We’re exploring the role of food in the fight for justice.

In a city full of diversity, Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) of Minneapolis works hard to bring people that are often so apart, together. Using food as the mechanism to address culture, education, health, policy, and justice, PUC has built an ecosystem of food resiliency programs to lift up the Minneapolis community. With numerous urban gardens, food shelves, hot meals, a one-of-a-kind community grocery store, and season-less hydroponic farm, PUC sets the standard for how supporting community with community can create incredible change.

Ethan and Micah of PUC are the featured guests in our July 22nd live discussion, but they sat down to the Freight Farms team in advance to share the inspiring details of how their organization tackles food inequality and community health.

Interested in joining our chat with Pillsbury United Communities? Register for free here. 

About Pillsbury United Communities

Pillsbury United Communities (PUC) is a non-profit organization built on the belief that systemic problems can’t be solved without systemic and holistic solutions. Since its founding in 1879, the organization has focused on helping various Minneapolis groups thrive with a united system of programs, community centers, and social enterprises. At PUC, it’s not about telling others what to do from a place of superiority. It’s about uplifting the community with the values of creativity, justice, resilience, connection, and kindness.

Throughout its 141-year history, PUC has been on the forefront of community service. Today, their roster of services is even more impressive, with a huge range of community and social enterprises that range from physical and mental health to childcare, truancy prevention, and much more.

At the center of many PUC programs, you will find food. As Food Systems Manager, Ethan Neal has been fueling PUC with his passion for food justice and urban farming for the past nine years. Newer to the cause–but no less passionate–is PUC’s new Freight Farmer Micah Helle who, in spite of joining in May 2020, is already an invaluable team member bringing food access to Minneapolis residents.

The many faces of Minneapolis

From the very beginning, Ethan gave us the lay of the land, saying that it’s impossible to understand what PUC is trying to accomplish without understanding the diversity of the communities they serve. 

The Phillips Neighborhood (Waite House Community Center)

The Phillips neighborhood has one of the lowest median incomes in Minneapolis, averaging $29,000 annually per family. The community is made of black and indigenous people of color (BIPOC) and is also home to the largest urban Native American population in the country. The Phillips neighborhood especially emphasizes the city's glaring economic disparities, with middle-class communities existing mere blocks from tent cities that house thousands of homeless people. 

Cedar-Riverside (Brian Coyle Community Center)

Cedar-Riverside might be only a few miles from Phillips, but it is home to another completely separate community: East African immigrants and refugees. With this new population comes different considerations, such as providing the necessary refugee and immigration services. 

Northside (Oak Park Community Center)

Travel to Northside Minneapolis and you find yet another rich and diverse community, this time composed mostly of African Americans, and the result of strict government redlining in the not-so-distant past.

Yet, one thing remains clear: in a city so full of mixed cultural backgrounds, food becomes an essential service–not just as means for survival, but to reinforce diverse cultures and give residents the dignity they deserve.

Beyond the Food Pantry

For the Southside community, PUC operates two ‘food shelves’ and two daily hot meals programs. The focus of this outreach is not just providing calories: The organization works to create a robust ecosystem that tackles culture, health, and nutrition. 

With four outdoor urban gardens in the area, Ethan and his team ensure that both the food shelves and the daily meals are infused with fresh and healthy options. This is the main difference compared to more traditional approaches that rely on canned food, which are chock full of sodium and exacerbate every health issue already seen in the community

Beyond food and health, Ethan and his team recognize the function of food and farming in culture. They work hard to provide the diverse communities with ethnically-relevant foods–like masa for the Latinx community. They also use the farms as community touch points. One farm is an East African garden that is operated by community elders in Cedar-Riverside's Somali community with the purpose of teaching the younger generation about their heritage.

More than a grocery store

North Market is a one-of-a-kind Black-led grocery store that serves the Northside Minneapolis community. A long time in the making, the store is the result of joint efforts between PUC donors, the community, and the neighboring North Memorial Hospital.

The need for the store was first observed when PUC was asked to conduct research about why the Northside community–which had one of the highest populations enrolled in SNAP and WIC benefits–had an unusually low usage rate. The answer was blatantly obvious: there was no grocery store in the area. North Market was born then, not only as a local grocery store in the middle of the food desert, but as a center for community health as well.

The idea was to help residents untangle the complicated web of food, nutrition, and health with pharmacists on hand to explain new medications and staff members available to build custom meal plans and help with the shopping. There is even ‘Talk to a Doctor Wednesday’ to make talking to physicians less intimidating and encourage more regular check ups and better self-advocacy.

North Market is also home to the PUC Freight Farm–literally! The 320-sq-ft container farm resides in the store parking lot, and is currently ramping up to make the community access to fresh food a year-round possibility (Minneapolis being highly seasonal). With food from the on-site Freight Farm, the local urban gardens, and 35 local entrepreneurs, the North Market shoppers can use their SNAP and WIC benefits to buy healthy, nutritious, local, and fresh food at an affordable price. 

The Community Freight Farm

Ethan inherited the Freight Farm from another PUC team when he came into his role as food systems manager and–initially–wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it. He decided to find a farm manager to help bring the farms full potential to light, and Micah could not have been a better fit.

Formerly from Chicago, Micah was surrounded by urban agriculture their entire life. After graduating with a B.S. in Biology and spending their summers interning at various urban farms, Micah decided to pursue a career in agriculture. They joined a 40-acre organic farm and fell in love with the climate-control capabilities of greenhouse growing. It also was during this time that they came across hydroponics, and they got involved in a year-long urban hydroponic training program where they learned to operate the Freight Farms Leafy Green Machine™, fatefully the same farm model that PUC already had. 

During their training program, Micah learned a lot about commercial farming and growing popular crops to be sold at high prices in upscale grocery stores. However, they always had a passion for food redistribution, access, and security, and really wanted to find their way into the world of nonprofits where they could leverage their expert knowledge to help grow food for people at prices they can afford.

For the past two months, Micah has been operating the PUC Freight Farm, getting it ready to serve the North Market community. They are growing eleven flavorful crops–3 varieties of mini compact romaine lettuces, green oakleaf, basil, Thai basil, rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, sage, and mint–to be harvested and delivered to North Market and the food shelves mid-July. 

Micah views their role as a bottom-up approach, starting with growing the food, but then expanding into more of a community role as they spend their time at the store interacting with the customers. 

Micah sees feedback as a crucial part of their role, and the key difference between their non-profit work and the commercial farming they did in the past. They are also looking forward to the next phase of their role (offset for the time being by COVID-19): teacher and trainer for more urban farmers.

Coming ‘Full Cycle’

The last hurdle the food services team sought to fix was distribution. How could they make their local food initiative more impactful, more helpful, more sustainable? The solution was to partner with one of PUC’s other social enterprises–Full Cycle. 

Full Cycle is a community bike shop and bike mechanic training program for at-risk youth where community members can learn how to build, fix, and sell bikes. As of July 2020, the enterprise helps transport food from point to point, with couriers picking up freshly harvested food from the Southside gardens and delivering them to North Market to be sold. There, they pick up any unsold (yet still edible) food and bring them back to the Southside to be distributed through the food shelves, cooked into healthy meals, or (as a last resort) composted back into the gardens. Not only does the bike delivery service eliminate all fossil fuels from PUC’s local food system, but they give a whole new meaning to the name “full cycle”.

COVID-19 and the killing of George Floyd 

More than any city in the country, 2020 has been a year of fear, grief, trauma, and rage for the citizens of Minneapolis. Just as the city left the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind, the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd destroyed the remaining normalcy and security that citizens were clinging to.

For Ethan and Micah, this was a time of transition from one crisis to another, with PUC firing on all cylinders to keep their community safe and fed. The trouble, they describe, is that crises typically work on a three-week cycle: For three weeks there is an outpouring of resources and donations that quickly trickle down to nothing in the weeks and months that follow–even though the need is still ongoing. This is where PUC steps in with their established services and long-term vision that was not only forged in a similar crisis (the 1919 flu epidemic), but has been seeing and tackling many of the same issues over it’s long career.

As the news cycle moves on and donations for both COVID-19 and George Floyd/Black Lives Matter dwindle, PUC’s programs are sometimes all that people can rely on for fresh food and healthy meals. Today–in the aftermath of vandalism and looting in the Northside neighborhood–North Market is the only viable grocery store in a 10-mile radius. When we asked Micah and Ethan how Freight Farms and our community can help, they said unanimously: donate. Donations help PUC run their expert operations and ensure that their community members stay healthy and safe during any kind of crisis.

If you’re interested in supporting Pillsbury United Communities, visit pillsburyunited.org/donate/. You can choose to designate your donation to one of the awesome programs we’ve discussed in this article (Full Cycle, North Market, Food Access Programs), or any other initiative that is near-and-dear to you. 

Check out our conversation with Ethan and Micah to hear more about Pillsbury’s fight for food justice.