The Common Market in the News

Connecting families with fresh produce

Food Service Director

As school districts throughout the country switched to curbside meals when the pandemic hit last spring, The Common Market was looking for ways to help increase families’ fresh food access.

“We realized that we also needed to shift and adapt within the constraints of COVID and the challenges that imposed on many food distribution efforts,” says Rachel Terry, national partnerships director for The Common Market, a regional nonprofit food distributor working to connect local farmers to schools.

The global disaster relief organization World Central Kitchen has teamed up with Houston’s Common Market Texas to distribute fresh veggies across the city

Eater Houston

Together, the two nonprofits will source fruits and veggies from about a dozen farms across central and southeast Texas, including contributions from Houston refugee farming collective Plant It Forward Farms and Fresh Life Organics, along with Gundermann Acres in Wharton County. Part of The Common Market’s statewide network, these farms have offered to sell the kale, sweet potatoes, and winter citruses like oranges and grapefruit that weren’t destroyed by the winter storm to the organizations, making this a win-win prospect for both the farms and Houstonians in need of fresh food.

The Common Market Partners with World Central Kitchen to Feed Texans

FoodTank

“Thankfully, regional food systems are resilient. Our community partners are resilient,” Smith says. “It’s about feeding people and providing nutrition, and it’s also about quality, having our produce boxes communicate ‘you matter’ to families.”

School districts pitched in to help during hard freeze

Galveston Daily News

Jesica Medellin, project director for Galveston Independent School District’s Texas Afterschool Centers on Education program, carries a box of fresh produce to a car Tuesday. Medellin helped distribute 140 boxes of fresh produce from The Common Market to students and their families in need following the freeze last week.

La Porte ISD offers 400 boxes of produce to area families at food distribution site

KPRC 2 Houston

Each box brimmed with cabbage, carrots and other vegetables grown at local farms throughout southeast Texas. The farms provide food for La Porte ISD year-round, through The Common Market Texas.

“We’re going to be able to feed thousands of people by the end of the week,” said Margo Robertson, outreach coordinator at The Common Market Texas.

1,000 boxes total were donated and they’ll be distributed throughout the area, helping area families as well as farms.

The Common Market: A bountiful response to COVID-19

W. K. Kellogg Foundation

"In 2020, The Common Market, a Philadelphia-based W.K. Kellogg Foundation (WKKF) grantee, found a way to distribute 1.1 million emergency food boxes and at the same time support the viability of 132 family farms.

'This work develops a degree of mutuality and respect between urban and rural people,' Johnston explains. 'We’ve built relationships in every kind of community, with every kind of people you can imagine.'"

School Nutrition Directors Feed Communities Through the Pandemic

FoodTank

"Bridgeton Public Schools are also working to increase local partnerships. This work is a continuation of a project that has been underway since the implementation of the Community Eligibility Provision – a program that allows schools to feed all students breakfast and lunch for free – in 2017. The county currently works with local producers The Common Market and Seashore Fruit & Produce. “[We] pride ourselves on being a nutrition hub for our students,” says Warren DeShields, Director of Food Services at Bridgeton Public Schools.