Interviewed by Chapin Dorsett, Operations Manager for The HEAL Project
Chapin - To start us off, could you give a brief overview of Fresh Approach’s mission, how y’all got started and what you do?
Andy - Fresh Approach works at the intersection of food access, public health, nutrition education and local food systems. We were born out of the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association, which includes 50 markets in the Bay Area. In 2008 we began as the nonprofit wing of the association, aimed at getting low income communities to shop at farmers’ markets. Our two primary program areas are food access and nutrition education, and these programs have a uniquely strong tie to the local food systems. Our education programs are rooted in the food and medicine philosophy that healthy eating and healthy behaviors drive healthy outcomes. We utilize a behavior change model through long-term classes about eating and shopping healthy and preparing foods. We give out vouchers at each class that can be used at 100 different farmers’ markets as an incentive for people to take what they’ve learned in class and put it into action, as well as to help with access to buying local food. We also run gardening and composting workshops at our community garden in East Palo Alto.
Prior to the pandemic, our food access programs revolved around two mobile farmers’ markets (styled like food trucks) that visit low income communities and serve locally-grown food. The mobile markets provide a 50% subsidy to people who use food assistance programs like CalFresh or WIC. We also do a similar matching program at farmers’ markets in low-income communities like East Palo Alto and Richmond.
C - How have your programs changed since the start of the pandemic?
A - Our main change has been pivoting our food access work to emergency food relief and focusing on how to bring local food systems into this. We have strong networks of people who trust us, so we were able to move into modified programming quickly, mainly an emergency CSA box model. The CSA started with a partnership with Pie Ranch to distribute 100 boxes a week of locally-sourced produce from small, Latinx-run farms to families in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties, including the La Honda–Pescadero Unified School District. We then took the model as a proof of concept and applied for the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program. We now work with eight other organizations, including Pie Ranch, to coordinate the distribution of 3,200 CSA boxes per week. The program has directed over a million dollars to local farmers. We’ve had to pull back on the mobile farmers’ markets due to social distancing protocols, so now we’re only running one mobile market once day per week (as opposed to both trucks six days per week).
Aside from the new CSA, our education programs have largely moved online. We’ve been running group online classes through zoom and google classroom.
C - Where did the idea for the mobile farmers’ markets come from?
A - The program started in 2013 with the support of a USDA grant for local food promotion. At that time there were a handful of mobile farmers’ markets around the country, but since then the concept has really blossomed and now there are dozens. People call us all the time to ask about starting their own. The mobile markets are designed to be able to travel to communities that don’t have regular farmers’ markets, because these communities are often overlooked with regards to food in general and farmers’ markets in particular. It’s a good, fun, flexible program that people really appreciate. It’s unique and makes people happy to see. And the 50% discounts that the mobile markets provide make them really valuable to families that come to rely on food at those prices. In a given year, our two mobile market trucks sell $100,000 worth of produce.
One of Fresh Approach’s Mobile Farmers’ Markets. Photo with permission from Fresh Approach.
C - Where do you source your produce from? What is your relationship with the producers like?
A - Since we started out of the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association, we have relationships with many of the farmers that sell produce at the markets. Our mobile market trucks would go to the farmers’ markets to pick up produce directly from the farmers there. We have a South Bay and an East Bay truck team, so those teams work with the farmers at their own discretion. But we have a list of values written on our website that we look to when determining sourcing. For instance, we prioritize farmers of color and farms that use sustainable and organic farming practices. We also consider ease of delivery and the farmers’ communication styles. We’re always finding new farms to work with and are trying to source culturally appropriate food for the families that we serve. We work with close to 30 farms each year, and our team has pretty close relationships with them. The farmers are generally appreciative of the extra income and they like knowing that their food is going to low income communities. The farmers don’t necessarily have the ability to get their food to these communities themselves, but they are glad when the food does get there. The farms are located in all directions from us, but they’re mostly all well-within 200 miles of the Bay.
C - How do you balance your on the ground education programs and food access work with broader work surrounding policy and advocacy?
A - We ourselves don’t do much policy work, but we’re in the room with those who are doing the policy work. We’re a collaborative organization that likes participating in groups and getting to know other partners in the field. So we navigate this balance by being an active member of the ecosystem and by being supportive of other organizations. My programmatic philosophy is that if my colleagues and partner nonprofits are successful, then I’m successful, because we have overlapping missions. We root our work in collaboration, alignment and resource sharing, which leads to a strengthening, not necessarily directly in policy, but in overall resilience. For example, we coordinate collaboration on the CSA emergency food box program, but we’re not moving the food ourselves. We saw our ability to network between organizations that wouldn’t have had the resources to work with the USDA, but our impact is reliant on our partners.
C - How have or haven’t you been able to frame your work through an equity lens?
A - Fresh Approach is actively engaged in looking at our work through an equity lens. We have equity goals and metrics that we set and look to. We actively look at our programming and institutional structures and give space to the organization and employees at every level to engage in conversations about representation. We did intentional value-setting a couple years ago, and we’re constantly looking back on those values and checking ourselves to see if our programs are in alignment with them. We keep innovating, making changes and addressing the holes we see.
C - Any new programs or initiatives you’d like to share?
A - In the beginning of September we launched an emergency fire relief endeavor with prepared meals sourced from local farms. The meals right now are going to evacuees of the CZU Lightning Complex fires. This came about because we were able to move quickly through our networks and find partners to get it off the ground. We’re partnering with Growing the Table, Off The Grid (a Bay Area food truck company) and Google Kitchens (they’re using workers who have lost hours due to closed cafeterias at Google to instead do meal prep for other initiatives). The meal program also serves farms like Brisa de Año and Pie Ranch by supporting them in an emergency food harvest they risked losing due to fire evacuations.
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Andy has been working to build resilient food systems since 2014. In that time, he has been particularly focused on increasing the linkages between small-scale, mission-driven farms to communities who have historically been denied access to healthy food landscapes. Andy has developed unique program interventions around the country, he has worked with corner store owners in the Bronx, food pantries in Brooklyn, gas stations in the Navajo Nation, farmers’ markets in Mexico, and cooperatives in rural Maine. In the Bay Area, he leads food access work at Fresh Approach, managing a diverse portfolio of projects including two mobile farmers’ markets, traditional farmers’ markets in low-access/low-income neighborhoods, and now the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program.