike were delighted, and the cooking club is still going strong today. In fact, GUH is now building the bridge even farther to include Northfielders outside the Viking Terrace neighborhood. The Multicultural Cooking Club is partnering with Just Food Co-op to add another day of cooking each month, this time during the dinner hour on Mondays. The co-op will donate food for the meetings, and its staff will also offer instruction on preparing common Minnesota produce. Leah is an authority on this, since it is one of her projects, and she has high hopes for the connections it can build.

“The co-op membership community is a very different community than the GUH neighborhood community in Viking Terrace, just demographically, so bringing them together around an issue of food I think would be huge,” she said.

Janet pointed out that connections built through the Multicultural Cooking Club could extend beyond the club's Monday and Friday meetings to make other food-related resources in Northfield, like local farmers' markets, accessible to a wider audience.

“In general, [a farmers' market] is the kind of thing that, if you see three or four people that you know and can converse with, then you walk past the booths and suddenly it's like, 'This is really cool!'” she said. “Whereas if you look at the crowd and you don't see a single familiar face, then what's going to make you want to explore what's there? If you go to the farmers' market and you're picking out ingredients next to somebody that you met in cooking club, it's easy to say hi even if you don't speak a lot of the same language. You can smile and be excited, there's something delicious on the table in front of you.”

In fact, GUH has done considerable work towards making farmers' markets, including Northfield's Riverwalk Market Fair, more accessible. The organization implemented a program last year that enables the market to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Janet mentioned that the Riverwalk Market Fair was “really excited about having the ability to offer that service to folks,” but she also said that few SNAP users have actually participated so far. When we talked about barriers that might be preventing more people from accessing that local produce, price concerns came up immediately.

“The reality is that if you go and buy some vegetables at the Riverwalk Market Fair in those farm booths, they're going to cost you a significant amount more than if you buy the same named vegetables – I acknowledge that they're not the same quality – [in a supermarket],” Janet said.

Richard Coffin, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer with HCI, took worries about price barriers even farther, drawing a distinction between “healthy” and “sustainable” foods, and stressing the importance of ensuring universal access to the former. The later, he sees as too often the domain of the middle and upper classes.

“When you're struggling to make it day by day, you know you should be thinking about your kids and their using the land too, but when you're just trying to nurture your kids for the next day, it's tough,” he said. “A lot of people who come in looking for food are not necessarily looking for what is traditionally thought of as sustainable food, locally grown without chemicals. I think a lot of the push behind sustainable food is a more privileged point of view.”

The association of sustainable food with privilege hints at another barrier that GUH faces in its food access work; this time the barrier is a social one. “I think [a] tiny piece of it is just, 'The market is for a different Northfield than I am a part of,'” Janet said in reference to limited SNAP benefit use at the Riverwalk Market Fair. “And I think that is one that we just have to keep trying to address. We have to make it so that Northfield is Northfield, and it's open and accessible in ambiance to everybody. I don't know that we're there yet, so we've got to keep working on it.”

That work is full of small successes, though, some of which have broader implications for changes in the way Northfield neighborhoods access sustainable food. Janet told me a story about tomato canning: GUH led a workshop on canning and then bought equipment for residents to borrow. After the workshop, one group of neighborhood leaders held a canning party and made a vat of fresh salsa. Participants went home from the party excited about the jars of salsa in their pantries and enabled to preserve tomatoes the next time the vegetable comes into season.

In successes like this there is an opportunity to change the way we think about food. As Janet put it, “You can get a huge thing of tomatoes, and it's not the 'Oh my gosh now what do I do? They're going to go bad.' Instead, it's 'I know how to preserve these.'”

All this bridge-building, large-scale and small-scale, happens not because GUH brings plans for action to Northfield communities, but because the neighborhoods themselves take initiative, and GUH provides the resources. Leah stressed the advantages of this grassroots approach in contrast to more top-down models, saying that “A lot of times people think or assume they know what's best, and they haven't actually been in touch with the people they're trying to serve, so it just doesn't work.” Working on sustainable food access issues, Growing Up Healthy offers that grassroots piece, aiming to put people in touch with quality food by building connections with the people who produce, distribute and consume it in the Northfield community.