Environmental justice meets sustainable agriculture, as the AnewAmerica Community Corporation's Green Market project coordinates with local immigrant farmers.

The Green Market project offers educational opportunities for members of disadvantaged communities to learn about sustainable and organic agriculture businesses. Nearly a decade ago, AnewAmerica joined to empower improvised San Francisco Bay Area communities by creating jobs and provide appropriate training with sustainability in mind.

For the past three years, AnewAmerica has launched the Green Market project and describes it as a way to provide “a unique opportunity to build a bridge between rural and urban new American communities with the strategic purpose of building food self-reliance and sustainability over time."

The project is dually funded by the US Department of Agriculture through its Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service (CSREES), and by the Agricultural Land-Based Association (ALBA). These organizations work to foster learning for farmers, farm workers, and the general agriculture community in an environmentally healthy format. Their efforts on this project allow people from low-income communities to learn and then develop ways to produce crops in economically and environmentally sensitive manners. Through community collaboration and advocacy work, CSREES, ALBA, and AnewAmerica, is making strides to reduce poverty and increase the success of sustainable agriculture.

Green Market courses range from general business planning and marketing, to localized needs like nutrition for poverty stricken families. The project also jump starts entrepreneurial spirit. Students actively participate in how the agricultural market produces, processes, delivers, and sells products to consumers, discovering along the way that selling locally produced crops is both economically and environmentally viable. Students take part in identifying ways to enhance their prospective business in a community such as selling those local crops to the more than 100 weekly farmers markets.

Other program features allow the students to participate in the Green Banana Food Incubation Project, a program where students earn a college certificate and are paired with mentors to expose them to the trade. By working in the project’s café, students gain access to customers and a full functioning market operation. From there, students create a business plan including identifying sales opportunities in the community, as well as locating financial and credit assistance.

The program has successfully graduated 153 students earning their certificate and led 65 self-starters through the businesses start-up process in the past three years,  according to CSREES.

Photo by Flickr user Jennifer Dickert