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

Respondent: Yea, so in the ‘90’s there was only one grocery store. Ward 8 had.. has.. uh about 70,000 residents so. And uh there was this grocery store, it was a Safeway on Martin Luther King Avenue and Milwaukee Place. MM right across from where the Gateway Pavilion is now.

Interviewer: Okay

Respondent: Yea and in 1998 it closed and… for a while there was no grocery store, actually for quite a while until the one over here opened in like 2007 I think. The Giant.

Interviewer: And that’s still the only grocery store?

Respondent: Yea. MM and so a group of residents including John Gloster and Virginia Major, those are the two people who are still around, uh and a number of others got together and decided that there had to be…that something had to be done so that there would be, so that there would be somewhere in War 8 where people could buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: So they created the market and initially they couldn’t get any farmers to come and so they would go to the Wholesale produce market on Florida Avenue and they would buy a bunch of stuff and they would just set up tables and volunteers would run it.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: Um. I mean after a couple years after doing that they started getting farmers…within a hundred miles, and that’s still the policy. Everything has to be produced within one hundred miles.

Interviewer: Are you guys, are you producer only, what do your regular farmers…what regular farmers does the market take? Do you do like value-added products?

Respondent: Yea, it’s pretty open. Traditionally it’s just been fruits, vegetables, sometimes meat, sometimes eggs if we can get it. And then prepared food, sometimes barbeque, sometimes a fish fry. Um, things like that. This year we had a woman that did like organic, vegetarian, snacks.

Interviewer: Yea, sweet.

Respondent: And then in the past we’ve had people who’ve sold plants. Uh… we’ve had people selling soaps and cosmetics and stuff like that. And then crafts that are locally made.

Interviewer: Sweet, that’s great.

Respondent: Um. To the market kind of grew slowly over the years, starting in 2005 or six they had enough funding for a paid market manager.

Interviewer: Okay

Respondent: At least part time, seasonally. But, because it was part time and season and the funding was always year to year it was hard to uh attract and retain really good people for that position.

Interviewer: Of course

Respondent: And mostly, mostly it remained a volunteer driven organization.

Interviewer: And is it still that way now?

Respondent: Yea, yea,. So I was out of a job last winter, and I ended up writing some grants and we ended up getting one from the DC Department of small and local business development – uh the healthy food retail program. And that created a uh thirty hour a week position from March until September of 2016. And I resigned from the Board and they hired me to uh… rather I applied for the position, and then I resigned from the board so that I could accept it. And as part of that funding we also initialed a school garden program

Interviewer: Cool

Respondent: At Martin Luther King Elementary. The market has moved a few times, the new, new, location is at Martin Luther King Elementary School.

Interviewer: Okay

Respondent: So we partnered with them. For the first like ten years of the market, from 1998-2008 it was in the Old Congress Heights School. And then when they started to renovate… I mean that building was vacant from the ’70s until about 2009, when they finally got around to renovating that building the market had to move. At first it moved to Greater South East Hospital, and then it moved to the THEARC for three years…on Mississippi.

Interviewer: I do (laughs)

Respondent: Good

Interviewer: THEARC I especially know, yea.

Respondent: Uh and then we got kicked out of THEARC because they were expanding that building. Also they…they had had for a while a youth garden there – Urban Farm – but around the same time they were starting to build a new building they decided they wanted to have their own farm stand CSA. And so they kicked us out and we were in 2015, in 2015 we were in Saint Elizabeth’s gateway pavilion. And now we’re at the school.

Interviewer: Well it’s good that you continue to find space. That can be a challenge.

Respondent: And we realized that we had a problem. With THEARC where those facilities are very nice um but they…a lot of people that visit them are not from the community and people who live here perceive those facilities as like existing for other people. And so they don’t, there were basically all these people living from across the street from THEARC and we were always leafletting those apartments and stuff but very few of those people came to the market.

Interviewer: Yea, because those were institutions like for the…

Respondent: Yea, they, we. People told us when we asked them, “we don’t really feel like that’s for us.”

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: So we hope to overcome that by being at the school in a place that’s totally accessible, there’s no fence, there’s no security, there’s no gate. People pass through there all the time.

Interviewer: And people’s kids go there probably.

Respondent: Mhm.

Interviewer: Makes sense. Okay, cool, so can I ask you some of these questions I have?

Respondent: Sure

Interviewer: You kinda hit on some of this so uh I’ll try my best not to be repetitive but, if you had to pair down on the mission of Ward 8 Farmers Market what would you say?

Respondent: Sorry I missed that, can you repeat it?

Interviewer: Yea. If you had to pair down the mission of Ward 8 Farmers Market?

Respondent: Uh. Our mission is to empower residents to live healthier.

Interviewer: Okay

Respondent: And we do that by making local… locally grown, sustainable food accessible and affordable. And we also promote healthy living and community and environmental sustainability mainly through popular education.

Interviewer: Cool.

Respondent: On topics of nutrition, cooking, gardening

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: Environmental sustainability

Interviewer: Sweet. So um do you have, I guess you’ve talked a little bit about your personal role and history with these topics. Does this mission like specifically resonate with you for a reason? Is there a specific tie you have to this mission? … [pause] Or like what does that mean to you? How do you carry that out?

Respondent: Well I’ve always been interested in gardening, I’ve always been interested in cooking I got that from my mom.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: and uh yea I’ve always been really concerned about social and racial justice and really like… when I decided to move over here a lot of people kind of warned me that it wouldn’t be safe, and also because … and this part is true … there’s a lack of amenities. And this part’s true. If I want to go to… if there’s an emergency I have to go across town to go to a reputable hospital.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: I can go to the one here but you wait for hours and you still might not see anyone. This has happened to me. And to my friends.

Interviewer: Sure.

Respondent: Um. And you know we don’t have bars, we don’t have restaurants, we don’t have many places even to buy uh… good food. So that, that’s the mission.

Interviewer: I think it’s incredibly cool that you uh. Live in the community you’re working in. I think that’s extremely important.

Respondent: Yea. And also the fact that it’s not something that I started it was started a long time before I got here. And when I got here it was still going but it needed…

Interviewer: A person?

Respondent: They were kind of tired

Interviewer: Sure, burnout happens

Respondent: Uh and so.. right… it needed new people and new energy.

Interviewer: I’m glad you’re bringing that. So how do you think the market effects the specific financial security of the farmers in that 100 mile radius you have?

Respondent: Well, it’s interesting, I think its you know of course…we are providing a direct retail outlet for farmers, we charge no membership fee, we charge a five percent commission of – you know – what they sell. Um which helps us cover the administrative costs and the marketing and the permits and all that. Which we handle so that they don’t have to. But, interest in local food, in organic food, has grown so much in this area. And the number of farms in the area has not increased. Because land is becoming more expensive, houses are being built, etcetera etcetera. Um and so ac…it used to be that farmers would compete to get into farmers markets and now it’s almost the other way around, farmers markets have to compete to attract the farmers. Um, and, you know for us being in a low income community they don’t make as much with us as they do in a more affluent area. So we have… we have to do things in order to make it work for them. This past year we waived the commission for our produce farmers. They didn’t have to pay a thing. And we also, on many occasions throughout recent years, we’ve had a buy back program that was grant funded where the farmers… at the end of the day if farmers had a lot of left over fruits and vegetables we would buy back a certain amount – last year I think it was $250 – which we would donate to food pantries in Ward 8 that we were partnered with.

Interviewer: Cool

Respondent: And that… they would get whatever they sold, plus $250 dollars. Um. So even if it was nasty weather and nobody came to shop, they’d still get something. More important, it actually expands the impact who are getting access to the food.

Interviewer: Yea, great to hear. Um, can you give me a time or an experience that was particularly memorable with a farmer or a number of small farmers that kind of reinforces this idea you’re talking about, increasing financial security or giving them an opportunity to vend in a low-income community.

Respondent: Yea. Um. We um…last year we brought on board a new farm, which we’re never proud of. It’s Licking Creek Bend Farm.

Interviewer: Yea, I know them

Respondent: Uh yea a lot of people know them because they were one of the founders of the Adam’s Morgan farmers market in the ‘70s. You know, they’ve been doing this long before it was trendy or fashionable. They’ve, and, throughout that time they’ve had a specific commitment to bringing their food to underserved community. Adams Morgan is not underserved so much anymore, and so they, you know they decided that it was time to be east of the river.

Interviewer: Cool

Respondent: Um. You know and they’re awesome because of their experience and their track record and because they’re certified naturally grown, they are really good at communicating. You know every week before market they would send a list of exactly what they would be offering with explanations for some of them.

Interviewer: That’s so rare; that’s great

Respondent: And they’re like we’re gonna have these different varieties of heirloom apples which has notes of whatever. And then in May they have a community day where they invite, you know, community members and customers and vendors. And a couple of us went that last year.

Interviewer: So this isn’t a relationship just at like the market itself it transcends beyond that. It seems to be a true partnership where you’re, ya know, involved beyond

Respondent: And we had another farmer who signed on with us in April. But then, it’s just a small family operation in Virginia – northern neck – so when things happened, they didn’t really explain to us what it was, when June came around they didn’t have any vegetables that were ready to sell and they dropped out.

Interviewer: That’s very hard

Respondent: Yes it was very different for us

Interviewer: Because you’re relying on that. Um, okay, yea, cool.

Respondent: So we ended up basically with one farmer, um, we had a bunch of others that were interested in vending with us. A bunch of them had the same problem, which was that they only had one truck – and the one person to drive the truck from Virginia to DC – you know and it wouldn’t be hard for me to find a Ward 8 resident who would man your stand for you. But that wasn’t actually the problem.

Interviewer: But if they had to take the time to drive the truck.

Respondent: And that basically has to be someone that lives on the farm. I’m not in the position to find someone and they apparently couldn’t find anyone either. Um. So. Yea.

Interviewer: Um okay so one of the focuses of my thesis is matching program like Produce Plus. So you do distribute produce plus right? Do you match too or no?

Respondent: Last year we did. In years past we have but this year we didn’t have funding for it

Interviewer: Yea, sure. So how do perceive that implementing produce plus expecially in a low income community affects – do you think it affects the outcomes of the farmers, like the amount that theyre able to sell, um, what do you see there?

Respondent: I wasn’t really… I wasn’t too involved in the years before produce plus. I can tell you that in 2016 Produce Plus accounted for about 55 or 60 percent of our sales. So yea it’s huge. Without it we probably wouldn’t have had a market. Which is interesting because of course in past years we didn’t have it and we didn’t have a market. So I wonder a little bit about that… and you know Produce Plus ended at the end of, what, um

Interviewer: Late November right?

Respondent: No we stopped receiving them at the end of August

Interviewer: Oh really?

Respondent: Yea and we, and we stopped being able to distribute them after that and our sales tanked. And I think they tanked at a lot of markets. And so…obviously it increases what people are able to get, what they can afford, but I wonder if it doesn’t inadvertently make people less likely to spend their SNAP and their cash.

Interviewer: I wonder too.

Respondent: I think people are like “I don’t need to use my SNAP and WIC I can use Produce Plus” but then, it’s ten dollars you know, and then do they spend more than ten dollars? Do they just keep it to that?

Interviewer: Yea, have you noticed, if someone is coming to market and is using like a Produce Plus voucher to pay do they also do a SNAP transaction?

Respondent: Um I would say our SNAP sales for the season seemed very low. Um we had more WIC than SNAP. And..

Interviewer: Do you think that’s a reaction?

Respondent: I’m sure some economist has studied the psychology of if something is free versus if you have to pay for it. Under certain circumstances maybe you are less willing to pay. And you know we had some vendors that were not selling produce, we had someone selling aloe vera juice, we had people selling fragrances…they cant accept produce plus. And they didn’t see a huge impact. So ideally. The ten dollars of free produce would bring people in and they would spend their SNAP too if they have other money.

Interviewer: Okay. Sorry some of this you’ve already hit on. Um. Are there any specific challenges you’ve noticed for those vendors who can accept the vouchers? The administrative aspect of it?

Respondent: I mean I think Licking Bend was really good at that. The problem we had this past year was that everything had to be done on the tablet and there was only one tablet so I don’t know I’m hoping that next year they provide a second tablet. There were times when we had enough volunteers and we could have had, you know, two people running tablets and two people writing checks. So I’m hoping…that for those markets that are distributing a lot, like ours, that they will provide more. Or else find some way to kind of streamline the steps you have to go through. Because it was really slow.

Interviewer: And for licking creek, do you think the lack of challenges they faced is drawing on that expertise you were speaking to working with these programs for so long?

Respondent: Yea, we… I think one of the things that scared off some of the other farmers we were trying to work with is that some of them hadn’t vended in DC before so Produce Plus was news to them and I was like “you’re getting free money,” but they were intimidated by it

Interviewer: That’s fair. So I want to shift a little bit from talking about farmers to talking about the people who are actually using these programs. So how do think Produce Plus at Ward 8’s farmers’ markets effects the food security of customers participating in the program?

Respondent: Uh I don’t really have the hard data to back it up

Interviewer: Sure, I’m not asking for it

Respondent: I know, you know, certainly we have a lot of customers who come every single week. Most of them are women, many of them are seniors, people on the nord side of 50, and you know, anecdotally there are specific people I know of who are…who come to the market every week, and when the market’s not open they go to the store and eat stuff that’s not as good.

Interviewer: Um and what about that effect as it specifically relates to your location here in Ward 8? Let me think about this… I think that is probably true everywhere. When markets are out of season people will go to grocery stores instead, where the food isn’t great. Why is it especially important that you’re doing this work here?

Respondent: I think our customers are more price sensitive. And this actually sometimes presents a challenge because we have to make the case to people that the produce we have is better than what’s in the grocery store and worth paying a little bit more for. Sometimes, it’s not always more, but sometimes. Um. You know, I think in more affluent areas local or organic produce is sort of a lifestyle choice, and for people here it’s much more a practical concern. It’s “do you have it, do you not have it, and how much is it going to cost?” You know and then there are obviously things that people are used to eating and know how to cook and then there are things people are not familiar with.

Interviewer: Like okra. Um do you have, similarly to how we talked about Licking Creek, a specific memory with a customer expressing the impact of the market to you for them? Or with a customer in relation to these incentives and the impact that’s had on them? [long pause]

Respondent: I don’t know, I’m drawing a blank right now.

Interviewer: Yea I mean it’s okay to say no if you don’t have one

Respondent: I do I just cant remember right now.

Interviewer: Okay, well if you think of anything later in relation to any of these questions you can email me and I’ll make sure they’re included. On just like a regular day at market what do interactions with customers receiving vouchers look like?

Respondent: Well there’s a line. And when you get to the front of the line you usually hand your ID to one person and your card to another, and the person you give your card to will scan the card on the tablet and go through all of that and the other person would take the name from the ID and copy the name onto the checks. Um. And then uh we give them their checks and sometimes we give them their ID and remind them they have to sign it before they give it to the vendor, we thank them for coming, and tell them to enjoy their vegetables

Interviewer: So it sounds a little bit like, like a business transaction, right?

Respondent: Yea

Interviewer: And I wonder if that’s because of the nature of being in a low income community, the line being long, and instead of being able to spend ten minutes talking with someone because they’re the only one there for the program that it manifests that way.

Respondent: Yea, there’s definitely like the quality of customer service declines in relation to the volume of business.

Interviewer: Yea. Okay

Respondent: But we need the volume, so we’re not complaining

Interviewer: Yea, and people need food to eat. So that’s important too. Okay. I’m gonna skip pst some of these. Have you noticed any specific challenges related to incentives like Produce Plus um that customers have anticipated or expressed? Either constraints of the program that don’t work for them or challenges with how thye use them at market

Respondent: I know that at some point they put a restraint on how many markets you could go to in a week. And, um, before that we hadn’t realized it but after that we realized that a certain percentage of our people were going to multiple markets. I mean more than two. And they had to stop doing that. But I think people understood, nobody was too angry about it. You can understand why people would want to go to three or four markets, because ten dollars is not enough to feed your family for a week but forty dollars might be. If you go to four different markets. People found the whole procedure for proxy’s to be very confusing.

Interviewer: Can you explain that to me?

Respondent: No, because its confusing. [laughs] but basically if you – you were allowed to pick up checks for someone who was not physically able to be there. You were in other words allowed to serve as their proxy. But in order to do that you had to first come to the market with them the first time. And you had to show your ID and they had to show their ID and there was something in the app where you had to indicate that that person was the proxy. And we ended up doing it not the way it was supposed to be done because the way it was supposed to be done was confusing. And you know some people would come with three cards, and “one of these is mine, one of these is my daughter, and one of them is my husband” but they wouldn’t know which one was which. So we would scan them but we would mix up the check numbers with the names, things like that.

Interviewer: And it sounds like you had a pretty good base of volunteers to help you do that?

Respondent: Yea. Yea I mean I was there, we had a market assistant who was always there and then we usually had at least one other person who was from the Farmers’ Market Brigade, and a couple of other random volunteers that I had recruited.

Interviewer: Cool

Respondent: So yea it wasn’t really a problem of man-power as it was of the intricacies of the program

Interviewer: Yea the administrative

Respondent: I mean we also had, our hotspot never really worked properly so we were always trying to use the wifi from the school. Which was fine 90% of the time but them it would go down without explanation.

Interviewer: And that obviously affects the program

Respondent: Yea [laughs]

Interviewer: So I guess I kind of starting noting this but as it relates to the resources you have in terms of man power, do you feel like you had the tools and the resources you needed to implement the program?

Respondent: Yea, for the most part

Interviewer: Cool. Are there ones that would be helpful to you next time around, now that you’ve done it once? Like “This is something that I want to use more next year or invest more time in” or that was kind of a best practice that I want to keep doing

Respondent: Well we did, after a while the lines got to be really relly long we did the thing where we passed out numbers so that people could kind of wander and not have to be in the physical line. And you know, we set up an extra tent with chairs so people could sit in the shade. Um. You know but that means you have to have somebody to pass out the chips with the numbers and you have to keep track of what number youre on. [pause] I think, like I said, we need to get to where the hotspot actually works. I hope that some of the app that you use, all the steps you have to go through, could be streamlined a little bit. Because it was kind of – I mean it didn’t feel like we were really – each step is designed to capture some piece of information but it felt like we were just kind of clicking through these pages because we had to in order to get to the end. Without actually capturing any information.

Interviewer: And how did you manage meeting both like that need for customers participating in Produce Plus, and the need to tend to farmers like Licking Creek if they had any assistance that they needed.

Respondent: Yea it definitely. Yea I mean there were times when we didn’t have as many volunteers and I was needed at the Produce Plus table and that meant that I was not keeping tabs on the vendors as much as I would like.

Interviewer: Is there a way you mitigated that?

Respondent: Um. Yea I mean obviously the solution I s just to have more volunteers for Produce Plus. The market assistant we had was a little bit unreliable and would come late a lot so.

Interviewer: Okay, is there anything else that you feel is important to know about either relationships with customers participating in produce plus or the farmers you work with that would be helpful in kind of looking at ye those two specific populations in relation to this program for your market.

Respondent: [pause] No I think I pretty much covered it

Interviewer: Alright well if you think of anything you can feel free to email me and if I have an additional question as I’m reading back through this can I reach out?

Respondent: Yea

Interviewer: Cool

Respondent: Yea, probably the biggest – I was just working on an application before you came – and one of the questions was “what challenges has your organization faced?” I wrote that our biggest challenge was finding funding. You would think it would be easy because farmer’s markets are in-style and trendy and you know people want to fund them. But surprisingly, most of our applications have not been successful. Um, part of that is because I’m not a professional grant writer and neither are the volunteers that help with them.

Interviewer: Yea

Respondent: And we’re competing against organizations that do employ professional grant writers. But I also think that there is this desire on the part of funders to do something new and sexy. So if we say “we’ve already been doing this for eighteen years and we’re going to continue doing it because it works, they don’t want to fund that. They want to fund something with a new twist. And so Arcadia for example with the mobile market, I mean people really like that idea, and that’s nothing against them. But funders also seem to be really gung ho on urban farming and subsidizing – not just bringing in rural farmers and subsidizing the produce on the customer end but also subsidizing funding and subsidizing the production of food and employing people to do that. And so that’s why we decided to launch the school garden program. Well, one thing we noticed was that younger people weren’t coming to the market to buy vegetables. Then we need to start with them when they’re young and get them juiced – no pun intended – about fruits and vegetables. But we also, we thought that if – well they’d be more likely to fund the market manager position if the market manager is also leading a school garden program.

Interviewer: And that seems to have

Respondent: That seems to have worked, yea. So we may, we’re definitely going to try to continue that and may even try to expand it. Um there are a couple of other schools in Ward 8 that have garden programs. Their gardens are struggling because their teachers don’t really have the time or the energy, they’re swamped with the rest of the job. So we feel like it’s a really good opportunity to have an outside partner organization – in this case Ward 8 Farmers’ Market – basically run that garden. And all the school has to do is tell us when to come, when to make the kids available.

Interviewer: Yea, cool, alright. Well

Respondent: But even that can be a challenge for the schools because

Interviewer: They have a lot going on

Respondent: they’re just so swamped

Interviewer: Um so I do have a questionnaire that will take approximately five minutes.