I am voluntarily giving up not one but both of my weekend days to attend a financial meeting. Oh joy, oh fun, oh bliss.
Why, one might ask, considering I have absolutely no concept of finances or ability to create a business plan. I'm doing it for the sake of the New Orleans Food Cooperative.
Most people don't realize it, but NOLA has some of the worst food access problems in the United States. The nearest grocery store (as opposed to a corner market) is at least five miles away from our neighborhood. My neighborhood is Bywater, which is separated from the Upper Ninth Ward by one street-St Claude Avenue. While Bywater is a fairly mixed income neighborhood, full of plenty of hippies and liberals and whatever other dirty names you might like to call us, when you cross St Claude to the Ninth it's nearly uniformly poor. I hope I'm not making too much of a generalization, but most in that neighborhood cannot afford to 1. pay high prices for groceries or 2. take a lot of time out of their day to make their way five miles to a lower-priced grocery store. So what happens? Most end up buying groceries at the corner markets or meals from the po'boy shops. Not too many fruits and vegetables in those locations.
So the mission of the NOLA Food Coop is to allow access to healthy, fresh, affordable groceries for everyone. We've been offered a 5,000 square feet space that straddles the Bywater, St Claude and St Roch neighborhoods--places where people desperately need access to groceries.
But now what we need is a plan, a way to make sure that this is feasible. And that's what we're doing this weekend, sketching out that plan.
It feels sometimes like I never rest. This weekend, of all weekends, I could've used some good-old-fashioned down time. But this is important to me. If I didn't go, and didn't offer all that I could, what would I be? Just someone who blahs and blabs and blogs about the importance of food but never actually does anything to change the situation. So instead I'll whine a little about the lack of free time and go give a bit of myself
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Now playing: Jack Johnson - Sitting, Waiting, Wishing
1 comment:
That sounds like a very worthy thing to do.
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