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The Austin Fresh funder collaborative is excited to announce the 2024 Call for Ideas.

The funder team supporting Austin Fresh, Builders Initiative, The Christopher Family Foundation, Food:Land:Opportunity, The Lumpkin Family Foundation and the Walter Mander Foundation, are united in the belief that access to healthy, affordable food is a human right and critical to community health. We envision an equitable Chicagoland region in which all people have knowledge of and access to healthy food.

To this end, in 2020 we created a one-million-dollar annual fund called Austin Fresh. Our aim over the five-year initiative has been to work collaboratively with partners to expand healthy retail options, support community gardens and local food production, grow food enterprises, and protect and strengthen food assistance programs in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. Learn about the 2020-2023 grantees here.

We are issuing this call for ideas to elicit projects and encourage collaboration among organizations and people who know the Austin landscape and understand the requirements for success.  Examples of the types of ideas we would welcome include (but are in no way limited to):

• Planning grants to support the early development of large scale and long-term project ideas that need more time and resources prior to implementation (see the FAQs below for more info);
• Commercial ventures, including brick & mortar stores, designed to increase access to healthy or local food while building the economy of the Austin community (provided a nonprofit organization/partner is the applicant);
• Promoting the importance of purchasing food within Austin and increasing awareness of where to buy healthy food whether that be grocery, restaurant, farmers market etc.;
• Community food gardens which increase access to healthy, affordable food, or activating and connecting Austin’s network of food growers;
• System improvement: planning for longer-term strategies around food access in order to create improved systems and build out underdeveloped ideas and strategies;
• Community kitchens and other processing enterprises that add value to food and empower entrepreneurs to build businesses and create jobs;
• Food cooperatives;
• Food as medicine and food education approaches to health which focus on diet and nutrition;
• Nutrition education, cooking classes, or community cooking efforts focused on the preparation of fresh and healthy meals, in which the work of creating prepared meals is shared to make it easier for families to eat well;
• Expanding or coordinating emergency food efforts;
• Neighborhood or school habitat projects that support food production (e.g. pollinator gardens) or which give residents greater access to nature or green spaces, even if they aren’t directly related to food production (e.g. tree planting).

We believe in a place-based model of funding. We strived to listen and learn from the community in the creation of Austin Fresh, including aligning grant making goals with Austin’s quality-of-life plan Austin Forward. Together (AFT). Community representatives from AFT’s food justice initiative, Austin Eats, will continue to inform the grant-making process.

The Call for Ideas form will open on July 29, and submissions are due August 26, 2024, 11:59 p.m. CDT. Please see the Call for Ideas and Application Question List and Guidelines & FAQs for additional information

There are two upcoming opportunities to meet with the Austin Fresh and Austin Coming Together (ACT) teams to dive into the guidelines and your project ideas. Register below!

1. Virtual Info Session, July 30, 4 pm – 5:30 pm. Held during the first hour of the monthly Austin Eats meeting, and facilitated by Austin Coming Together, the Austin Fresh team will provide an overview of the guidelines, delve into examples of projects that would be eligible for funding, and go over FAQs and the audience’s live questions. Register here.
2. Office Hours, 5049 W. Harrison, August 6, 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm. Bring your project ideas and questions to meet with Austin Fresh members and receive feedback to strengthen your application and get technical assistance with the online system. Register here.