Healthy Corner Store Action Conversation
Appetite For Change, and the Northside Fresh Coalition is excited to be able to bring Urbane Development to Minneapolis in June for a tour of North Minneapolis, various corner store visits, and a strategy session with you all as stakeholders. Northside Fresh is interested in working with a corner store owner to do a complete head-to-toe remodel makeover to create a “model corner store” that is designed more like a small grocer with many different fresh and staple food options. We also hope to explore the “Adopt-a-Shop” model with community based organizations sponsoring the store(s) in order to market the store to customers, provide TA to the store, and help ensure its success. These efforts would compliment and enhance the city-wide marketing and
promotion efforts of the staple food compliant stores and those stores that are making changes.
Urbane is is an NYC-based community development venture that cultivates innovative solutions to build dynamic neighborhoods and positively impact underserved communities. They specialize in helping food-based enterprises and entrepreneurs to take their businesses to the next level, not only as a strategy for creating local wealth but also as a way to begin to address the social inequity caused by a failure in the marketplace to provide quality, affordable food purveyance in dynamic, diverse, but underserved communities.
Some of you may know Urbane’s Principal Founder and CEO James Johnson-Piett. Prior to founding Urbane Development, James served as program manager for the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative – a $120M public/private loan fund at The Food Trust in Philadelphia. He also managed the Trust’s Healthy Corner Store Initiative and Green Supermarkets Initiative, which worked to integrate sustainable design and development practices into supermarket development. From policy ideation, to accessing available financing, to construction and infrastructure development, to operational technical assistance, James and the Urbane team have utilized a myriad of methods to help create more sustainable grocery environments for underserved communities throughout the
country.
This process is one that will take multiple partners and much effort in planning and collaboration. There are many needs and potential for partnership…this is where you come in.
Please join us for this stakeholder strategy session with James and the Urbane Development team. It will be interactive, action oriented, and we will leave with a plan to move this project forward with at least one store owner on the Northside.
We hope you can make it!
Cheers,
Appetite For Change