About two years ago, I worked on a project to bring a web-based food hub into Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood that has been designated a “food desert”. I find the term “food desert” highly problematic, and something I’ll get into in another post. The organization managing the project has been a long-time fixture in the neighborhood, providing single-stop services to low-income, homeless, and/or unemployed residents in Bed-Stuy and throughout Brooklyn.

As for food access, they offer an in-house soup kitchen serving breakfast and lunch weekdays, a mobile soup kitchen that travels throughout Brooklyn, an innovative pantry model that is both digital and client choice, a CSA-like produce club, and nutrition and cooking education. The organization believed this food buying model would increase good food access in the neighborhood while also helping its clients aspire towards self-sufficiency.

The online food portal had already launched a couple of hubs in Michigan, and was looking to break into the New York City market.

I was excited about this project, as I loved the idea of creating new markets for farmers, artisanal food producers, and Eaters to participate in. But I also knew firsthand about the specific challenges to bringing something like this into a neighborhood like Bed-Stuy.

About two months into the project, I was released from the project on the grounds that I wasn’t a “good fit”. They then hired someone else, a person with no connection to the neighborhood and no involvement whatsoever with Brooklyn’s grassroots community food scene. The food hub never actualized.

They did, however, develop a mutually beneficial relationship with one of my favorite farmers, so I’m glad that something positive resulted in my brief time with them.

Later, I would find out that the organization and the food hub threw me under the bus, discussing with colleagues my “failure” to get the project off the ground.

Using this project as an example of why food projects fail, I am going to highlight the reasons well-intentioned food projects fail by discussing how I approached this project and the resistance I was met with from both the organization and the online food hub.

And by fail I mean:

 

  • The project does not meet the organization’s goals or definition of success
  • The project’s leadership incorrectly assumes its value and relevance to the community it wants to help
  • The project’s success hinges on organizational leadership and not community-based succession of leadership
  • The project is run by “temporary” staff who have no intentions of building long-term relationships with the community

It is my hope to create a real, open, and honest dialogue about what really has to happen if we, all of us in this good food revolution, really believe that everyone deserves access to good food.

Tomorrow: The problem with Deficit Thinking.