Eastside organization hopes to increase local produce supply for food pantries

Food pantries around the city of Madison will be more regularly stocked with fresh produce this growing season thanks to the Eastside Pantry Brigade and its teams of Madison teenagers

The Eastside Pantry Brigade (EPB) is a new project this year. Urban farmer and environmental activist Joe Mingle organized the brigade after getting many calls last year from organizations and businesses in the Madison area to help existing and new gardens grow produce for food pantries.

“The basic task of the pantry brigade is to tap into the energy around local food, especially amongst young adults with strong backs who aren’t afraid of hard work,” said Mingle. “We want to get people involved in the food movement.”

The EPB is targeting and recruiting at-risk, low-income teens for gardening roles, which Mingle said is vocational training into a food movement career. Mingle said EPB provides teens the opportunity to work hard, manage responsibilities, and gives them a valued role in their community.

“We need to start re-localizing the food system now so it is resilient and serves us when we actually need it. We need to start at the bottom, at the place where people are most vulnerable,” Mingle said to explain EPB’s mission. “You don’t have to have a college degree to be a farmer. There are plenty of opportunities in the food movement; you just have to find a way in, which is what the EPB helps with.”

The Eastside Pantry Brigade has two main goals. The first is to assist gardens contributing to food pantries in the Madison area with maintenance needs. Sometimes, Mingle explained, businesses donate land for a pantry garden but the labor to take advantage of that land is missing. 

The EPB’s second goal is to help food distribution channels turn “too much” locally grown produce from a challenge into an opportunity. There are not enough distribution channels in the Madison area for all of the gardens, so a lot of food goes to waste in storage, or even rots in the fields because there is no way to collect it and not enough people to deliver it to pantries once collected.

For their first year, the EPB will be working with nine gardens and hopes to add more soon.

Different workers manage each garden. School gardens are run by teachers, students, and parents and are used as an outdoor classroom during the school year. In the summer months, volunteers from the EPB will take over.

Other gardens will be built and maintained by three teams of at-risk teenagers. The teens teams are formed by three different agencies in Madison including Mentoring Positives, Goodman Teenworks, and Operation Fresh Start.

Teens that are a part of the Mentoring Positives group will be in charge of growing, harvesting, cleaning, bagging and distributing the food to others in the Mentoring Positives program as well as to others in local neighborhoods.

The EPB gardens will focus on produce that isn’t common in the pantry network. They will have mustard greens, okra, collard greens, and beans, among other produce. Popular vegetables like zucchini and tomatoes will be cut back because there already is a surplus of growers with those crops.

The food goes to pantries and soup kitchens, including locations such as the Goodman Center, Salvation Army Community Center and Kitchen, and the Wil-Mar Center.

The City of Madison granted the EPB a permit to create a garden at the corner of East Washington Avenue and Milwaukee Street. The garden is named Union Corners and the produce raised there will go to the Goodman Community Center Food Pantry.

This Sunday, April 22, sustainable agriculture and food security advocates and  volunteers will break ground at the new Union Corners location. The celebration has been chosen for Sunday in honor of Earth Day.

The day of work and celebration will begin at 10 a.m., with a dedication ceremony to be held at 2 p.m. Speakers at the dedication event will include Mentoring Positives’ farmer Alan Chancellor, 6th District Alder Marsha Rummel, Community Action Coalition Food and Gardens Division Manager Chris Brockel and Dane County Executive Joe Parisi.

Anyone is welcome to volunteer or attend the Earth Day ceremony.

If you are interested in volunteering with the Eastside Pantry Brigade or donating space for a garden, call or email Joe Mingle at 608-332-1493 or jwmingle@tds.net.