Senior Farmer Market

At A Glance

Location: 

Springfield, Massachusetts

Primary Issue Area:

  • Food
  • Climate Change & Energy

Active since:

2019

Our Purpose

 Project Summary:For the past 5 years we have been operating as a Senior Mobile Farmers Market. Are goal has been to provide our community members with locally grown produce through delivering to those whom have limited transportation and recieving snap benifits as well as senior summer coupons. We have done outreach, hosted workshops, cooking demonstrations and even have a vertical mobile grow space of our very own ! We're online and we deliver but the biggest problem we seem to face now is prgram funding being cut. One of the programs is HIP (healthy incentives program) which allows snap users to spend a percentage of money based in household size to purchase only from Farmers. Well that program as we know it was cut last year$20 per household. And this year even more cuts will be made with the funding freeze. This has us restructuring ourselves to a Co-op model. Allowing every memeber to have equal say along with more support in the work we are doing.. We are now in process of getting our own parcel from the city to grow!! Our vertical grow trailer is in its 3rd season helping us extend our grow season. Our mobile trailer for delivering, markets and events. This will allow us to add more farmers and grows from the community.  It will also give us the opportunity to charge membership fees to help pay for equipment up keep, tools and community events!! This model will allow us to more self substanable in growing food for the community.