Grow Southeast
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.
Our Response:
COACT in partnership with The Office of Commissioner Brooks and The Healthy Tarrant Collaboration, created Grow Southeast to function as a joint initiative to incubate urban farms. Through our efforts we help each of our farms become self sufficient and craft solutions to best serve their communities, and combat food disparities.
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
Mission: Increase food access and resiliency in Fort Worth through community centered urban agriculture.
Vision: Southeast Fort Worth as the renowned community for food, culture, and well-being for everyone, everywhere.
Objectives:
1) Incubate community owned and operated urban farms.
2) Design toolkits to help urban farmers achieve self-sufficiency and create social impact.
3) Increase the number of emerging farmers in the greater Fort Worth Area.
4) Design policies that support regenerative urban farming in Fort Worth.
Our Partners
This project would not have been possible without support from the following partners and funders.
