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	Video Farmer Ben Burkett talks about getting produce to New Orleans after Katrina. Interviews with staff and vendors at the weekly market in downtown New Orleans
	Photos Farmers and marketumbrella.org staff at the market. People can exchange cash or food stamps for these tokens to purchase food. Crescent City Farmers Market
	Financial Documents marketumbrella 2005-6 financial report

Mission

marketumbrella.org initiates and promotes the ecologies of local economies by developing markets, mobilizing people and resources, mentoring emerging leaders, and modeling best practices. We believe that public markets have the power to mobilize communities, the power to create community in a world where otherwise the winner takes all.

We can do better! Most public markets — be they tiny parking lot farmers markets or gigantic, historic public market halls — already manage to create win-win relations between producers and consumers. We believe that this should be the beginning of beautiful relationships, not the end unto itself.

Inspired by conversations of social entrepreneurism, mutual aid, and self-help, we seek ways to use the markets we develop as gateways for new relationships, new experiments, and as public spaces that inspire others. It is with this in mind that we have explored ways to introduce food stamps (electronic benefit transfer or EBT) into our Farmers Market along with credit and debit currencies via wooden tokens and wireless devices. Out of this effort to bridge the digital divide and to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables to the food insecure, we have stumbled into the territory to forge a local currency for commerce and for philanthropy.

Programs

Crescent City Farmers Market
It’s fun, engaging, and it happens twice weekly, year-round in two New Orleans neighborhoods. Founded in 1995 by John Abajian, Sharon Litwin, and Richard McCarthy, the Crescent City Farmers Market has served as the organization’s flagship project and as a national model for cultivating community and commerce, in cooperation with universities, green activists, business leaders, developers, public health advocates, and food producers. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Market operated four days per week, year-round and with a combined annual economic impact of $12 million, today it operates twice weekly with impact of $6.8 million and featuring food producers from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

We attract over 1,500 shoppers to our year-round Markets each week; fifty-plus vendors travel from as far away as two states to participate in the Markets;

In the first three years of the Market, fifteen new businesses were formed and twenty-two new jobs created;

We broker many new commercial relationships between Market vendors and dozens of world-class restaurants in New Orleans, thus helping chefs add value to their menus and farmers and fishers diversify their customer base;

We bridge the digital divide for traditionally low technology family farmers and fishers by offering a farmers' market web site, weekly electronic newsletters to subscribing customers featuring Market goods, and individual web pages for our vendors, thus enabling them to participate in the direct marketing opportunities of e-commerce;

We have successfully incubated "Riverside Pasta," a special, model enterprise among single mothers living on welfare in public housing by using the Market as the initial point of distribution for their products and as a hands-on enterprise academy that rewards creativity, hard work, and the investment of sweat equity with a real self-employment scheme.

Mobile Market
The Mobile Market is envisioned as a collaboration of the New Orleans Food Co-op, Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, and marketumbrella.org. The Mobile Market is currently in the planning stage. We hope to have it up and running this winter ('07) or early in the fall.

The Vision
The New Orleans Food Co-op’s Mobile Market will provide access to healthy, affordable groceries to families in post-Katrina New Orleans neighborhoods underserved by existing grocery outlets. The Mobile Market will:

sell groceries (fresh, local produce, seafood and dairy, bulk foods, some packaged foods, and some cleaning supplies);

give away some food provided by Second Harvest of Greater New Orleans and Acadia;

provide an ordering and distribution point for special orders through the Food Co-op’s buying club; and

distribute information about healthy eating and affordable meals.

The Need and Mobile Market Locations
Post-Katrina, many of New Orleans neighborhoods have little or no access to fresh, healthy food. See http://www.nolafoodmap.com/. In the city, there are only ten large grocery stores open (three or more cash registers), and seven of the ten are located in the “sliver along the River,” the relatively wealthy areas that were not flooded by Hurricane Katrina. Only three large stores are open in the vast flooded areas struggling to recover. For the most part, people in the flooded areas have access to only small stores which for the most part carry limited amounts of fresh food and in most cases are best characterized as “convenience stores.”

The Mobile Market will be located in three areas of the City with limited or no access to grocery stores carrying fresh food. Three days a week, the Mobile Market will go to one of the three market locations and will be open for business at the same time and place.

In addition, the Food Co-op intends to seek neighborhood partners in the areas in which the Mobile Market will be located. Social and cultural groups such as community organizations and churches will become neighborhood-level partners and assist with outreach, volunteers and site maintenance.

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