A sustainable agriculture and food systems blog, Civil Eats, talks with James Johnson-Piett, a Philly community and development guy. He's been working with Detroit to launch a program called the Green Grocer Project. The program seeks to improve the quality of food in the city by providing assistance to Detroit's existing grocery stores. It launches May 17; read Model D next week for more details. The project is sponsored by Kresge, the city, and the Detroit Economic Development Corp.
Excerpt from
Civil Eats:I work with city agencies, like economic development, public health,
and urban planning, around designing programs for grocery development. I
was a manager of the Fresh
Food Financing program in Philadelphia and had been working with
cities like Detroit. In two weeks Detroit will launch its Green Grocer
Project, which is a grocery expansion and attraction program to help
with operations, financing and giving them a direct liaison housed in
the City for anything they need. To create a space in the city for a
grocer at any level to get involved and give them a contact for anything
they need: bookkeeping, accounting, store design, product handling, you
name it.… the Mayor will make an announcement on May 17th and it'll be
like watching my baby be born.
So yeah, I'm in that space within the larger food access movement.
But I think because I've been doing this for a little while now I see
where the pieces connect. Local grocers selling local producers products
and creating those networks and getting those networks to scale and
getting that local web connected to other local webs and connecting it
all.
Read the entire post here.
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