Ashley Gurvitz, CEO of LISC partner United Northeast Community Development Corporation in Indianapolis, describes how neighbors are devising and carrying out strategies to bring healthy, affordable food and independent distribution systems to an area that corporate grocery chains have ignored and abandoned.
The excerpt below was originally published on Nonprofit Quarterly:
Organizing a Community Around Food Sovereignty
By Ashley Gurvitz, United Northeast Community Development Corporation
Since January 2020, I’ve had the honor of leading the United Northeast Community Development Corporation (UNEC), a neighborhood-based community development corporation founded and led by residents of Northeast Indianapolis, a center of Black life in this Midwestern city for generations. At present, one of UNEC’s most critical projects is to convene a multi-partner collaboration in the city’s Northeast Corridor neighborhoods to transform our local food system.
I bring to this work the passion and perspective of lived experience. My family has deep roots in Northeast Indianapolis. I lived here as a young child and do again today. In the intervening years, I spent many happy times here with my grandparents and extended family. I also come from a family of grocery workers and managers. When I was little, my dad managed a large local grocery. “Ashley, go straighten the labels” was his way of keeping me busy as I watched him work.
I’ve observed the inner workings of a complex food system that, when it functions well, nourishes our bodies, families, and cultures. I saw how my father was able to bring the community into the store, forging fond and sturdy bonds between people as they sought the sustenance that everyone needs. I have also seen how, when tied to neighborhood institutions, the food system can afford the dignity of living-wage work and a chance to build lasting community and family wealth.
The Costs of Neighborhood Disinvestment
What I describe above is the food system at its best, but this system is often not at its best. Over the years, I’ve seen corporate food giants pack up and leave our neighborhoods. Folks in well-to-do white suburbs of Indianapolis don’t have to circulate petitions or mount statistical arguments to coax a supermarket chain to open its doors in their communities. The stores’ expected profit per square foot makes that a no-brainer.
Meanwhile, the answer to our own vigorous recruitment efforts is too often no. Grocery store chains say there aren’t enough households, or there’s too much risk of theft, or that neighborhood residents don’t have sufficient income to pay for the food the stores stock.
Historic disinvestment and racist assumptions shape this dynamic, just as they shape the inability of small, Black- and Brown-owned businesses to access capital and the devaluation of Black- and Brown-owned homes.
A Positive Vision of Food Sovereignty
Frankly, it is tiring to plead with outsiders to sell their products here. Unwilling to wait for others to save their community, residents of Northeast Indianapolis have enthusiastically come together to create the Equitable Food Access Initiative (EFAI).
The core idea that grounds the initiative is food sovereignty. At a practical level, this means focusing on hyperlocal solutions to food insecurity and lack of access. This includes organizing to produce our own food—food that’s healthy and varied, pleases community palates, and uplifts Black culinary traditions.
In the richest country on earth, our community ought to have quality, affordable food and see the income and wealth generated by our consumption circulate within the community, rather than being extracted by some distant corporate entity.
These ideals and beliefs are built into how EFAI works. Seeking to address the root causes of food insecurity in its own backyard, the Anthem Foundation (a philanthropic arm of the major Indianapolis-based health insurance company, Anthem, Inc.), funded the initiative with a $2.45 million grant to LISC Indianapolis. On the city’s northeast side, our collective of residents and organizations, including UNEC and local food growers, submitted the winning proposal in a request-for-proposals process, launching an intensive three-year planning and implementation process.
We meet monthly with a food-justice committee along with representatives of seven other areas of Indianapolis and citywide leaders. UNEC employs a full-time community builder tasked with representing the food initiative across Northeast Corridor neighborhoods. It also employs 10 part-time neighborhood food advocates, who are gathering diverse resident perspectives on what matters and where to begin.