COMING SOON – The MARSH Cooperative Grocery Store
HFFI Press Release:
MARSH Food Cooperative Receives Grant to Improve Healthy Food Access
The MARSH Food Cooperative/Community Grocery was among 20 grantees announced December 9, 2020 as receiving financial assistance awards through the 2020 round of America’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative’s (HFFI) Targeted Small Grants Program. Funding for the HFFI grants program is provided for the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Awardees were selected through a competitive process that was open to eligible fresh food retail projects seeking financial and technical assistance to overcome the higher costs and initial barriers to entry in underserved areas. There were 245 applications submitted to the program with requests totaling over $40 million.
MARSH’s successful application will use funds to expand the existing cooperative model from online sales and summer outdoor market to a storefront grocery. “We were very pleased to see the interest in cooperative and worker-owned enterprises, and excited to be able to combine our goals of equitable healthy food access and worker-ownership in a dynamic brick-and-mortar setting,” says Beth Neff, the director of MARSH’s not-for-profit organization. “Over 80% of funds will be used to pay fair wages to a worker-managed team that will share in decision-making, set schedules and tasks according to their own needs and skills, and collaborate to provide sliding scale natural, organic, and local fresh foods to their neighbors and the larger community.”
A full list of awardees is available at https://www.investinginfood.com/impact/.
________________________________________________
Also coming soon:
The MARSH Cooperative Farm
Thanks to a generous donation from Fred Hessel at the Carondelet Community Betterment Federation, MARSH will be farming a lot at the corner of Minnesota and Nagel Streets this summer. We have applied for a second grant from the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) program of the U.S.D.A. and will learn whether we will receive the supporting funds in early March. In the meantime, we plan to go ahead and prepare the ground and sow some plants and seeds in hopes of a successful application. Should the funds be awarded, we will be able to hire farmer-managers to realize the project fully and make significant quantities of produce available to the community on a sliding scale at the MARSH Cooperative Grocery (see above).
If you are interested in helping out, either as a paid or volunteer collaborator, please contact us at bioculturalist@gmail.com!
MARSH 