How to Beat a Food Desert
And Save Your Community at the Same Time
Jay Jones
President, Renaissance Community Cooperative
“What do you do when the last access to healthy food leaves town?
Organize locally, join your peers nationally, and build it yourself.”
-Jay Jones, President, RCC
After the Winn-Dixie closed, our neighborhood was declared a food desert. We recently organized to keep a landfill out of our community, so we thought, maybe we could organize to solve this too?
We tried to keep the store from leaving, we tried courting other chains to come, but to no avail.
We realized it was up to us — together we’d build our own supermarket as a community owned cooperative. We had the organization and the inspiration, but there was the obvious hole: where would the money come from?
That’s when we learned people were forming the Southern Reparations Loan Fund (SRLF), and that it was a peer in The Working World’s Peer Network. As part of the network, we could access training and capital for businesses that maximize community benefit rather than investor profit. That sounded like us.
The Southern Reparations Loan Fund and its Peer Network came through: they looked over our business plan, and they provided capital patient enough for us to get off the ground and only repay once we are successful.
