Southside Community Land Trust’s comprehensive urban agriculture programs empower growers of all ages, including children, youth, and adults with the knowledge, skills and facilitative support to harvest high yields of food from small spaces, and to build meaningful connections to one another and nature. The safe, beautiful, and productive spaces created at SCLT’s community and school-based gardens, market farms, and education sites not only allow families to grow food, they also provide places for people to connect across economic and cultural divides to revitalize their neighborhoods, and for innovative farm businesses to thrive.
This IBM Smarter Food video highlights the inefficiencies in our food supply chain, including sourcing, transport, tracking, and energy.
In Chicago, A Plan To Quench 'Food Deserts' : NPR
“Walgreens is piloting several food centers in Chicago after Mayor Daley approached the chain about helping end “food deserts” — areas bereft of grocery stores and food options. Walgreens is now selling fresh produce and light perishable groceries in low-income and/or black communities in Chicago.”
Walgreen release here.
The Better World by Design Challenge: Urban Food Deserts
A Better World by Design, the internationally acclaimed student-run conference on reshaping the built environment, wants to your ideas for eliminating urban food deserts.
What is a food desert? Quite simply, it is a geographic area with limited access to fresh, nutritious, or locally-sourced food. Obstacles to the elimination of food deserts include availability, price, proximity of sources, transportation and preservation of goods, poor environment for local farming, and lack of awareness or education.
Smart and healthy cities need accessible nutrition. How is your city addressing food deserts? What innovations have you seen in sourcing and distributing food? A Better World by Design, in partnership with IBM’s Smarter Cities Scan, is searching for practical, efficient, and visionary solutions to various aspects of the food desert problem. You can submit a post right on this Tumblr site, send it via email to smartercities@tumblr.com, or if you have a Tumblr site, just tag your post “bxdfood” and we’ll reblog it from your site to the Smarter Cities Scan.
This effort is part of the 2010 Better World Challenge, an international design competition in which the top ideas will be implemented locally in Providence, RI with the support of the municipal government.
The three most popular posts, based on the number of “likes” and “reblogs” received, will be shown in front of our audience of hundreds of global innovators and broadcast live on the web on the afternoon of October 3, just before we reveal the winner of the Better World Challenge!
A Better World by Design is an annual conference at Brown University and RISD that connects students, professionals, and individuals from a variety of disciplines to build a global community of socially conscious and passionate innovators. Find out how you can attend or watch our live stream October 1-3 at www.abetterworldbydesign.com.
