What’s up with LEAP?
Many of you may recall that last year we embarked on a long term partnership with our local food access nonprofit, LEAP.
The Local Environmental Agriculture Project (LEAP) runs our Saturday farmer’s market in Grandin and has a mission to create an equitable food and farming system which prioritizes health and abundance by supporting community initiatives, markets, farms, and farmers. We think they’re incredible. Which is why, in our own effort to support more equitable food access in our community, we have committed to donating 20% of our market revenue every year to support LEAP and their work in our community.
Our partnership with LEAP is focused on food access broadly and community organizing in the Roanoke West End and Hurt Park neighborhoods specifically. These are communities where LEAP is working to engage folks directly in building a healthy food system through their gardens and the new food hub.
Creating a healthy food system in places that are fundamentally food insecure is challenging to say the least. Doing so correctly (i.e. organically, from the ground up, with no pre-determined “benchmarks for success”, and an unshakable commitment to inclusion and equity) is even harder. Community organizing on this level fundamentally slow, difficult work with no real roadmap. It is work that doesn’t get funded or staffed easily. It is work that people and organizations often say they want to do but when the rubber hits the road they can’t or won’t stay committed. It is exactly for these reasons that we feel so strongly about the need to stay committed to LEAP and this project for the long haul. We will support this work for as long as we and the farm are still standing.
In many ways farming and community organizing are very similar vocations: they are both entirely Sisyphean in nature. The work is never done.
However, lest this sound too dire and depressing. It is awesome and exciting work. The more time we spend out in the community with folks, knocking on doors and opening conversations about food, the more we are inspired by the resilience of our city and people’s willingness to try, to engage, and to dream with us about community spaces that could be real centers for change—places where the jargony words “healthy food system” could actually become something tangible.
Please come along on this journey with us.
After all, you guys are the reason this is happening. Your support of our farm supports this work. Further, farm share members have the opportunity to chip in and support our work every week when placing orders, and many of you do! You can also, of course, donate to LEAP directly here. And you can support the work by talking about LEAP, getting involved, and helping to spread the word. It is, after all, a community effort first and foremost.