Providence

Avatar of Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

by Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

Foodies look to new west side market

April 19, 2011 in News

The Brown Daily Herald, April 19, 2011. The sustainable agriculture advocacy group Fertile Underground is opening a “vanguard corner store” in Providence, Rhode Island. Since 2009 Fertile Underground has created vegetable gardens on neglected land around the city. The store will focus on selling local produce, most grown within thirty miles of the store as well as provide customers tips on how to eat healthy on a budget. West Broadway Neighborhood Association owns the building the store will be located in and had been looking for a group to open a neighborhood grocery store in that space for some time. To fund the project, Fertile Underground is seeking small loans from community members.

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Avatar of Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

by Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

Improving Student Nutrition Outside the Classroom

January 17, 2011 in News

WRNI, January 17, 2011. This radio story describes a project supported by the Providence Healthy Corner Store Initiative. A storeowner noticed that children purchased unhealthy snacks in the morning before school at her corner store. This bothered her, so she talked to teachers at the nearby school and they started working together and asked for help from the Providence Healthy Corner Store Initiative. The Initiative donated healthy snacks to the store and gave students a raffle ticket for each healthy snack they purchased. Healthy snacks sold well at first, but the storeowner has found it difficult to keep prices on the healthy snacks affordable. The Healthy Corner Store Initiative hopes to create nutritional standards for stores near schools and to help stores make bulk purchases to save money.

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Avatar of Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

by Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

Latino Market in Providence Gets Makeover

August 15, 2010 in News

The Providence Journal, August 15, 2010. The Providence Healthy Corner Store Initiative is collaborating with high school students to increase the amounts of healthy food purchased at neighborhood corner stores. This article describes their work on a market makeover that included rearranging displays and installing new signs in Spanish to highlight healthier items. Two small ethnic stores that already offered a variety of fresh produce were eager to participate in the market makeovers. One of the Initiative partners, Farm Fresh Rhode Island, hopes that corner stores will begin to “take advantage of its ‘market mobile’ program, which takes online orders for local produce and distributes the food to restaurants and other businesses.”

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Avatar of Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

by Liz Simmons, Community Food Security Coalition

Farm Fresh Rhode Island: Making Your Corner Store Choices Healthful

May 1, 2010 in News

Wholesome Wave blog, May 2010.This blog post describes the Healthy Corner Store Initiative in Providence, Rhode Island, which was kicked off with a Corner Store Iron Chef Competition for high school students. Two stores will receive market makeovers this summer so that they can offer quality fresh produce from local farms, whole grain breads and cereals, and other healthy food options at affordable prices. The project has developed a three-tiered rating system that will be used to evaluate participating stores. See another blog posting about the Providence project here.

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