City Greens Produce, a program operated out of Catholic Charities Midtown Center, has been providing underserved city residents with access to fresh, locally grown food for the last two years – first through community gardening, next by opening its own produce market. Now it appears it’ll be taking it on the road with a mobile market.

According to the center’s director, John Pachak, it all started when the nonprofit revitalized a community neighborhood garden and began growing and distributing food to families in mid-city St. Louis. Yet despite receiving additional subsidized boxes of food from urban greening organization Gateway Greening, the organization couldn’t support the demand for fresh produce.

An $18,000 donation last year from students at Nerinx Hall High School made it possible for City Greens to open a produce market in the basement of its Catholic Charities facility on 1202 S. Boyle Ave. The program used the capital to pay small farmers in Missouri for their fresh produce and fruit, which was then sold at-cost at the market to members, some of whom pay a $100 annual membership fee while those with annual household incomes under $30,000 are subsidized. “The membership is a mechanism that is used to subsidize food so it is at its lowest cost possible to the community, ” stated Pachak, who hopes to have 100 paid memberships this year, which would enable the organization to support 300 nonpaying members.

City Greens Produce wanted to expand its geographic impact, so it submitted a proposal for the creation of a mobile market to the 2010 YouthBridge Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation Competition, a business-plan competition for nonprofit organizations sponsored by Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Washington University. Last week, City Greens was named the winner of a $30,000 award. “The money will be used to pay for a vehicle equipped to handle and deliver produce, the cost of fuel and a driver,” said Pachak. The communities that the market-on-wheels will service are still to be determined, but Pachak expects that aspect of the operation to begin in May 2011.

In the meantime, City Greens Produce is preparing for the start of the market’s second season, which kicks off on May 27 and runs through October. The hours of operation are Thursdays and Fridays from noon to 6 p.m. and on the first Saturday of every month from 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Membership is open to the public and applications are available on the Catholic Charities Midtown Web site, midtowncc.org.

– Ligaya Figueras

By Katie O’Connor

Tags: City Greens Produce

This entry was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2010 at 2:49 pm and is filed under About town, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.