Food and Farms Manager and Educator Emily Reckard-Mota from Groundwork Somerville was but one of the panelists at the first session concerning food access in the community.

By Michael McHugh

For the first session of a monthly speaker series held on Wednesday, July 20, Somerville’s Office of Food Access and the Friends of the Community Growing Center invited panelists from local hunger relief organizations and businesses to have a conversation about their work increasing food access.

The session took place at The Somerville Community Growing Center, an urban green space designed by local residents and maintained by volunteers. Used for much more than growing food, the space has been active since 1994 with educational programs, skill-building workshops, concerts, theater, festivals, and more.

With an estimated SNAP gap of 53 percent (meaning that around 700 individuals who are eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are not enrolled), Somerville’s local government and community organizations have tried to do their part in educating the community about food access, fill gaps within the food system, and make a more green and equitable future for Somerville.

Three such community members shared how they have played a role in increasing food access and equity through their organizations and businesses; Danielle Tubinis, Executive Director of Hearty Meals For All, Emily Reckard-Mota, Food and Farms Manager and Educator for Groundwork Somerville, and Matt Gray, owner of Neighborhood Produce.

While the three panelists all had a somewhat different model for increasing access to fresh, affordable, and often culturally important food, all of them spoke to the importance of providing this service to the community.

“I’ve lived in the Winter Hill neighborhood for about 12 years now,” said Gray. “The star market there has been closed for 14 years, and there’s just a lack of fresh food. But you also have a lot of small stores throughout the neighborhood; bodegas and convenience stores which serve a purpose, but they don’t really have fresh food. And the fresh food that they have is usually not too great and very expensive.”

Having worked for hunger-relief organizations such as the Greater Boston Food Bank, Boston Area Gleaners, and Food Link, Gray recognized the need for an affordable resource of fresh food and looked to fulfill it by founding his own business with his wife Heather in 2017, Neighborhood Produce.

The goal of the store is to provide food access to underserved neighborhoods, but it also serves as an experimental model for small produce stores being able to compete with chains that have much greater buying power. By creating their own business model and buying directly from the produce market, the store is able to simultaneously source on demand what people want and keep costs down. “We’re not relying on a distributor or relying on anybody else,” explains Gray. “We see every piece of produce that’s coming into the store before we actually bring it in.”

Hearty Meals for All has a somewhat different model in that they provide healthy, locally-sourced meals on the second Friday of every month in order to create a communal atmosphere where the social aspect of eating is just as important as the food itself.

This model would change somewhat in the wake of the pandemic as food insecurity would be heavily exacerbated, but the communal aspect of the meal would remain integral to the organization’s operation. “Most people were coming because they wanted a meal, but we didn’t think of ourselves as a hunger relief organization,” explains Tubinis. “And now in the pandemic, we saw a lot more families and college students coming to us and asking for more and more groceries. And so, we’ve been able to put together grocery packs, and we started doing deliveries and getting to know people’s dietary restrictions, medication interactions, preferences, things like that. Since we operate on a pretty small scale, we are able to have really special connections with people, which I think is great.”

Groundwork Somerville is a non-profit focused on educating the future generation on equitable food access and urban farming, as well as providing an open green space and source of fresh food for all Somerville residents.

Similar to Neighborhood Produce and Hearty Meals for All, Groundwork Somerville seeks to grow not only food, but a sense of community. “We’re really just trying to create a community space at the farm where people can be in a free public space that is outdoors and connects people to their food system and to one another,” explained Reckard-Mota.

Over the summer, Groundwork invites high-school students to work on the farm growing food, as well as attending workshops on food justice, systems of oppression, and farm education. They also manage eight different school gardens with education programs for students from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“We’re ensuring that people have a voice in shaping their food system,” said Reckard-Mota. “I think that a large part of our role is thinking about how we can create a hyperlocal food system where it’s more connected to people when our current food system is often so dehumanized and disconnected.”

While there’s no question that these organizations benefit the community in multiple ways, almost any organization or business model that is focused on providing affordable, fresh meals will face some level of economic challenges. “In urban environments, access to growing space is so hard to find and hold on to,” explained Reckard-Mota. “For us, with all the development in Somerville, we can’t afford to own the farm that we’re on. And so, we have had a lot of meetings and advocated to be able to stay where we are, but there’s definitely a chance in the next five or ten years that we could be booted off of the space.”

The rapid development of the city is just one of the litany of problems these organizations face. “Like many other nonprofits, we’re always struggling to be funded and find grants. And that’s something that could be addressed at the state, local, or federal level,” said Tubinis.