Blog / Food Justice

Although DC received a healthy serving of rain last Thursday, a team of experienced and beginner gardeners showed up in Bread for the City’s SE Center rooftop garden to help get the garden in shape!

BFC’s City Orchard, in Beltsville, MD, grows fruits and vegetables for our clients nearly all year long! In October and November 2017, the Sustainable Agriculture division harvested almost 5,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables. This equates to over 3,000 servings of fresh, local, nutrient-dense produce distributed to DC residents through our farm to pantry operations.

The Sustainable Agriculture team engaged almost 300 volunteers at orchard workdays, including MG2, FINRA, The Field School, and several returning client volunteers. Read on to learn more in our City Orchard Fall Report!

Bread for the City has spent 43 years reducing the burden of poverty in Washington DC, by supporting its residents living with low income. George A. Jones has been serving as Bread’s CEO for 22 years now. In this interview he discusses the food system and the need for a change. He shares his vision of a more inclusive model and the main challenges and obstacles to getting there…

Residents in Wards 7 and 8 are walking to demand the number and quality of grocery stores similar to those west of the Anacostia

Bread for the City’s Chairman of the Board, Paul R. Taskier, reflects on poverty, racism, food justice, the wealth gap, and why Bread for the City does what we do.

“Urban gardening is my form of organizing,” Brother Rashad told us. “What we’re doing here is what I started learning with Terrance Moore. We’re bringing the community together to overcome the challenges in accessing healthy food. We empower when we impart to the community that they don’t have to be dependent on toxic, unhealthy food, and then reintroduce them to their green thumbs.”

A D.C. Policy Center report released Monday provides a current look at D.C.’s food deserts, taking into account more than just how many grocery stores are in a certain area. The report’s author, Randy Smith, points out that food access in the city is “deeply connected to both poverty and transportation.”

If you follow this blog with any regularity you’ve probably seen several posts focusing on Bread for the City’s campaign to change the third-party referral system for local food pantries. Here a ‘referral’ means a written letter from an agency/organization vouching that a client ‘deserves’ access to food, clothing, furniture, or other goods. Referrals were required as proof of a client’s eligibility – regardless of any primary proofs they could provide on their own (income statements, lease etc).