Amid COVID-19, Urban Growers Collective distributes nearly one million pounds of produce
ADAM M. RHODES
From its eight farms in Chicago, the organization serves underresourced communities on the south and west sides.
By Adam M. Rhodes
Chicago Reader
Oct 2, 2020
Excerpt:
We’re now in the eighth month of the COVID-19 pandemic, and millions are struggling to maintain their incomes and housing. But even before the pandemic started, one Chicago nonprofit, the Urban Growers Collective, was working to address residents’ struggles to access another basic necessity—fresh, healthy food—and the current crisis has only emboldened that work.
From mid-March to the end of September, the group delivered nearly one million pounds of produce to more than 25 partner organizations across the city, including Howard Brown Health on 63rd, Grow Greater Englewood, and West Side Mutual Aid, says UGC development associate Brandon Lov.
That number, Lov says, includes produce boxes UGC delivers directly, as well as deliveries the group coordinates with its partners, including prepared meals and boxes of fresh produce, dairy and meat as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farmers to Families Food Box program.
“Our biggest pivot was from affordable sales of produce to hunger relief,” says Erika Allen, who cofounded UGC with Laurell Sims in 2017. “So, donating produce to folks in need as opposed to the economic development model that we’ve continued.”
Allen says the group’s work has been crucial in addressing food insecurity—or what she and others have come to call “food apartheid”—on the south and west sides even before the pandemic.
