A Farmers Market For the Urban Poor
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post, Michael Lipsky writes of a farmers market founded in a Washington, D.C., suburb to meet the needs of low-income people. “It achieves this,” he writes, “not just with its location in a poor neighborhood and its accessibility by bus, but by offering a friendly environment for people to apply for food stamps and women’s nutrition programs on site.”
What sets the market apart, though, is that it is one of the first in the country to supplement food stamps and nutrition-assistance grants. “For every dollar a low-income mother-to-be spends” at the market with her benefits, he writes, “she can receive an equal amount in market coupons…doubling her purchasing power.”
“These figures suggest,” he notes, “that, to reach those in poverty, farmers markets need private programs as well as federal subsidies.”
The article, “How to bring farmers markets to the urban poor”, can be accessed at www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, a public policy organization in New York City. A former professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he worked at the Ford Foundation from 1991 to 2003 in the Peace and Social Justice program where he was responsible for the Foundation’s work on government performance and accountability.
|