A collaborative effort coordinated by members of the Southside Community United for Change hopes to bring fresh, local food and provide small business development opportunities to residents of Peoria’s Southside neighborhood.
The 8-week long Southside Farmers Market is the latest demonstration project that has sprung from that collaborative effort.
Martha Ross and Dwayne Harris of the Southside Community United for Change, Brent Baker of the Greater Peoria Economic Development Council, and local entrepreneur Billy Young shared their thoughts on this year's Southside Farmers Market initiative:
Martha Ross: We are at the Southside Farmers Market at 210 Western Ave. in the old Aldi’s building. [It’s] an eight-week project. Every Saturday from ten ‘til two. This is our fifth farmer’s market.
Dwayne Harris: What I want to see this eight weeks is just...to show that we're trying to bring fresh foods to the community. We have to establish a community pride here. You know, the 61605 has gotten a lot of negative media play.
Martha Ross: We are a food desert and it's obvious that no big box stores are gonna come to our area. So we’re going to develop our own.
Dwayne Harris: This is something that we are doing in our own community, it's for our community, it's supported by our community, it gives the community an opportunity to own it. We have to establish our own community pride and show that we are doing something that attracts all of Peoria to come.
Martha Ross: We’ve been working on this for a couple of years. Last year we did a demonstration of three weeks of farmer’s markets and that was as a result of the City of Peoria actually applying for ahttps://vimeo.com/340288374"> Local Foods, Local Places technical grant. They came and they did training for a couple of days.
Dwayne Harris: It's about establishing a whole better economic system here on the south end of town, and establishing a food hub and a resource center for 61605.
Martha Ross: We hope that we develop a business model where we can continue this on.
It’s a collaborative effort. The Community Foundation of Central Illinois approved part of our grant. The City of Peoria, EDC, and the Southside Community United for Change wrote this grant together. And of course, like I say, the partners all kick in their time and energy to try to make this happen.
Dwayne Harris and I are the coordinators.
Brent Baker: Martha and Dwayne’s approach has been fantastic as well because they’ve taken this opportunity to really use this as a community building event for the 61605 neighborhood.
So the Greater Peoria EDC’s role is making sure that Martha and Dwayne have the resources they need to reach out to the community and actually find small businesses that maybe don’t have the resources for a full brick and mortar to pay rent but it's far cheaper to pop-up here for several weeks and actually sell quite a bit of goods and actually test run their business.
Billy Young: I’m a local author, I write children’s books. I was able to put in to acquire a table and the experience has been good. People have been stopping by the table and a few have even purchased. So it’s a benefit, it’s been good.
The community needs something that’s positive and so these pop-ups are providing that.
Dwayne Harris: I think that it makes Black people here come together, you know, in a positive way.
You’ve probably overlooked 61605 in the past. But now there are good things that are happening there. We don’t have no businesses? Well, watch what we do to make businesses here.
Martha Ross: We do see that this could be a year-round market. The outcome so far has been very favorable. I see it as just an initial start.
The Southside Farmers Market, located at 210 Western Ave., runs on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. through Oct. 10.
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