Here’s something to add to your growing list of reasons why you should drop everything and move to the Midwest (because God knows you’ve been secretly dreaming of this for years). A new service called the Michigan Good Food Fund is offering a loan service to businesses to boost low-income communities’ access to fresh, healthy food.
[Michigan Good Food Fund] is a new public-private partnership that wants to increase underprivileged communities’ access to fresh produce and meat, while at the same time, expanding business opportunities for entrepreneurs. The organization will make $250,000-plus loans to businesses all along the supply chain from farmers and food processors to distributors and grocery stores; funders expect it to grow to $30 million.
The Healthy Food Access Campaign report, commissioned by the Philadelphia-based Food Trust this year, found that more than 1.8 million Michiganders, including an estimated 300,000 children, live in lower-income communities with limited supermarket access. Those areas include rural parts of the state, like Hillsdale, Tuscola, Sanilac, Coldwater and Allegan, and urban hubs, like Detroit and Flint.
The fund’s list of goals to be met in the next five year are pretty lofty — such as providing 80 percent of Michigan residents with access to affordable food and incorporating food and agriculture into K-12 curriculums, for example. But seriously, Midwest, you may have climate change working against you (and who doesn’t, really), but you’ve been lookin’ mighty fine these days.
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