FAIR FOOD

How the Poughkeepsie Farm Project is
attempting to eradicate food insecurity

WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY LISA M. DELLWO

In the City of Poughkeepsie, though, a startling number of people have little opportunity to enjoy the local farm bounty, because they can’t afford it or because they simply can’t get to it. The number of people accessing food stamps and other government food assistance in Dutchess County, according to the USDA grant proposal, increased by 72 percent over a 2.5-year period starting in late 2007. Nearly 80 percent of students in the Poughkeepsie city school district qualify for free or reduced-price lunches (in nearby Arlington, only 10 percent require this assistance), yet almost half of the students are considered overweight by measurement of body mass index. This points to a hunger problem that is not defined as lack of food, as in drought-stricken countries, but lack of access to nutritious food, such as that grown on local farms.

What if it doesn’t have to be that way? What if urban, low-income families had the same access to fresh fruits and vegetables as everyone else, in school and at home? This is obviously a question that has been posed numerous times before, but with no consistent answer offered. Could local farms find newmarkets in urban centers like Poughkeepsie? These are the questions Susan Grove thinks about a lot. She’s the executive director of the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, a nonprofit organization focused on education and food justice.

Founded in 1999 with three acres leased from Vassar and 70 shareholders onboard, the Poughkeepsie Farm Project (PFP) now feeds 400 shareholders who pay upward of $500 a year to receive weekly allotments of produce grown on 10 acres. If that was the sum total of PFP’s mission, the story would end here: another CSA, another couple hundred middle-class families happily trying to figure out what to do with their share of kohlrabi.

But the story doesn’t end there, because the Poughkeepsie Farm Project is much more than a CSA. It has been a registered nonprofit since 2004, and has gradually added programs that teach local schoolchildren about gardening and nutrition and that address hunger. Twenty-five percent of the food grown at the farm goes to the Food Share program, which distributes produce to lowincome families. They can buy it at the Poughkeepsie Farmers Market (run by PFP) using food stamps and other government assistance, and it is also distributed to local food pantries and other emergency food-assistance programs. Some families also receive the same weekly shares as the other CSA members, at a subsidized price. These projects, the farm tours that serve hundreds of school children each year, and the new City Seeds program that provides City of Poughkeepsie youth with hands-on farming and cooking experiences, are more than enough to keep the minimal staff busy. In addition to seasonal helpers and apprentices, PFP employs Grove, farmers Asher and Wendy Burkhart-Spiegel, education manager Jamie Levato, a farmers market manager and an office manager.

The $100,000 Question

But Poughkeepsie Farm Project is becoming a player on a larger stage, an ambitious attempt to end hunger for good in the City of Poughkeepsie. Last year, Grove led a team of local agencies that successfully competed for a grant funded by USDA’s Hunger-Free Communities program. Over the next two years, the agencies will use the $100,000 planning grant to survey city residents about their food needs, conduct community forums to brainstorm solutions, and create a citywide plan for a hunger-free Poughkeepsie. Only 10 such grants were awarded nationwide with some of the other recipients being the United Way, Cornell Cooperative Extension and the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, which serves rural desert communities in Arizona.

“It’s a big deal to be recognized in that field of players,” says PFP board member Cornelia Harris. The idea of the survey and community forums, says Harris, is to learn from members of the community what can be done to address food insecurity. (This term is slowly supplanting hunger in nonprofit circles, because it refers more accurately to the challenges of affordability and access to good, nutritious food.) Would it be better to have co-ops, mobile markets and community gardens rather than one central farmers market? Could there be community cafés where people pay what they can afford for simple, delicious meals?

These are ideas that are being tried elsewhere. In Beacon, Common Ground Farm teams with the Green Teens program on a mobile farmers market that brings reduced-price produce to lower-income people. In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Vimala’s Curryblossom Café has an “everyone eats” philosophy, and diners who can afford it are asked to donate to the “food for all fund” so that anyone who walks in the door can have a meal. This model is not too dissimilar from rock star Jon Bon Jovi’s “pay-what-you-can” Soul Kitchen restaurant, which recently opened in neighboring New Jersey to great fanfare. The Edible Schoolyard program and similar projects are transforming schoolyards into organic gardens. Many home gardeners are familiar with Plant a Row for the Hungry, which asks gardeners to plan for surplus and donate it to local agencies helping the poor.

The difference between those initiatives and Poughkeepsie Plenty, as the USDA-funded initiative has been named, is in scope: the goal is to involve agencies such as Dutchess Outreach and Hudson River Housing that serve low-income families, but also churches, clubs, colleges and other organizations across the economic spectrum, forming a coalition that will transform Poughkeepsie into a place where healthy, nutritious food is part of the fabric of life, for all socioeconomic classes.

The insistence on fresh, local foods as part of the solution to food insecurity, Grove says, puts Poughkeepsie Plenty outside of the mainstream of grantees; the more common attitude is that solving hunger and addressing the health problems related to bad nutrition are separate problems. It’s easiest for people in need to access the least nutritious food, she acknowledges, and she wants to change that. “Our response focuses on nutrition, because just providing calories doesn’t address hunger,” she says. “If you’re not healthy, you’re not able to take advantage of the opportunities out there.”

Grove’s linking of hunger, nutrition and dignity is echoed by Rev. Betsy Fisher, vicar of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, a growing congregation in Amenia Union, just west of the border with Connecticut. Since 2009, the rural church has operated the Food of Life Pantry, distributing both fresh and processed food to 150 to 200 people each Friday afternoon. “When people have full bellies and are treated with dignity,” Fisher says, “They are better able to meet the challenges they face.”

Food of Life also emphasizes nutrition and is supplied with fresh organic produce each week during the summer by the nearby Sharon House Garden Project. Volunteers help maintain and harvest the 52 raised beds. According to Robin Capers, one of the two part-time employees of the pantry, the atmosphere on Fridays is sometimes similar to that at a CSA, with recipients of food exchanging recipes and ideas for preparing the week’s yield.

“We are very blessed to be the recipients of that,” Fisher says of the fresh produce. Food of Life also occasionally distributes meat and eggs from local farms, but make no mistake—the pantry also relies heavily on canned and boxed foods out of necessity.

If it’s surprising to find fresh vegetables at a food pantry, it is even more surprising to find out who the pantry’s clients are. Fisher says it’s the shrinking middle class—not those who are unemployable, alcoholics or drug addicts (although she hastens to add that those people also deserve to be treated with dignity). They’re elderly retirees whose pensions don’t stretch to cover the increasing costs of fuel and food, or people who owned small businesses that were affected by the downturn. They are well-read, they are skilled, but they are un- or underemployed. “These families look like our families,” she says. “What is wrong that 200 of our neighbors can’t afford the necessities of life?”

On The Town

There are those who would argue that the Poughkeepsie Farm Project and its partners in Poughkeepsie Plenty should skip the surveys and community meetings and do what Food of Life is doing: acquire food and distribute it to people who need it.

Susan Grove defends the planning process, though. “There are so many things that can be done,” she says. “We’re figuring out how to deploy our time and resources in the most effective way possible.” Board member Harris agrees. “It’s presumptuous for us to assume that we know what the community wants and needs.” Grove is insistent that the project will “belong” to the whole community and that it is about creating relationships between diverse groups rather than being a “top-down” effort of PFP.

When Grove talks about ending food insecurity in Poughkeepsie, it’s clear that she isn’t thinking about the traditional avenues of government aid and assistance provided by churches and other nonprofits. As important as those programs are, she says, people are still falling through the cracks. She launches into a series of questions: “How do we ensure that people can access assistance and fewer people need to access it? Could we provide dignified access to food that is not reliant on charitable responses that come and go in waves? Can we intervene in the economy? So that people can secure this basic right, that’s like air and water?”

She envisions a place where the bounty of nearby farms is deployed to help the poor—to the benefit of both. And there is plenty to go around: the New York Sustainable Agriculture Working Group reports that farm production within 100 miles of Poughkeepsie’s low-income neighborhoods is “more than adequate” to meet the community’s needs.

Susan Grove, executive director of the Poughkeepsie Farm Project

Under the Influence

Grove and her partners are listening to the community, but they clearly also have a role model in mind: the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil, whose mayor decided in the early 1990s that food is a right of citizenship. An advisory group developed a series of programs that have benefited both farmers and consumers: urban farm stands featuring produce from farmers outside the city, community gardens, People’s Restaurants that serve low-cost meals to everyone, not just diners who are poor, eliminating the stigma of having to prove need. School lunches feature farm produce. Every child eats a free lunch, not just the poor children.

Belo Horizonte is a recurring theme in the stump speech Grove is developing as she prepares to launch a series of community forums and in educational events at the farm. In October, a seventh-grade Poughkeepsie Middle School visited the farm. While half the class took a tour—tasting herbs and raspberries and learning about crop rotation—the other half joined a discussion led by a Vassar student interning at the farm. When she asked the students to list items on their school lunch menu, they mentioned pizza, chicken nuggets, “PB&J” and hamburgers. Then she showed them a photo showing a Belo Horizonte school lunch featuring salad and fresh passion-fruit juice, a lunch that every student gets free regardless of family income. And she described the community cafés in poor neighborhoods.

“Could this happen in Poughkeepsie?” she asked. They looked listless.

Then one student said, “Our city’s poor.”

“Poughkeepsie is poor?” the student leader asked sympathetically.

“No, poor as in the food.”

It’s ambitious, as well as quixotic, to imagine duplicating Belo Horizonte’s success. But maybe not impossible.

A Little Serving of Red Tape

And the project has two daunting challenges. The first is a lack of strong engagement, so far, by officials in the City of Poughkeepsie. City planning director John Morabito has attended one of the community forums and says, “If I’m available, I will probably try to stay involved.” But he confesses that Poughkeepsie Plenty is just one of a large portfolio of projects he represents for the city.

Morabito is one of those who supports the planning process, believing it is more valuable in the long run to identify solutions and organize a coalition of organizations than to simply buy food that will run out when the grant expires.

He also believes that the program can get more traction by staying at a grassroots level rather than getting involved in city bureaucracy. As for stamping out hunger—or food insecurity—in Poughkeepsie, he is politely skeptical. “That’s very, very ambitious,” he says, while adding that no matter what the outcome, the group can still have a positive impact.

The second challenge is funding. In addition to the 10 planning and assessment grants, USDA’s Hunger-Free Communities program awarded four implementation grants to communities that had already created a community action plan. Completion of an action plan in Poughkeepsie would have put the community in line to receive an implementation grant, but grantees have been advised that the funds are no longer available.

That means that the challenge—and Grove admits it’s a huge challenge—is to create a community action plan that can be sustained from within the community rather than with federal funds.

She doesn’t yet know what the details will be; that will come out of the planning process. But she says the outcome will need to involve “multiple actors in the community.” She envisions not only a hunger-free Poughkeepsie but a “food town” in the way that Beacon has styled itself an art town—a city with a vibrant urban food system that serves the entire socioeconomic spectrum.

She asks, “How cool would that be?”

farmproject.org

Eat YourVegetables

How do you get kids to eat their vegetables? One approach is to teach them to grow them and cook them. City Seeds, a new program sponsored by the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, gives a dozen or so school kids the opportunity to work in an organic garden located at Poughkeepsie High School and cook meals with the produce. Susan Grove says it’s an opportunity for kids to connect with food sources.“We’re trying to interrupt a path to diet-related disease” with positive fresh-food experiences.