Community Design Center of Minnesota

The Community Design Center of Minnesota operates a year-round Youth Enterprise in Food and Ecology project for low-income, minority, immigrant, and refugee youth aimed at helping them:

• Improve their health through cooking and nutrition
• Become environmental leaders and stewards
• Develop work skills
• Explore and pursue careers related to food and ecology

Overall Youth Enterprise in Food and Ecology project activities include:

• Family cooking/nutrition classes
• Garden Corps and Conservation corps Internship programs
• A variety of environmental learning projects
• A leadership program

Our request: WedgeShare funds will be used to support our cooking/nutrition classes and food tasting sessions for 1,200-1,400 fourth grade children and their parents at St. Paul Elementary Schools. Funds will also be used to teach 25 youth in our Garden Corps internship program how to grow and market food and serve as teaching assistants in our cooking and nutrition classes.

The Cornucopia Institute

The Cornucopia Institute is fighting for the integrity of organic farming and the authenticity of organic food by uniting family farmers with consumers and cooperatives. Cornucopia is spotlighting factory-farms using questionable production shortcuts - threatening the future of local organic farmers. Our national scorecard rating all organic dairy brands separates factory-farm (2000-10,000 cows) and family-farm brands, helping consumers and cooperatives support/reward ethical producers in the marketplace.

Do you want "organic" eggs from 1,000,000-bird henhouses? Our investigation will offer choices for consumers and cooperatives.

Soy imports from Brazilian rainforests are flooding U.S. markets. Our upcoming soy scorecard will help consumers identify brands made with beans grown by Midwest farmers and processed without toxic hexane.

Cornucopia is challenging the legality of USDA's almond chemical pasteurization mandate. We are protecting organic almond farmers and consumers' freedom of choice. Help us win this struggle for the heart and soul of organics!

Emergency Foodshelf Network

The Emergency Foodshelf Network (EFN) is a local nonprofit organization that collects, warehouses, and distributes high quality food and provides essential support services to Minnesota hunger relief organizations. The WedgeShare grant will be used to support Harvest for the Hungry - a program that partners with Community Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) to bring fresh, locally grown produce to Minnesota families facing hunger. The program uses dedicated donations to purchase shares from local CSA's - these donations are powerful because EFN matches the cash amount and some CSA's make additional in-kind donations. Produce donated through Harvest for the Hungry is distributed for free to member programs - making a direct impact on the fight against hunger and improving the nutritional quality of food distributed to Minnesotans facing hunger. This partnership is a local initiative that improves local communities in several highly connected areas.

Farmers' Legal Action Group

Farmers' Legal Action Group (FLAG) is a 22-year old non-profit law center in St. Paul that has helped thousands of family farmers succeed in their struggle to stay on the land. We seek Wedge members' support for our work advancing the cause of the community-based foods systems in Minnesota that provide us with bounties of fresh, healthy, economical food. We work with an increasingly diverse community of family farmers that is growing, processing, and selling food locally. Often, farmers are as challenged by regulations and contracts as by weather and weeds. FLAG has some of the savviest agricultural lawyers around, and we help family farmers understand those regulations and contracts - at no charge. We are often the only resource farmers and their local communities have as they work to develop - and thrive - in the local foods systems that support the production, sales, and, best of all, consumption of local, community-based foods.

Gardening Matters

Gardening Matters (aka GardenWorks) supports and promotes community gardening in the Twin Cities metro area. Gardening Matters is a clearinghouse for community gardening, helping people join or start a community garden.

Today, most gardens have waiting lists, even as demand for garden space increases as food and gas prices rise. Gardening Matters is responding to the increased demand for local produce by working with groups and organizations to start more community gardens.

This year, we will work with community organizations to examine the issues, challenges and opportunities for establishing neighborhood-based urban food production within the cities and make our local food system more just and equitable.

With your partnership, community gardening and fresh produce will be accessible to more people, and ensure that gardeners continue to network, share resources and lessons learned, and brainstorm ideas that will increase the garden's capacity and enhance its role within the community.

Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy

Founded in 1986, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) envisions a world of prosperous family farmers, vibrant rural and urban communities, a resilient environment and healthy food for all. We believe that farmers are vital to our quality of life, including the quality of our food, our health, and our environment. In a greater sense, we work toward a world where the good of the whole is paramount, where fairness and social justice pervade, and where quality of life is much more than just a financial measure.

Over the past several years, IATP has worked extensively on Minnesota-based food system projects. We have recently begun exploring ways to increase the amount of healthy foods in corner stores that serve low-income neighborhoods in south Minneapolis. With a WedgeShare grant, we will leverage our connections among NGOs, businesses and governmental organizations that deal with public health and food-related issues to help residents of underserved neighborhoods gain access to healthy foods.

Local Fair Trade Network

The Local Fair Trade Network brings together the growers, sellers, and eaters of food to cooperatively build a food system that is just and healthy for everyone. LFTN seeks funding for the Local Fair Trade Certification System program. This program provides verifiable information to consumers that certified farms and sellers operate under principles of respect, justice, health and safety, and sustainability. Additionally, the program supports community organizing and cross-constituent communications, leading to far-reaching changes in our food system. A WedgeShare grant would help us include migrant farm workers in setting fair standards by providing them the financial ability to stay in the area after the 2008 growing season ends, completely localize the certification process, using local certifiers and advisers to audit and certify farms, and build a comprehensive local food website to assist consumers in finding, learning about, and cooking local, and local fair trade, foods.

Southside Family Charter School

Southside Family Charter School serves 100 inner city Minneapolis youth with a vibrant social justice curriculum that links them with individuals and organizations working to make our community a better place. We are asking the Wedge for $10,000 to contract with chef and sustainable educator and practitioner Jenny Breen to conduct Just Food, a program for our students and families, helping them learn about the issues involved with food and giving them experience preparing healthy food. The two key elements will be:

Classroom instruction on food issues that is integrated into various subject areas at the school; and Family Cooking Nights, bringing students and their families together to learn how to prepare an affordable, delicious dinner using locally grown and other organic food purchased from the Wedge.

Through this, we will prepare the next generation and their families to make "Just food" a way of life.

Universal Health Care Action Network of Minnesota

Universal Health Care Action Network of Minnesota (UHCAN-MN), founded in 2003, is a grassroots health care reform resource center and action network, empowering communities to create fundamental health care system change. The current fragmented and complicated non-system of health care in the U.S. and Minnesota tragically leaves hundreds of thousands uninsured, bankrupt, and at high risk of illness and death. As a solution and lifeline to this worsening crisis, UHCAN-MN has decided to form a MN Health Fund Cooperative in which uninsured and underinsured Minnesotans, including cooperatives, the self-employed, artists and healers, pool their funds into a co-operative bank account to pay for preventative and emergency health care and medical, mental health, dental, and alternative health source directories and referrals. We believe that our request for a $5000 WedgeShare Grant for start-up costs for this effort is consistent with Cooperative Principle #7: Cooperatives working for the sustainable development of their communities.

Urban Arts Academy

Imagine not knowing what an orange is, and biting into it like a juicy apple. Then puckering as the sweet bitterness of the rind hits your tongue. It's a taste few enjoy, but was the experience of a 9-year-old boy at Urban Arts Academy who had never known an orange in its purest form. Children are becoming increasingly dependent on school meals, mainly consisting of processed foods, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While nutritional, children are losing their abilities to recognize, and exposure to, whole foods.

Healthy Living is this year's theme for our K-8 Afterschool Arts and Enrichment program. Through arts, students learn about nutrition and the impact their choices have on their environment. Students grow, cook, eat, and recycle whole food. As production of this food is dependent on a healthy environment, Healthy Living also includes hands-on lessons in recycling, resource conservation, and alternative energy and building materials.

Windustry

Windustry (a non-profit working to increase wind energy opportunities for farmers and rural communities) is the primary provider of high-quality energy information and assistance to farmers and rural communities in the Midwest. Requests for Windustry's assistance continue to grow as interest in renewable energy has exploded. There is great potential for wind energy to provide economic and social benefits to Minnesotan and Midwestern farmers and rural communities, but these benefits will be maximized only if farmers and rural communities have high-quality, up-todate, easily accessible information to help them make informed choices. Windustry is requesting continued support for increased outreach and education efforts to the rural Midwest through our Wind Information Hotline and Wind Farmers Network online forum. The same farmers that supply the Wedge with high-quality organic food may have the potential to produce high-quality, clean electricity as well, and we want to help them achieve this!

Women's Environmental Institute at Amador Hill

WEI's mission "to be a place for women and allies to renew, learn and organize for environmental justice" has worked hard to challenge the status quo for almost 5 years. We have been largely successful and provide an important inner-city/rural linkage that raises core environmental justice issues. In Phillips Neighborhood we have mapped toxic environmental sites and stopped a proposed wood burner that would have added human health burdens to low income, Indigenous and communities of color. In the East Metro we are organizing Hmong, Latino and Indigenous residents who are neglected by the public health agencies currently evaluating the toxic burden of perfluorochemicals - particularly as they impact the farm/garden produce grown for home and farmer's markets. Connecting "food justice" and "healthy homes" strategies to "green jobs" that provide a family-sustaining income in and for these community residents is a key WEI collaborative justice strategy. To continue, our rural campus and our city office require that WEI build the funding capacity to hire more paid administrative and community-organizing staff and decrease our reliance on highly dedicated volunteer staffing.

The Youth Farm and Market Project

The Youth Farm and Market Project will use any WedgeShare funds we receive in support of our mission to nurture relationships between urban youth and their families, their communities, and the earth around them by growing, cooking, eating and selling healthy food. Support from the Wedge Co-op has been integral in our organization's 14-year history. Within our three main focus areas of Urban Agriculture, Youth Organizing and Cultural Nutrition, we will use WedgeShare funds to support the following goals:

• To increase youth competencies and qualities needed to be successful in life and work;
• To help youth develop public skills through community building projects;
• To set youth on the road to lifelong health using local, traditional and cultural foods; and
• To provide high quality, culturally appropriate foods for people in low-income communities.