Corie Luckett grew up in the Englewood neighborhood — walking distance from the newly opened Go Green Community Fresh Market (1208 W. 63rd St.). Luckett recalls having to walk to a bus stop every day in the ’90s and seeing nothing in that area. But now Fresh Market is there to provide fresh produce, meat and groceries in the Englewood corridor of 63rd Street and Racine Avenue.
“You would normally have to either go all the way to Halsted or all the way to Ashland to get those things,” Luckett said. “People can come in and not have any issues or worries about having to travel too far; just thinking about those that have children, being able to get a box of cereal or some milk and not have to go to the gas station and pay (for) an overpriced version of it when you could come to a grocery store that is dedicated to that — that’s very important for the community.”
The Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), a nonprofit, community-led organization, opened its Go Green Community Fresh Market on March 8 as a part of the Go Green On Racine project, a multi-development plan built off of years of neighborhood quality-of-life plans fused into one idea. Green on Racine is meant to revitalize the local economy, increase local resources, and enhance the overall quality of life for local residents. The Racine project is a partnership between IMAN and other grassroots organizations like Teamwork Englewood, Resident Association of Greater Englewood, and E.G. Woode.
Twenty-five years in the making, according to Alia Bilal, IMAN’s deputy executive director, the Fresh Market is a re-imagined model of the traditional neighborhood corner store that is centered on health, wellness and healing with its inventory of fresh produce, vegan and gluten-free foods. Urban farmers, local food vendors and entrepreneurs can sell their products through the market on the ground level while residents can attend wellness classes on the second story. Bilal and Sana Syed, IMAN’s senior director of strategic initiatives, said access to healthy food through the Fresh Market is part of a vision that will strengthen the 63rd Street corridor and serve as an anchor in the ecosystem of future developments in the Englewood area.
The Fresh Market operates in cooperation with IMAN’s Food & Wellness Center food pantry located across the street from the Fresh Market at 1210-1218 W. 63rd St. Bilal said together the resources will ensure Englewood residents have access to nutritious food, regardless of income.
“What we have come to realize is that people’s experiences is vast and many people that need to go to a food pantry, it’s not like they don’t have some funds, they are spending those funds somewhere,” Bilal said. “They’re just not spending them where they are because they can’t find what they need where they are. We want to be able to leverage the $55 million of grocery funds that are leaving Englewood every year to other people’s neighborhoods so that they can get what they need at the Food and Wellness Center, or they can get what they need here at the Fresh Market.”
The Fresh Market is a $5 million project, 54% of it funded by philanthropic giving (the rest is a mixture of grants and loans), Syed said. The concept grew out of IMAN’s Corner Store Campaign, an initiative that organized South Side corner store owners and community members to commit to improving healthy food access. IMAN’s campaign and work in the Englewood community helped to foster racial healing among immigrant owners and Black residents, and established an alternative corner store business model that promoted more equitable business practices.
Bilal said having a holistic integrative model that considers the fact that food insecurity is not disconnected from housing insecurity and failed educational systems is necessary. Syed said the Fresh Market will serve as a cultural hub, will feature a robust rewards program for shoppers and house a community bulletin board. Syed said the site already has the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), an electronic system that allows a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participant to pay for food using benefits, in place. Syed said the site will also serve as a platform for local food entrepreneurs and artists to feature/sell their work. Forty local vendors are connected with the space.
“We want to lift up the people that are doing good things in the community; really elevate the people and the projects and the efforts that are taking place in the community here,” Syed said. “People would often say corner store operators because their spaces were smaller, there was the excuse that they can’t carry the things that the household needs because of that small space, but we’re a 3,700-square-foot market and our inventory is like a typical grocery store. We tried to keep everything a household would need on a weekly basis, but we don’t have three different types of coconut milks; we might have one or two different types of coconut milk.”
Nine people have been hired to work at the Fresh Market, with another position waiting to be filled.
“We’re intentional about the health and wellness segment of this,” Syed said. “Englewood is in the top quartile of heart disease and diabetes related hospitalizations in the city. The Englewood quality of life plan has identified nutrition as the primary contributor to that. For us to make accessible healthy foods that are affordable — that’s something we’re going really hard on. We’re a holistic model; we have a federally qualified health center so, for us to have patrons come in, we want to create easy referral systems within our health center, so we cannot only provide people nutritious foods, but begin to help them improve their health outcomes.”
Syed said there are 6,000 residents for whom the Fresh Market will be the only store they can walk to. She’s hoping the area will benefit from the ripple effects these types of developments create. She said when construction was being completed, a shop across the street from the Fresh Market started to step up their game, aesthetically.
“We welcome that. We want to see that happen,” Syed said about the Fresh Market project. “Meeting people where they’re at now and building capacity, building purchasing power and keeping the vision and the dream alive — the community believed that this was going to happen. When all these things have happened and there has been so much consistent disinvestment, we do need to invest wholeheartedly and generously to revive what should have always been there, or what was lost.”
Bilal said it’s important when communities are thinking about how they can do these kinds of things for themselves, it’s never been enough just to have a service or a thing that you do. In order to foster health, wellness, and healing in the inner city, one has to understand that it takes years and more than just a couple of policies to tear down a neighborhood. Given the “sustained assault on Black and brown neighborhoods in a city like Chicago,” the approach is going to take an equal amount of effort and time and money, resources to build things back up or to build things to a place that they have never had the opportunity to be in the past.”
“For us to be able to get to this point, it took having to really focus, to deep dive on the health and wellness aspects of things, the deep dive on the racial tensions, and the kind of racial healing that needed to happen between these Arab-owned corner stores and the predominantly Black neighborhoods that they were situated in,” Bilal said. “It took time to build the health center and the behavioral health components that connect to each other. We have been focused for the last 25 years on building a model that can be replicable in cities across the country. But in order to do that, I think it takes a community to really understand how holistic that model needs to be in order to make a really successful venture.”
Luckett is excited to see some progress. With the Fresh Market in place, Luckett is excited to see what other improvements will be made in the area.
“It’s truly a breath of fresh air … makes a very big difference in the community that has been so forgotten,” he said. “We definitely want to see our community respected as one that takes care of our community. This is music to all of our ears, but it’s also an opportunity for the community to eat fresh. When you hear about Englewood, you hear negativity, and you don’t get to necessarily hear the story about the great things that happen — the Fresh Market is something that’s coming from greatness.”
More information about the Go Green Community Fresh Market can be found at gogreenonracine.org.
