A repurposed bus will soon make its way across Little Rock offering locally grown fruits and vegetables for sale to residents who live in areas with little or no ready access to fresh produce.
The mobile farmers market called Fresh2You, which will accept food stamps, will make a few practice runs late this month with an official rollout date of Aug. 13.
It's a partnership between the Hunger Relief Alliance, the Mosaic Church of Central Arkansas, a farmers collective called Raising Arkansas, the city of Little Rock and Rock Region Metro, and is made possible through the funding of various grants.
"We have a lot of people in Little Rock who don't have access to healthy food because of either the lack of stores or the lack of transportation. We have huge problems in Little Rock with diabetes and high blood pressure and different health issues that are partially caused by lack of access to healthy food," said Kathy Webb, executive director of the Hunger Relief Alliance and a city director.
Cities across the nation have started mobile markets. Little Rock Mayor Mark Stodola said he first heard about the idea a year and half ago when he was told about Memphis' initiative.
Stodola knew that Rock Region Metro was soon expecting to retire some of its transit system buses, and he contacted the agency to see about getting a bus donated for the new cause.
"When you're more than half a mile from a legitimate grocery store, the tendency is to go to these convenience stores and eat all that junk stuff," Stodola said.
Through the city's previous work with its "Love Your School" childhood obesity program, it mapped all of the "food deserts" in the city. A food desert is as an urban area where it is difficult to buy affordable or good-quality fresh food.
The Fresh2You mobile market will start out making a few stops just two days a week, one of those days being Saturdays. The second day hasn't been determined. Eventually, if the initiative is successful and there is enough funding to continue, the goal is to run the mobile market five days a week, Webb said.
The first stops will be areas near some of the downtown public housing high rises and at the Hillary Rodham Clinton Children's Library and Learning Center.
"You don't want to compete with other folks who make a living at small grocery stores and things like that, but there are significant areas in Little Rock where there are food deserts," Webb said.
The bus will stop in the same spots each week and at the same times, so people can rely on it as a food source.
Anyone who receives federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits -- known as SNAP and formerly called food stamps -- can participate in a "Double Up Food Bucks" program at the mobile market. That lets those recipients get twice the amount of produce.
Under that program, for example, food stamp recipients can get $20 worth of food for $10, and the farmer selling the produce will still be paid the full $20.
The Double Up Food Bucks program is possible through a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant provided through the Arkansas Coalition for Obesity Prevention and is offered at 18 farmers markets in the state this year.
Raising Arkansas, a recently formed group of small-market farmers, is providing the produce for the mobile market. The nonprofit's 89-acre farm is in Grant County near Sheridan.
The group is "dedicated to providing improved access to nutritious food and eliminating food deserts through agriculture," according to its website, which notes that Arkansas ranks No. 1 in senior citizen hunger and in the top 10 in childhood hunger.
The Hunger Relief Alliance will offer cooking classes to show people living in food deserts how to prepare the fresh produce. It also will advertise the Mobile Farmers Market at those classes and at classes it hosts for food-stamp recipients.
Mosaic Church joined as a partner to operate the bus each week through its Vine and Village nonprofit, which works to address social, physical and material needs of residents in Little Rock's 72204 ZIP code.
Vine and Village already runs "the Orchard," which Pastor Mark DeYmaz said is the largest food distribution pantry in the city and third-largest in central Arkansas, serving about 19,000 people a year. That's more than half of the 72204 population.
"Fresh2You, then, is a quite natural extension of our heart for the community and of this program specifically," DeYmaz said. "As we continue to serve the people of 72204 by helping them gain access to healthy food and groceries, we look forward to serving many others throughout greater Little Rock having a similar need in the years to come."
Mosaic Church will get volunteers or employees to drive the mobile market. The first few months will be an experimental period, DeYmaz said.
"That is, we will be in a pilot mode -- listening, trying, failing, learning from our mistakes, etc. -- all in an effort to establish operational excellence that best serves the community and farmers involved," he said.
Rock Region Metro donated a 13-year-old bus for the project.
"The bus was past its useful life and scheduled to be disposed of by spring 2016, along with 15 other vehicles, and we felt it would be useful in its second life as a Mobile Farmers Market," said Becca Green, Rock Region Metro's director of public engagement.
The bus had to be gutted and retrofitted for its new purpose. Rolling Wraps put a new design on the outside. The seats were taken out, and metal shelving and a generator were put in. Customers will walk through the bus to make their purchases.
The retrofitting was supported by a $10,000 Union Pacific grant and $30,000 from a Blue and You Foundation Arkansas grant, Webb said.
Stodola said the collaboration of the different agencies to pull this project together has been impressive, and his hope is for a private business to donate a refrigeration unit for the bus.
DeYmaz also said the partnership has been a model for community engagement.
The project shows "how together, collectively, we can get beyond the distinctions of this world that so often, and otherwise, divide, and beyond so much rhetoric to real results in terms of community transformation," he said.
Metro on 07/04/2016