After months of waiting, Jo Deming is glad to see Pittsburgh’s Food Justice Fund about to bear fruit.
The city approved the first-of-its-kind $3 million investment to improve food access and address food deserts back in 2023. But it’s taken more than a year to set up the application process, and the clock is ticking to allocate federal COVID-relief ARPA dollars, which fuel the fund, before the end of the year.
That has led to a tight timetable for applications: The city put out its request for proposals on August 9, but Sept. 13 is the last day to send in an application for the most generous grants.
“I’m glad things are moving forward, but anxious about the short time,” said Deming, the executive director of the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council. “Until I see these contracts get executed by the end of the year, we probably won’t rest.”
The goal of the program was to increase investment in an equitable food system — one that addresses the need of “food deserts” where access to healthy food is limited. But Deming and some other applicants worry about whether the money will make it to the grassroots-level organizations that were originally excited by the fund.
Deming and her organization have been involved with fund planning and implementation since the beginning. And she said she’s hopeful “that the funds [are] directed to areas impacted by food apartheid, and leaders in those communities that have been working for so many years to address these issues.
“So that is my hope. And we'll wait and see.”
Who gets the funds?
The $3 million fund is split into two separate pools. Tier 1 is for small community organization grants, whose value would range from $2,000 to $75,000; Tier 2 will allocate grants of up to $500,000 for larger investments in the food system.
Tier 2 applications are due today, and grants will be awarded through the city’s standard procurement process. They’ll be scored and selected by an internal committee of city staff, and then presented to City Council for its approval.
Lisa Freeman, who owns and operates Freeman Family Farms and Greenhouse in Pittsburgh’s Manchester neighborhood on the North Side, is one of the applicants. She hopes to receive funding for her grocery and to help expand operations at local farms.
She worries that the larger-scale grants will end up going to bigger, better-resourced nonprofits — the kind that have more grant writers and more capacity to turn around applications quickly.
“It's all the big fish who know how to grant-write, and who traditionally get all these grants. It seems like once again, they're gonna swoop down,” she said.
Freeman, meanwhile, crafted her application alongside other farmers in order to put together an application for the larger grant money pool.
“We're joining resources so that we can grow our individual farms,” she said. “Urban farms you can only do so much on so small [of] a plot of land. But when you join resources, you can grow in collaboration and create scale.”
Even so, grassroots groups are not familiar with some of the contracting requirements that come along with federal money, or with requirements that would-be recipients demonstrating a good-faith effort to obtain the participation of minority, women, veteran, or LGBT+-owned organizations.
Freeman said it was difficult to stay on top of the requirements: “[It’s] like, wait a minute, I can't stay abreast of it. And I'm sitting in every meeting like, ‘Wait, where did this come from?’”
While the Pittsburgh Food Policy Council supports efforts to include minority and women-owned contractors in the process, Deming said the application can be confusing for grassroots groups.
The process “is not built around nonprofits, even though it's open to for-profits and nonprofits,” she said.
In general, Deming said, it’s important to “make sure that large corporations aren’t scooping up the bulk of the funds,” especially in “communities that have really been driving solutions and [should] have priority for funding.”
Deming said there had been early discussion about only accepting applications from organizations with a budget under $1 million, in order to make sure that community organizations benefited from the grants. But that approach was dropped.
Olga George, a spokesperson for Mayor Ed Gainey’s office, said a budget cap was not added to make sure that the “widest range of strategies and solutions” were considered. And she said that the fund would prioritize investing in serving communities of higher need.
“After reviewing proposals to ensure [they] meet the requirements of these federal funds,” she said in the statement, city staff will consider other criteria “including connection to community and equitably serving communities of higher need.”
That approach makes sense to Ken Regal, executive director of the nonprofit Just Harvest.
“I think it's reasonable to not have a specific budget cap on the organizations that are allowed to apply,” he said. “There may be very large entities that have a very good, smart, focused idea that we wouldn’t want to exclude just because the applicant is the size of the United Way or the [Greater Pittsburgh Community] Food Bank or the YMCA.”
‘Something we need to build on’
The smaller-grant Tier 1 program does have a budget cap on applicants: Only nonprofits with annual budgets of $500,000 or less may apply.
“Larger organizations and even medium-sized organizations are only allowed to apply in the tier of the larger grants,” said Regal.
The application period for the smaller grants hasn’t yet opened, but is set for sometime later this fall, according to George. The process for awarding them will be different: While the Tier 2 program will be handled by the city, applications for the smaller grants will be reviewed and selected by a Food Justice Fund governance committee. Funds will be administered by nonprofit New Sun Rising.
The smaller program will also have more time to spare. The money funding the grants comes from a federal COVID aid program, which requires money to be allocated by the end of this year. The city meets that deadline by committing the funds to New Sun Rising, George says, even if the money isn’t in the hands of applicants until the new year.
Freeman, for one, plans to apply for both a Tier One and Tier Two grant with the hopes of receiving money for resources for her ongoing grocery store project.
“I'm not letting it discourage me,” she said of the prospect of being pitted against much larger groups for the Tier 2 grant. “I'm using a little bit of ‘work smarter, not harder.’ Rather than be discouraged, let's see how we're going to get together and get that money.”
In any case, food-justice organizations say that $3 million won’t solve all of Pittsburgh’s food problems, no matter who ends up receiving them.
“While we're happy and excited for these funds, it’s really something that we need to build on and leverage in the future to improve our food system and build food justice,” Deming said. “It's going to take time and sustained investment.”
In that same spirit of sustainability, Regal said he hopes the fund will back initiatives that address the “more structural causes of hunger and food access problems,” rather than simply provide charitable food distribution.
“Charity can alleviate the problem, but not solve it,” he said. “We see the Food Justice Fund as a critical new tool for the kind of transformational change that actually produces food justice, instead of just food charity.”
Jamie Christian, founder and executive director of Lettuce Turnip the Beet Sustainability Collective, says she too hopes the programs sustained by the fund are the sort that “teach a man to fish.”
“It's great to be able to provide a one-time resource, she said, “But if it's something that can help people ward off food insecurity for a sustained period of time, it’s going to have a greater impact.”
