The Green Machine Mobile Market: An Innovative Response to Food Insecurity in the Bluff City

Abstract

This chapter describes the effort of residents from one of the nation’s poorest urban neighborhoods to successfully transform a retired city bus into an attractive mobile food market and nutrition education facility to address the food security crisis confronting large sections of Memphis, Tennessee. Since its launch in July of 2013, The Green Machine Mobile Market has provided more than 50,000 Memphians living in communities without full service grocery stores with easy access to high quality, competitively priced, and culturally appropriate fresh fruits and vegetables. The Green Machine is a joint venture of Saint Patrick Community Outreach Center and the Vance Avenue Collaborative – a coalition of more than 24 local grassroots organizations and the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. This project was made possible through the collaboration of dozens of local community organizations, religious institutions, small businesses, corporations, schools, universities, foundations, hospitals and the Memphis Grizzlies (a professional basketball team). This chapter describes the strategies, achievements, and challenges encountered during the transformation process, and concludes with important lessons learned through this experience. In particular, it explains how this partnership was able to establish a successful collaboration across sectors involving a broad range of neighborhood assets to directly improve community well-being (Haworth and Hart. Well-being individual, community and social perspectives. Palgrave, Hampshire, 2007; Cox et al. Aust J Soc Issues 45(1):71–89, 2010), not only in the residential area that first originated the project, but also within more than 20 low income areas where food security is a critical problem.

The Green Machine represents a social invention that various groups involved in food-related projects in other legacy cities may be able to use to address the all too pervasive and corrosive effects of urban food deserts (Whyte. Clin Soc Rev 5(1): Article 7, 1987).