Blog

The Austin Fresh Funders Collaborative has made its third year of grant decisions. This collaboration consists of The Christopher Family Foundation, The Builder’s Initiative, the Lumpkin Family Foundation, the Walter S Mander Foundation and the Food: Land: Opportunity Fund, a program of the Kinship Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust. These five foundations are focused on increasing availability of healthy food in the Austin neighborhood and are pleased to announce the next round of funding.

Projects being funded this year are:

• Austin Coming Together: for their essential work as a backbone organization in Austin implementing the Austin Quality of Life Plan, and coordinating the Austin Eats community, a group of more than 20 organizations working on improving access to healthy food in the neighborhood.
• Beyond Hunger: for a second year of training community-based nutrition ambassadors who can provide cooking instruction and nutrition information focused on how to prepare healthy meals with the food available from emergency supply, in a partnership with New Moms.
• BUILD, Inc.: for the redevelopment of the expanded Iris garden and associated programming on urban agriculture and healthy food as they move into their greatly expanded new structure.
• GAP Community Center: for youth programming involving growing healthy food and learning to cook it.
• Greater St. John Family Life Center dba Austin Empowerment Coalition: for preparation of training curriculum, marketing, and staffing of new commercial kitchen in Greater St. John Church, which will be open to the community for development of commercial food products, cooking classes, and sanitation certification for those seeking employment in the food industry.
• Westside Health Authority: for the partnership with Forty Acres Fresh Market toward construction of a brick-and-mortar grocery store, specifically for marketing outreach and purchase of equipment once construction on the store is complete.