In the Eastern North neighborhood of Philly, residents and community activists found a simple but powerful way to slash grocery bills and consume more fruits and vegetables at the same time. Together they formed a food buying club to purchase produce in bulk. The club, and the LISC AmeriCorps member who helped get it off the ground, have even won props from Washington.
Not all wholesale clubs are enormous chains in cavernous buildings, with names like Sam’s or BJ’s. A small group of people who decide to take action about the high cost and poor quality of food in their own neighborhood can cut out the middleman, too, nourishing a community’s nutritional choices and social networks at the same time.
That’s exactly what happened in the Eastern North section of Philadelphia, where 60 percent of the primarily African American and Latino residents live below the poverty line, one in four are out of work and the stress of food insecurity plagues many neighborhood families. When every dollar counts, and full service grocery stores are few and far between, $2 per pound for onions or tomatoes at the corner store is prohibitively expensive. People are more likely to buy cheap, high-energy, processed products with little nutritional value to make that dollar go further.
It was this critical need for access to well-priced, quality food that got residents and neighborhood activists talking at Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha (APM), a community development agency with a 45-year history of working to improve life for residents of Eastern North. APM has been exploring ways to address food insecurity since 2011, when neighbors named it a high priority as part of a planning process with LISC’s Building Sustainable Communities initiative.
What if families joined together to buy fresh produce directly from a wholesaler? A project like that, though, takes a committed organizer to see it through.
Last year, with the help of a LISC AmeriCorps member named Bridget Palombo, the APM Food Buying Club was launched. In just a few months, some 400 families have been able to buy affordable, fresh produce through the bi-weekly program and, unlike most food pantries and community-supported farm shares, residents order exactly the items and quantities they want. Member volunteers help oversee the weekly distribution. The APM Food Buying Club is as user-friendly as it is transformative and can serve as a blueprint for similar programs elsewhere in Philadelphia and beyond.
APM’s program has been so successful in increasing access to healthy food and improving the diets of Eastern North families, while saving them more than $80,000 collectively, that it won Palombo the inaugural Harkin Award for Excellence in AmeriCorps Programming. The award, given by the federal Corporation for National Community Service, was named for retired U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin who has championed AmeriCorps at a time when proposed congressional budget cuts could slash the program.
When Palombo started out with APM, she was immediately struck by the contrast between the many Philadelphia neighborhoods enjoying a restaurant renaissance and those where families struggle to afford groceries. In Eastern North, “we still have people who are trying to get food as a bare necessity to survive, not just food that is a luxury or something new they want to try,” said Palombo, 32, who grew up in rural Louisiana and knows what it’s like to live on limited means.
The club works by collecting orders and payment up front—on average, families spend $22 for about 31 pounds of produce of their choice. A recent order form listed 30 items, ranging from locally grown red potatoes to spaghetti squash to Macintosh apples. With orders in hand, Palombo and two colleagues from APM make an early morning trip to Philadelphia’s wholesale produce market, where staples like onions, tomatoes and string beans sell for less than half the supermarket price. Member volunteers and APM staff sort, organize and distribute the food at pop-up locations each week.
In the club’s first week eight families joined in a pilot run, buying ingredients for a traditional mixture of vegetables and spices called sofrito, a staple of many Latin-influenced dishes. Jennielee Ortiz, an Eastern North resident who joined the APM Food Buying Club, was delighted to see her outlay for sofrito ingredients drop by almost half. “I used to spend $35 and sometimes the ingredients were poor,” says Ortiz. “Now I spend $20, and they’re fresh veggies and great quality.”
The benefits of the club seem to be multiplying. One year into the program, up to 125 families participate on a bi-weekly basis. By saving 40 to 60 percent a week on produce, families can reserve a portion of the household budget for other necessities. Members can “take this cash and put it toward utilities, school supplies, and other things that they need for the household,” says Palombo.
The savings also means people are buying more produce than before, and eating more healthfully. The club has already purchased more than 40,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables, and members have shared stories of losing weight and feeling better. Eastern North, like low-income communities across the country, suffers from high rates of nutrition-related chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes. The scarcity of affordable, healthy food—especially fruits and vegetables—is partly to blame.
But just as important as improved nutrition and savings are the community ties made through the club. Members volunteer to sign up their neighbors, collect payments and distribute the produce at pop-up pick up sites each week. Some of the residents involved admitted they didn’t know their neighbors before they joined the club; now, through volunteering, they have made friends and strengthened social ties.
Those connections and relationships with and among residents are important for neighborhood revitalization because they bring diverse stakeholders together to improve the neighborhood comprehensively. “APM engages with hundreds of residents and organizations to achieve common goals set by the community,” explains Nilda Ruiz, APM’s president and CEO.
Of course, the food buying club did not burst onto the Eastern North scene fully formed. Palombo says she was first encouraged to “experiment and feel out what was going on in the neighborhood.” With support from APM and LISC AmeriCorps, Palombo was able to develop the program in collaboration with the very Eastern North residents who wanted it. “It is important to involve residents in these projects, which is what AmeriCorps makes possible,” says Andrew Frishkoff, director for Philadelphia LISC. Without member volunteers, the program would flounder.
The success of the club also highlights how small federal investments in programs like AmeriCorps can make an extraordinary difference in communities. In fact, for every federal dollar invested in AmeriCorps, there is a return of almost $4 in community-wide earnings and other benefits, according to a government study. But in spite of a clear return on investment, and the strength of its public-private partnerships, AmeriCorps continues to be threatened with budget cuts year after year. This year, Congress has proposed cuts of 20 to 50 percent, which would decimate AmeriCorps’s activities. And programs like the APM Food Buying Club would never get off the ground.
LISC AmeriCorps puts special emphasis on matching members with communities so that both sides benefit and have an affinity with each other. “When we place LISC AmeriCorps members with local nonprofits, the members already understand the dynamics in play because they’ve lived them,” said Stacey Rapp, LISC AmeriCorps program director. “AmeriCorps is about giving low-income residents the skills to build a career in community development, just as it is about lifting the prospects of the struggling neighborhoods where they live through meaningful service.”
Palombo and the rest of the staff of APM hope the Food Buying Club will catch on in other neighborhoods and, eventually, other cities. “The whole model is replicable and has low-starting costs,” said Palombo, who is now an APM employee. “I see this expanding so that other communities and organizations can do the same thing, and reach other families.” Which means more people eating better, saving money and building relationships.