Support Our Village: Food Insecurity in New Columbia

Who are we?

Our Village Gardens is a 501(c)(3) organization that addresses food insecurity in Oregon’s largest affordable housing development. We work in the New Columbia neighborhood, where 98% of the population is at or below the federal poverty level and 70% of the population identify as BIPOC. While providing healthy, free/low-cost, and culturally relevant foods is at our project's core, we also work to provide job security, education and skills development and social inclusion, which are all factors that influence community health

Why do we need your money?

We are currently experiencing our first operation deficit. We historically get the vast majority of our money through grants, and several of the the grantors who we have received larger sums from in past years are pausing their grant giving opportunities. We have been remedying this deficit through pausing hiring, reducing employee hours, reducing our stores operating hours, and reducing the wages of our current employees by 50%. Our Executive Director and Grant Writer are hard at work finding new grants to apply for as well as ways to find more individual donors; this GoFundMe is a way for us to get back on our feet while we continue our search!

What will we use your money for?

The money from this fundraiser will go in our general fund towards the area of greatest need. Being a people-centered organization, staffing is our largest expense. Any donation you make will help pay our staff and work toward restoring staff hours and operating hours. Proper funding to run our garden and market is crucial to our mission of giving community members as much access to healthful, local foods as possible. Further, more than half of our Staff members are folks from the community, so ensuring that they are making a living wage is key to our mission.

Give me more details!

Our two main projects are our 36,000 square foot community garden and our non-profit grocery store. The garden offers 80 free garden plots, provides produce for our free CSA program that serves 30 families a year, and gives neighborhood growers a chance to make money by selling their produce to us for use in the store.

Our market provides free and reduced-cost produce to our community; SNAP customers receive a dollar for dollar match on produce, and everyone receives a 20% discount on produce to make sure it is affordable for people ineligible for SNAP due to immigration status. Our Free Fruit for Kids program gets out 500 pieces of fruit a month. The market provides jobs and cycles money back into the neighborhood; the folks we hire are given organizational support, professional development opportunities, and connections to mentors. This way, we are able to promote internal job growth and shared leadership opportunities. Currently, over half of our payroll dollars are cycled back into the community, with 67% of Staff and 62% of our Board of Directors being residents of the neighborhood.