What Does That Mean In Our Community?

Despite being a surrounded by a community rich in agricultural business and farming, residents in Cleveland County often experience food insecurity and difficulty accessing fresh food. BRCM aims to embrace the ideals of food sovereignty in our local communities through our partnerships with local famers by allowing them to channel some of the food they produce back into the surrounding community without risking their financial health. The unfortunate fact is that, for many small-scale sustainable farmers in Cleveland County, it is often cost prohibitive to sell their products to the folks who live in their local area; in order to turn a profit and earn enough to support their livelihoods, these farmers often have to branch out, selling their wares in larger metropolitan areas such as Charlotte and Asheville where residents can afford to pay the higher cost necessary to creating their high quality products.

In spite of this reality, we believe that every person deserves access to fresh, healthy, high quality food, regardless of their income level or area of residence. Our hope is that by partnering with and purchasing food from local producers, we can remove some of the financial burden both from the farmers and consumers, lowering barriers of access for the folks who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford these products.

Our pop-up markets also use something of a unique approach among hunger-based nonprofits: we do not require any form of identification, proof of residence or income, registration, or any of the other strings that often come with food assistance, and we allow people to take as much as they want without imposing specific limits. This approach is based in trusting people to evaluate their own needs, take what they want/need, and do so with consideration of others using our services. Many groups providing services similar to BRCM employ ID requirements, food limits, or both with the expectation that left unchecked people will take everything they can get and reduce the number of people that can actually access available resources; These sorts of regulatory limits by hunger-based nonprofits can serve to exacerbate systemic discrimination and disenfranchisement faced by the folks who require their assistance the most, such as BIPOC, disabled and chronically ill people, undocumented immigrants, and the unhoused by aligning with prejudiced expectations of these groups’ behaviors and ignoring the difficulties that they might face in fulfilling the requirements necessary to receive help.

Defying typical expectations of self-regulated food assistance, we have found that the people who come to our markets are courteous of one another and fully equipped to evaluate and fulfill their own food requirements. Folks who come to our markets nearly always ask, sometimes multiple times, what they can take and how much, and take what they think they can reasonably consume before it expires; it’s extremely common for our attendees to say things like “I’m just cooking for me” or “I want to leave enough for everyone else.”