People's Grocery builds nutrition awareness and community from within

What started out as a way to get fresh, whole food from the farm to the people most in need has grown into a full-scale educational experience focusing on all aspects of what and how the Oakland CA community eats.

by Christine Ziegler-Ulsh

Grub Parties combine cooking, free, healthy food, music and nutrition education

A table along the north wall was heaped with organic gala apples, homegrown grapefruit, crisp white turnips, robust heads of romaine lettuce, free for the taking, and a table along the west wall held chips and hummus and phenomenal warm spiced yam waffles, made as part of a cooking demonstration by chef Keba Konte of the Guerilla Café in Berkley.

Dannae Washington and Kie’laya Carswell fielded a few more confessions as we all giggled at our shared food weaknesses, and then Dannae noted, “After hearing all this, it’s really important to ask ourselves, ‘Why do we eat food?’” We all grew quiet as she looked at us, repeating, “That’s a really important question. Why DO we eat food?”

The questions, answers and food were part of a powerful activity in nutrition awareness taking place at a community “Grub Party,” also known as a “Be Healthy Party.” The community gatherings are held monthly in downtown Oakland, California, featuring free, healthy snacks, cooking demonstrations, nutrition education activities led by Peer Nutrition Educators, music and entertainment by local artists, musicians, and DJ’s, and free bags of produce—all organized by People's Grocery.

By the people, for the people

The People’s Grocery (www.peoplesgrocery.org) is a community-based organization in West Oakland whose mission is “to develop a self-reliant, socially just and sustainable food system in West Oakland… that foster[s] healthy, equitable and ecological community development.” The organization's seven bright, energetic mostly part-time staff, along with a host of community volunteers, move this mission forward through a variety of community- and youth-focused social enterprises, urban agricultural projects, educational programs and public policy initiatives.

Everything about People’s Grocery is unassuming. Driving along Market Street in Oakland, the only way to distinguish the white stucco "office" from any other home in the neighborhood is the “Be Healthy” poster in the second story window. Jason Uribe (Yur EE bay), the farm manager, noted that they were working on getting a sign to hang near the front door, coordinating with the people who lived in the downstairs apartments to decide where and how to hang it. That exemplifies the way People’s Grocery’s does all its work. The organization lives in the middle of the community it serves, and it bases its work on the needs and interests of the people in that community.

People's Grocery Mobile Market is on haitus while they work on launching a bricks-and-mortar grocery store in West Oakland this fall.

Jason unlocked the front door and we climbed to the People’s Grocery’s second floor office to shake off the foggy Oakland morning chill. I plunked myself on the worn sofa in the meeting space and leafed through the articles welcoming five new staff members, announcing the volunteer garden workdays, providing updates from the Peer-2-Peer youth health and nutrition training program, and discussing the “disappearance” of the Mobile Market.

I had just seen the Mobile Market Truck parked in their work yard across the street. The bright orange and purple bread truck used to drive through West Oakland’s neighborhoods, selling affordable, fresh, local produce and natural foods directly to a membership of over 400 residents, reaching thousands with education and outreach materials and programs, and bringing smiles and recognition to many. However, when People’s Grocery conducted a customer survey in 2006, they learned that the community’s greater desire was for the Grocery to open a full-service grocery store.

Unfortunately, given the non-profit’s small budget, they didn't have the capacity to work toward a store and keep the Mobile Market going at the same time. So the organization chose to throw its efforts and resources toward developing a cooperative People’s Grocery Market (PGM) in West Oakland, and put the Mobile Market on hiatus.

As Brahm Ahmadi, founder and executive director of People’s Grocery, explained it to me, “The original goal [of People’s Grocery] was to open a grocery store that has a new business model: to solve problems of the inner city and poor communities, providing not only food at different discount levels as needed, but also addressing public health issues by providing only the best of fresh, local, and whole foods, along with information about cooking and nutrition. Now we’re back, focusing our energy on that work.”

Their newsletter noted that the Mobile Market will return in the future as an educational outreach vehicle for the new market, and that everyone is invited to attend the grand opening of the new market in the fall of this year. In the meantime, the cheerful truck remains parked in the back of the work yard.

Lessons learned by land

Although simply increasing access to whole, organic food has been a large focus of People's Grocery, from its inception the group has insisted that understanding where food comes from (and experiencing the growing process) can make one of the biggest impacts on how an individual, family and community eats. The group runs five urban gardens and a 2-acre parcel in a 18-acre Sunol, California, project called Sunol Water Temple Agricultural Park. The project is part working farm, part park and has allowed People's Grocery to greatly expand their food production capabilities and their educational outreach.

Jason Uribe, farm manager, and Julie Pavuk, volunteer gardener, do some weeding in the Sunol Water Temple Ag Park.

The farm site lies about 35 miles southeast of Oakland following I-580 and I-680 through beautiful rolling hills dotted with scrub oaks and wind mills toward the flat arid plane of California’s Central Valley.

The group's 2 acres is just part of a 10-acre field shared with another food program and an Asian market farmer since 2006. The soil at the site is dark and rich-looking, though it has a more clayey texture than you might expect, and even in early February, beautiful produce is springing forth. Three-quarters of their plot is currently planted in a bell bean cover crop (a good, inexpensive source of nitrogen used instead of chemical fertilizer), and the remaining half acre is producing garlic, lettuce, beets, peas, mustard, fava beans, collards and a few other brassicas. Throughout the past two growing seasons, they’ve also produced pumpkins, squash, tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, sweet peppers, okra and beans. “We’ve also tried growing melons," Jason adds, "but we’ve had difficulty producing the quality of fruit we’d like, so we need to decide whether to keep trying or let it go for a while.”

Adding up all the produce, the 2-acre field produced 15,000 lbs of produce in its first year of operation. This more than quintuples the organization's inner-city community gardens' 2,295 lbs. Of this produce, 9,600 lbs was donated to residents of West Oakland via food banks and other non-profit organizations, as well as through the People’s Grocery’s own give-away bags.

59th Street Spiral Garden is one of People's Grocery's urban oases.

More importantly, this farm site and the community gardens served as a hands-on class room for more than 300 Bay Area school children in 2007. People's Grocery outreach programs teach children about where fruits and vegetables come from (meaning the farm, not the supermarket), how they’re grown, and what makes the ones grown in their own neighborhood the healthiest, both for their bodies and for the community as a whole. Encouraging at-risk youth and their families to make more positive food choices for their health, and to take local control of their food supply for their community, tops the People's Grocery's list of goals.

In fact, the Peer Nutrition Educators who led the Grub Party group on an examination of why we eat food were both former Community, Health, Agriculture, and Social Enterprise (CHASE) Program participants. The teens were trained in sustainable agriculture, the food system, healthy eating and nutrition, working side-by-side with People's Grocery staff on the farm and in the community gardens.

“They learned a lot from the farming experience,” Jason Uribe said. “We're now paying them to organize programs to teach kids in the city about nutrition and healthy food choices.”

Whispering down the alley

If these five CHASE program teens educate five more people each who, in turn, educate five more people each, the positive potential is tremendous. At the end of the Grub Party exercise led by Dannae and Myiea, you could see how this group of polite strangers had transformed into cohesive community of empowered food quality and nutrition advocates. Given the response of this room full of adults, I suspect that the Peer Nutrition Educators have an even more powerful and positive impact on the peers they teach.

People’s Grocery is a small organization making a big difference in the community it serves. It connects people with the local land (at the Sunol farm and community gardens dotted around the city), with the fresh, nutritious produce that comes from that land, and with nutrition and cooking education through cooking classes and school programs.

Most importantly, People’s Grocery programs connect people with each other, empowering them to build a stronger, healthier community with their own hands, heads and hearts.

Grub Party photographs from left to right: Kie’laya Carswell and Dannae Washington, Peer Nutrition Educators; free, fresh-picked carrots from the Ag Park garden; community members snacking on waffles and sharing ideas.

Posted April 4, 2008