“As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty-eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy even if I just got a good checkup at Mayo Clinic. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made. No individual or nation can stand out boasting of being independent. We are interdependent.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

When I was asked to write this post about Fertile Ground, I was honored and humbled at the same time. This is my very first ever blog post.

Fertile Ground is the brainchild of Erin Byrd. As an avid coffee drinker, shewanted to see a good coffee shop located in Southeast Raleigh. When she first mentioned the idea back in 2009, she wanted to create a space where people could get a good cup of coffee and come together as a community. Her idea began to change when she noticed the lack of affordable, healthy food options in Southeast Raleigh. It was then when Fertile Ground made the shift from being a future coffee shop to a future food co-op for the community.

Fertile Ground’s mission is to be a Southeast Raleigh based multi-stakeholder cooperative that highlights the community’s entrepreneurial spirit, helps create pathways to living wage jobs, increases access to healthy/affordable food, and fosters collective ownership. Fertile Ground, as a cooperative, will not only provide healthy options for food; it will also provide the space for education and creativity.

One of the wonderful aspects of this organization is that its members will be stakeholders; everyone who becomes a member will be able to have a say in what is sold within the co-op by taking the initiative in being an active participating partner in the democratic community of the organization. NCLCV’s reason for partnering with Fertile Ground is because of their work to promote food resiliency.

We at NCLCV conducted a participatory research project that began back in January. This research focused on seven issue areas of environmental justice: housing, food, water, energy, jobs, transportation, and health. Our goal was to learn whether our community members felt that they had ample access to these basic needs. NCLCV staff canvassed communities in Wake County using the surveys we created in order to collect the knowledge we needed. Fertile Ground focused on one of our key issue areas, which was food. The members of Fertile Ground were very gracious in helping in our research by filling out our surveys and participating in our discussion groups.

Fertile Ground is comprised of some of Raleigh’s most creative, progressive, connected, and influential activists. NCLCV’s Jodi Lasseter is a proud member of Fertile Ground. She believes so much in what the organization is doing for Southeast Raleigh that she joined them in their effort to promote this aspect of resiliency. Liz Crews is a member and spokesperson who has certainly helped in getting the word out about the co-op into the community. Ajamu and Rukiya Dillahunt are both members of Fertile Grounds and serve on the Board of Directors. Overall, the co-op’s membership is very diverse with a good representation from Southeast Raleigh.

The word resilience is widely used at NCLCV. One of the ways our organization is trying to promote that is by helping to make the transition to a just, clean energy economy. Fertile Ground is playing a very important role in helping to promote resilience and making a just transition by providing a healthy space and place for our underserved community members.

Find out more information about Fertile Grounds and NCLCV’s community resiliency work by reaching out to Erika Moss. You can call her at 919.836.0006 x 122 or email her at erika@nclcv.org.