Market Manager Relationships & Financial Incentives in D.C. Farmers’ Market Spaces
Interviewer(s): Interviewer
Interviewee(s): Respondent

Interviewer: So you work with Dreaming Out Loud?

Respondent: Correct.

Interviewer: Great. Can you tell me, I’m not as familiar with Dreaming Out Loud as I am with um other market organizations in this side of the river. Can you tell me a little bit about the mission and what that mission means to you specifically?

Respondent: Sure. So Dreaming Out Loud’s mission is to create a more equitable food system with emphasis on serving underserved communities, building more entrepreneurs from underserved and disadvantaged communities – specifically food entrepreneurs – bringing local food production back into the hands of the community with farming or gardening projects and then there’s usually, we aim to have workforce development programs in conjunction with our other programs. That has been true in the past and has come in and out of being in practice, but kind of creating pathways to job, pathways to income, pathways to producing food, pathways to sourcing food. And um, and I manage the community markets so, the community markets program is specifically about organizing farmer’s markets in underserved communities or strategically located in a way so that entrepreneurs from the local community or underserved persons in the community can take advantage of the benefits of the market.

Interviewer: Great.

Respondent: Yup

Interviewer: Okay, so you – I guess as being a part of a market in DC – have a role in Produce Plus, are there other incentive programs that your markets take part in?

Respondent: So our, historically Dreaming Out Loud has been a big supporter of Produce Plus. Our Executive Director Chris Bradshaw played a big role – from what he tells me – in supporting DC Green’s advocacy efforts to create Produce Plus. Which is really cool. We also have, our vendors accept Farmer’s Market Nutrition coupon – vouchers – and we have a SNAP EBT terminal. So we do, our farmers accept all forms of nutrition incentives. In the past we’ve not been able to offer a matching program because of lack of funds and lack of capacity to fundraise for those programs, but we are launching a match program next year – or I guess this year.

Interviewer: Wow! That’s awesome.

Respondent: It’s good, and we’ll definitely play a – we’ll be really important to making our markets competitive with other DC based markets and making sure they serve persons using the incentives better, double better.

Interviewer: Exactly. Exactly twice as much. Okay, so I guess can you start by like telling me a little bit about what market looks like, like how the layout looks, where you are located?

Respondent: We operate two markets and they’re both very very different. One market is located in Southwest DC at the Waterfront metro station, and that neighborhood – more than 10% of DC public housing is located within the 3 quarter mile radius of that metro station. There’s Green Leaf Gardens, Fairfax Gardens, and then James Creek… and Cifax – no Cifax Gardens, James Creek, and Green Leaf. And theres a pretty significant number of public housing units in that neighborhood, but the rest of that neighborhood is highly gentrifying. Histrocially the neighborhood was kind of a middle class, middle-class black, neighborhood where folks could purchase condos or rent condos and now the development is looking more like luxary conods in glass and steel buildings. And, yea. The income disparity in that area is huge – the medium income is like 100,000 – but the average income in those public housing units that are right adjacent to those condos are like 24 k per household. It’s an interesting neighborhood to be working in, but it does give us some lee-way to build a larger and more diverse vendor mix at market. Typically we have about ten to twelve vendors at that market. We’re serving a mixture of produce plus customers and nutrition incentive customers and then more affluent customers who have more disposable income to spend – cash and credit and debit – and that market is in of like our opportunity to work with micro-entrepreneurs, start up businesses, start up farmers, beginning businesses, women of color, people of color. We have a really cool mix of vendors there that represent a lot of identities. So we see that as an opportunity for them to get their leg in the door, their foot in the door, to start working at farmer’s markets and build out some capacity to do that more as a part of their business plan. To integrate farmer’s markets into our business plan.

Interviewer: Will you tell me a little bit about what the relationships with those entrepreneurs and micro- entrepreneurs look like, how you interact?

Respondent: Sure. Right. So that. Our executive, our executive director has more of that history in his brain. It definitely has been about building relationships with people; our capacity to provide technical assistance to vendors, our ability to connect them to other resources like loans, or business plan training, or courses or curriculums. Like that has been limited. We have successfully connected some of our vendors to loans but mostly through supporting them, contacting another organization. I think in long term vision we would like to have our own set of training materials, technical assistance and you know our own supports in place to boost the capacity of our vendors. But I know that we like strategically partners with the latino economic development corporation – LEDC – they’ve referred vendors to us, others through union kitchen – which is a great place to recruit vendors who haven’t been to a farmer’s market before – some of our vendors are from Southwest and wanna participate in their own neighborhood market or work in southwest and somehow Chris also built a relationship with a latino family who farms in Monroselyn Virginia, which is this very special pocket, or unique pocket of farm owners and farm operators in the united states where a bunch of previous farm worker families found the equity and capacity to purchase land and start their own farm businesses which in the US contrasts greatly with the history of land ownership and farm ownership. So we work with a family, their farm is called Crazy Farm, and they’ve been working with Chris for five years now to bring their produce to these underserved communities, Southwest having been a place that wasn’t really sexy five years ago and then we have another farmer’s market on Minnesota Ave in Northeast in Ward 7. Which is a hard ask, to get farmer’s east of the river. So working with Crazy Farm has been a huge foundational piece of us being able to run farmer’s markets where we run them. They probably, one, have struggled to have access to farmer’s markets. Maybe because they’re new farmers, maybe because they’re latino farmers, maybe because they have less –they’re less reliable because they don’t have the capacity to have fully functional transportation all the time or being fully stocked all the time. They face their own barriers to being like reliable farm vendors at times being they just don’t have resources, which is where we are understanding and try to help grow them.

Interviewer: And what does that look like? When a vendor can’t get to market because they don’t have transit that day, or there’s a systematic barrier to entry, how do you as a market manager that works with them mitigate those issues or communicate in those times?

Respondent: At this point it’s mostly been just not kicking them out of the market, which I think is a big service. Okay, we are empathetic with your situation and scenario and we wont be kicking you out and finding a new farm partner; that’s the best we’ve been able to do because of lack of capacity. There was at one point a vision of building refridgeration on the farm with the USDA specialty crops block grant, but we don’t have capacity to do that so mostly that money has been used to just fund me as a staff member which has been really important because Chris as an executive director couldn’t focus on the markets in a way that they operationally required. So now he gets to focus on fundraising and hopefully we’ll like be able to build up capacity to do more of that actual technical assistance, actual technical support, diversion of funds. Just build out their infrastructure.

Interviewer: And in those discussions – this is less about I guess the technical aspect of like how building capacity looks and more about the relationship you have with those farmers – how do you communicate around these issues? When someone comes to market and is having trouble figuring out how to accept and incentive or – you know, they can be confusing – how does communication happen?

Respondent: Sure. That has been, with some of our vendors that’s in flux. It always depends who shows up to staff the market, which can change week to week or season to season. In the past our Executive Director worked closely with the farm director and operator, Maria, and her family members to work through a lot of those challenges of like, “how do we understand what nutrition incentives are, how do we collect them from customers, how do we like present our table in a way that looks bountiful and that also looks high quality – like the vegetables are high quality?” And then this past year different staff have been sent to our markets and so it’s been a whole new training process of like, “hey, you do accept that type of voucher I promise, I’ve talked to Maria about it you guys are approved. You shouldn’t be turning away customers, if you have a question come get me. I can answers your questions. It’s okay if ya’ll make a mistake but we just need to really make sure that you understand that these are all of the forms of tender that you need to accept and that it’s a benefit to your business and a benefit to these customers and we don’t want to be turning people away unless we 100% have to.”

Interviewer: Yea.

Respondent: and that like, that can look like multiple conversations sometimes because it takes a couple times to sink in, or because there’s a new staff member that showed up to substitute for someone. So it’s a constant practice of checking in with vendors and making sure they’re fully trained, which I think training is this other kind of conversation about like what kind of capacity do beginning farmers and micro-entrepreneurs have to take the time to train their staff if they’re hiring people to staff the tables. I think the market manager often has to intervene in those situations to make sure everyone who is participating in retail transaction knows the rules and that can happen weekly, as often as weekly. Ideally not, but as often as weekly.

Interviewer: Yea I mean what I’ve heard from hearing from hearing from people about their experiences at market, these programs can be confusing sometimes.

Respondent: Definitely. Definitely confusing.

Interviewer: Especially for vendors that are new or for a farmer just starting out. What is feedback you’ve heard from customers around these programs, what do the conversations look like there?

Respondent: It depends, if it’s a staffer who is getting paid to staff the table maybe they may be way more frustrated by the voucher program than the owner who is seeing the revenue from this. And usually the business owner, the farm operator, has to attend these training so even though the trainings are only two hours they’ve at least been exposed to this. They’ve done at least one two hour training with DOH, maybe multiple years of trainings, at this point they’ve been through the gambit so many times. Some of these folks have been doing this five to ten years, even though five to ten years is still a young business, that’s substantially more training than the random high schooler that they hire over the summer to staff the table [laughs]. So um... I don’t remember.

Interviewer: I guess if the trainings are DOH, are each of the vendors certified to accept their own benefits or do you have like a table where you act as the intermediary acceptor of SNAP or FNMP or senior vouchers?

Respondent: Vendors can directly accept vouchers. SNAP payments, it depends, some farm vendors have their own EBT terminal that they can process a card with but most often – from what I’ve heard – is that markets have a centralized space for customers to come and swipe their card where they can receive tokens as tender. Once we launch this match program we will also be an intermediary for matching purchases. So someone will spend their voucher with a farm vendor, the vendor will give them a receipt, they’ll come over to our table and say, “I spent this much money with this vendor,” show us the receipt, and then we’ll give them tokens to go out and shop some more. So we are an intermediary for matching and for SNAP pretty frequently. And then of course we play a role in the distribution of the Produce Plus vouchers?

Interviewer: So yea, what does Produce Plus distribution look and feel at your market? Is there a line to the side of market, is it integrated into market?

Respondent: Yea [pause]. So one thing, I don’t know that I ever described Minnesota Ave?

Interviewer: Not so much, no.

Respondent: So that farmer’s market has historically just been Crazy Farm and Produce Plus distribution, but last year we got an orchard to join us so now we have fruit at that market. Which is great because a lot of people are looking for fruit as opposed to fresh vegetables, which their kids will be excited about or they’re excited about. It’s a combination. You know. A lot of people, like the quality you can taste and feel in buying local fruit is just more on your tongue than the quality of fresh veggies. So that was a huge success. That meant like most markets we were in a dusty, dirty, parking lot with approximately three to four tents set up. Two to three of those were either vendors or – we also worked with K street farm which was a nonprofit farm and they would set up and sell veggies – which was great. They had really nice greens which helped complement the offerings that other farm vendors had. So there were usually two to three vendors set up, some sort of community service provider there: SNAP Ed would come, we invited the library a couple times to give out free books, we had cooking demos, some days we even had music, that was on the rare occasion but these people called the Green Schemer were really great. They would DJ music and then hand out nutrition information, they run garden programming for kids. And then we had our tent for produce plus. So I think there’s a lot of challenges to Produce Plus distribution because it can be a very hectic and very challenging operation to manage on top of managing a market, which is kind of this point of tension between what market managers actually need to do this well, to distribute produce plus vouchers well, and what other tasks market managers are supposed to be focusing on. In my ideal world we would have both a Produce Plus tent and a Dreaming Out Loud tent because dividing those operational tasks into different spaces, even if they’re right next to each other, is really important because you have to have enough space for persons with disabilities to approach the Produce Plus tent, you have to have enough space for people to approach an information tent for general information; you have to have enough personnel at the Produce Plus tent to answer questions and so that the line doesn’t crowd the table or the volunteers who are working. Um. There needs to be a place to distribute, to give out water and to hand out water when people are in the Produce Plus line becomes really crowded and hectic. It’s… because its such an in-demand program it’s like working the DMV. We need all of the best practices from the DMV to apply to the Produce Program to apply at the farmer’s market while relying solely on volunteer labor. Which is how it has been set up so far, that market managers are expected to manage the market and Produce Plus distribution and its on the market organization to have enough staff to do those things or we rely on volunteers, which is not a super reliable system. And like I think DC Greens is working really hard to make sure the volunteer program is more reliable but its very challenging. Luckily, too, our market spaces are large enough that we can dedicate an entire tent to Produce Plus, other markets are crowded are crowded, they’re downtown, they’d rather put a vendor in a stall rather than an additional tent for produce plus. So I think the space scarcity changes the way that they approach doing Produce Plus distribution and often they crowd it all into one tent. They have a market information table in the same place as they have Produce Plus distribution, and there might – I don’t know – they probably found out really clever ways to deal with that but in my experience that is just a really… just a bad experience for everyone, volunteers are stressed, customers are stressed, and I’m fucking stressed. I just want it to be like, I want there to be enough space for people to feel like they can have a dignified transaction at the market, and crowding everyone together is not dignified in my option.

Interviewer: Yea, I definitely witnessed some stress around Produce Plus this past season and I was only at one market. I’m sure it looks different everywhere.

Respondent: Which market?

Interviewer: On H Street Northeast with FRESHFARM. I definitely saw some interesting things and some wonderful people and I wish we had a better system for it. And so I guess that’s partially why I decided to do this research piece, because I think that each market I have spent time with – Arcadia or Ward 8 Farmer’s Market – they all have different practices to deal with that and make sure that they are still building communities and that a dignified experience is still a part of market. So that’s part of what I want to know, for you and Dreaming Out Loud, what are some of the tools you use to work with customers in that space and that dynamic?

Respondent: In Southwest uh we, we were limited to only serving 60 people a week.

Interviewer: Wow, okay.

Respondent: And that was really manageable just because our market serves less people but that was kind of a relief because that meant that there was just an hour and a half of voucher distribution going on. People would show up, and they would get numbers, and they could go sit in the shade, they could go shopping in Safeway, they could go shopping through the market and because they had a number they had a guaranteed voucher and it was just a lot more – it was much easier. Other than like the stress of having to, somedays, me having to distribute all of the vouchers myself because a volunteer didn’t show.

Interviewer: And on those days when you were distributing those incentives receiving Produce Plus, how did those interactions look?

Respondent: Um. Well one nice thing; some of the customers really stepped up to support me. If I was like… a lot of folks would show up at 9:00 and I would get there at 9:00 to set up the market, we open at 10, and I mean many folks are seniors and couldn’t really do heavy lifting but sometimes people who were able bodied would support me in setting up the tent. A couple of – definitely a regular – would end up collecting numbers for people. She would just sit in the picnic table and sign people up with their name and give them numbers and then when I arrived at the market she would give me the list of names and be like, “here is the list of people who showed up before you got here.” And I was like, great, this works for me, you know if someone’s willing to take on a leadership role in coordinating this and making sure people feel that they’re being fairly treated, and that they’re being fairly lined up, I guess that they’re getting recognized for showing up early, that works. That was really really kind. And then, you know I – there’s like a limit to how personable things can be because people really wanted to get their vouchers and get going. Folks weren’t there to dottle. Um. But, nice interactions happened like, often it would be a friendly thing, “hey, really nice to see you again, what are you gonna shop for today, please get water, we have plenty of water, please sit in the shade.” I tried really hard to make folks recognize that I didn’t want folks to get sick at the market for being in the heat