How does the Phoenix community development garden grow? With innovations like the Funds to Feed grant

Photo courtesy of Cihuapactli Collective

COVID-19’s devastating socioeconomic impact on underserved communities already struggling in food deserts required a crisis response with as many helping hands as possible doing the hard work of ensuring individuals and families avoid hunger. 

Or maybe what it took was the community development version of a green thumb, a grower’s heart and a commitment to plow new ground in grant-making. 

In addition to delivering healthy food assistance in especially hard-hit areas of Phoenix, the first-of-its kind Funds to Feed grant produced a bumper crop of fresh ideas, sustainable innovations and something we’ve seen far too little of during the time of COVIC-19 — hope. There is raw excitement in neighborhoods, among nonprofits and at Phoenix City Hall about the possibilities of a new normal that is fundamentally and systemically better than the pre-pandemic era marked by scarcity and inequity. 

With FTF, created with federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act dollars, the city of Phoenix leveraged its relationships with LISC Phoenix and its community of practice focused on food in south and west Phoenix neighborhoods to support an organic ecosystem of grassroots groups addressing food insecurity in healthy, affordable and culturally relevant ways. (The community of practice on food helped produce after several years the city’s food action program approved by the City Council in March 2020, just as efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 began.) 

While cities nationwide typically directed CARES Act funds for food assistance to food banks, Phoenix divided funds to address hunger between traditional food bank delivery and a new decentralized network of distribution through small, community organizations that typically don’t have access to grants like this because of technical and capacity barriers. 

Funds to Feed is a community development green shoot that springs up from the knowledge and commitment of Rosanne Albright, the city’s environmental programs coordinator for air quality, brownfields and food system. She combined what she learned about the grassroots community ecosystem through her work on city’s food action plan with what she knew about the capacity of LISC Phoenix to manage a sizeable grant into a pitch for FTF. 

The Phoenix city manager’s office supported Albright’s idea to decentralize some of the CARES Act funds for food assistance. The Phoenix City Council, seeing the potential for job creation and direct assistance in high-need areas during a pandemic, was even more enthusiastic about FTF. It approved more money than initially requested.

“Everybody thought it was a great idea,” Albright said. “LISC thought it was a great idea. Our community thought it was a great idea. But when it comes to actually doing it, I wondered could it really happen? And it happened.”

LISC Phoenix manages FTF, which essentially turned the grant process on its head and holds potential for permanently altering grant-making in the Valley.   

A primary goal of FTF was to remove barriers to accessing funds for small community organizations already doing the work of supporting neighbors and fighting hunger while fulfilling reporting requirements of the CARES Act. There was no better way to do that than to have representatives of community organizations at the table with LISC Phoenix to design the grant and to jury the applications. Community members were paid for that work, eliminating a potential barrier to full participation in the process.

The $878,000 Funds to Feed grant opened in August with a quick, two-week, turn-around deadline. It generated a surprising 56 applications with requests for funding totaling more than $2 million.

Enjolie Lafaurie, chief financial officer of the Cihuapactli Collective, was part of the grant design process. The collective, one of 10 FTF grant recipients, is a nonprofit established in 2015 that has a special focus on indigenous mothers and families on issues from womb to tomb. Healthy, culturally relevant food always has been central to their work. 

“I’ve never seen something like this,” Lafaurie said of the FTF grant. “It truly is a participatory action, community-based problem-solving. … It felt like such a privilege to see this process. I learned so much.”

In addition to providing more than 1,500 meal packages, the grant gave Cihuapactli Collective the capacity to support smaller organizations with their food assistance and delivery efforts and to secure a physical space that allows the nonprofit to develop even stronger roots in the community.

Joe Larios, a longtime community engagement expert who is part of the InSite Consultants group, said the FTF grant process showed the power of mutual-aid responses to crises, and it provided a prime opportunity to learn more about that practice.  

“Mutual aid is like a playground of new imagination and creativity,” Larios said. “People are seeing in very real and almost simplified terms the work that community could and should be doing. Some of it is about food. Some of it is definitely about meeting the need, but another part of it is just about how do we maintain, build and deepen relationships with community.”

Mary Stephens, also with InSite Consultants, said the long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis response was a key consideration in setting up Funds to Feed. 

“There’s a lot of thoughtful analysis that went into every aspect of this grant,” Stephens said. “It was not just about getting food to people. It’s about how we are seeding and sustaining a future for people.”

Stephens said FTF takes grant-making far-forward in evolution and she hopes the process becomes a model for philanthropy and the public sector. 

“This is a future grant,” Stephens said. “This is legit five years ahead of its time. … There’s just no way these particular groups could have gotten this money had LISC not stepped in and did a radical five-year leap into the future. … It really took a lot from LISC, frankly, to make this happen. A lot.” 

Frieda Pollack, program officer at LISC Phoenix, said FTF already has altered the way the community development organization does business, including revising its grant application template. 

“The fact that we were able to get such great response meant that it was worth it to do that (community engagement) work upfront, to think about what kind of applications we wanted to receive and build an application process with that in mind,” Pollack said.

Albright already knows Funds to Feed will inform the city’s long-term work in its food action plan that addresses food deserts and food insecurity.

“This is definitely a model for doing this work. As we start to implement all the recommendations that are in our food action plan, being able to put a grocery store in every location that wants one is not something that is going to happen,” Albright said. “What else can we do to bring food into the community? I think these types of things are going to help us to create those new ways to bring food into the area. 

“So, it doesn’t always have to be a grocery store. I would love to have more places like Spaces of Opportunity and Healthy Roots and folks like Sana Sana who do all of this great catering. All of those things can happen now because we’ve done it once. They’ve done it and they understand what it takes, and we just need to shore that up and keep it going.”