Grow Southeast
Building community owned urban farms to address food insecurity.
The Challenge:
Many of the neighborhoods within East Fort Worth lie within an identified USDA food desert. The region is 72 square miles and counts for 20% of Fort Worth's population. Within this area are 3 supermarkets and 5 discount grocery stores. High poverty, lack of economic opportunity contribute to food access and basic needs insecurity issues. Within urban agriculture there is a widening race and age gap of farm owners and managers. The average age of a farmer in Texas is 59 years old and 64 in Tarrant County. Most of the active farms do not have a succession plan, leaving them vulnerable to redevelopment, reducing localized food access and resiliency. Collectively, Latino and Black farmers represent less that 15% of the producers in the entire state of Texas.
Our Response:
Recognizing the economic disparities that contribute to food insecurity, CoAct in partnership with The Office of Commissioner Brooks and The Healthy Tarrant Collaboration, created Grow Southeast. Grow Southeast functions as a community development initiative to incubate community owned urban farms to combat food insecurity. Through our efforts we help each of our farmers create strategies to become self sufficient.
Long term, each farm serves as a model to expand the capacity of local community members, create policy to support urban agriculture, create narrative change towards the American urban farmer, and address the race and age gap in urban farming.
Project Objectives
1) Incubate self sustaining community owned urban farms.
2) Increase food access & resiliency in Southeast Fort Worth.
3) Increase the number of farmers representing communities of color in the greater Fort Worth Area.
4) Increase the local capacity to develop urban farms.
5) Decrease the age of farmers in the greater Fort Worth area.
Our Partners
This project would not have been possible without support from the following partners and funders.
