Austin Fresh Grant

The Lumpkin Family Foundation and collaborating foundations are united in the belief that access to healthy, affordable food is a human right and critical to community health. We envision an equitable Chicagoland region in which all people have knowledge of and access to healthy. The program exists to expand healthy retail options, support community gardens and local food production, grow food enterprises, and protect and strengthen food assistance programs in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side.

Examples of the types of ideas we would welcome include (but are in no way limited to):

• Community food gardens which increase access to healthy, affordable food
• Neighborhood or school habitat projects that support food production (e.g. pollinator gardens) or which give residents greater access to nature (even if they aren’t directly related to food production)
• Community kitchens and other processing enterprises that add value to food and empower entrepreneurs to build businesses and create jobs
• Food cooperatives
• Nutrition education or cooking classes focused on the preparation of fresh and healthy meals, or community cooking efforts, in which the effort of creating prepared meals is shared, to make it easier for families to eat well
• Food as medicine approaches to health which focus on diet and nutrition
• Commercial ventures designed to increase access to healthy or local food while building the economy of the Austin community (provided a non-profit organization is the applicant)