Fresh Moves: A Story of Vision and Collaboration
Event Review By Daniel Lopez
The first day of Chicago Design Week 2011 drew to a close in the warm, exposed brick walls of the Portfolio Annex at the Chicago Portfolio School. It was here that designers assembled for refreshments and a lively panel discussion with folks from EPIC, an organization that pairs creatives with non-profits, and Fresh Moves, a non-profit organization committed to bringing fresh produce to “food deserts” in Chicago.
Fresh Moves wanted to introduce the idea of a mobile produce market that would bring fresh fruits and vegetables to underserved communities in Chicago. After securing a CTA bus from the city, Fresh Moves worked with EPIC and assembled a team to transform and rehab their CTA bus into a moving produce market that is impossible to ignore. The bright and colorful design work that adorns the bus helps create a poignant visual marker no matter what neighborhood the bus travels to.
The Q&A that followed further revealed the role of design in the project and how the pro-bono work helped the project take off by significantly reducing start-up costs.
Fresh Moves
Event Review By Erini Shields (erinichristine.com)
Imagine growing up and never tasting an apple. For one west side teen, that was exactly the case. That is, until he walked aboard a bright red bus – Chicago’s first mobile produce market.
The term “food desert” isn’t necessarily a common one, but they are an unfortunate reality for a surprising number of communities in Chicago. According to a 2009 report by Mari Gallagher of the Mari Gallagher Research & Consulting Group and the National Center for Public Relations, more than 600,000 Chicagoans live in an area with limited or no access to fresh meat or produce. These are predominately in the south and west sides of the city, disempowering already hard hit communities. And while larger grocery chains have pulled out, there is an abundance of fast food to fill the food void.
Enter Fresh Moves, a mobile produce market and the brainchild of Food Desert Action – an organization founded by Steven Casey, Sheelah Muhammad, and Jeff Pinzino.
Solving this problem wouldn’t be easy –brick and mortar stores are expensive and have a smaller geographic reach than needed for this task. So the group decided to think about a mobile solution, seeking out and receiving a bus from the CTA.
With this, Food Desert Action joined forces with Katherine Darnstadt and Architecture for Humanity, a group that believes in being participatory design advocates for those who have a limited voice in public life. They work collectively and become active instigators of change in their communities, working not as leaders but as collaborators.
Together, Architecture for Humanity and Food Desert Action gathered a group of roughly 30 people for a design charrette to discuss what the bus would look like, from the graphics on the outside to the take-aways to the internal layout. They needed to suspend a few hundred pounds of produce, make the produce stand out and look attractive, and not have the entire bus feel like a 9-foot wide submarine.
With cross-discipline collaboration, they transformed the city bus into a mobile market. “Nothing brut force and a Sawzall can’t handle!” Darnstadt joked. However, through the charrette, and even after building the bus, they had a lot of good ideas but realized they still lacked a solid brand.
It was then that EPIC joined the team. EPIC joins creative teams with organizations in need whose budgets couldn’t normally include a design team. And it was a team headed by Levy Innovations Creative Director Justin Winget that was given the challenge: eight weeks to execute a full branding of Food Desert Action’s project.
The team wanted to create an adaptable identity that would be flexible and grow with the organization. They broke the project down week by week, working on everything from the name (where Fresh Moves was born) to all of the visual elements, print collateral, and a website. Two weeks before the end of the project, Winget’s team won the EPIC best-of-show award at their year-end fundraiser, beating out nine other teams who’d already finished their projects.
All the hard work paid off even greater on May 25 this year when the big red bus rolled out for its first stop. On that rainy Wednesday, they served 65-75 customers, sold out of five items, and introduced one teenage to his first apple. “The real test will come in November, when people aren’t thinking about a salad,” said Casey.
The seasons are just one of the challenges the bus faces. So are gas prices, recharging batteries so the bus won’t have to run off of a generator, and customer education. Luckily, another collaboration is helping to solve the later. With many customers never having, and subsequently not knowing how to cook some of the produce, Kendall College created recipe cards for shoppers to take home. Later plans include creating YouTube cooking videos.
Casey doesn’t judge their success in dollars, but in tons moved – the amount of produce they’ve provided to customers. He’s got an amazing outlook for his organization. “If I have no demand in three years, it’s a success. It means [Mayor] Rahm Emanuel has fixed the problem.”
And if recent talks between Mayor Emanuel and executives from six grocery chains are any indication, the teams behind Fresh Moves have sparked something big.
Win a HOW Conference Pass
One pass for the Creative Freelancer Conference ($525 value, CreativeFreelancerConference.com) will be awarded at the Fresh Moves event on Monday, June 6..
Event Overview
We all know the power that design thinking can wield. But when it’s applied to a good cause, that strength can multiply even further—with nourishing results. Hear from representatives of EPIC and Architecture for Humanity on how they joined forces to help Fresh Moves bring good food to those who need it most.
Fresh Moves approached AFH and then EPIC to help create a bus that would bring fresh produce to people who can't easily access it in Chicago. The EPIC team created Fresh Moves website (http://freshmoves.org/) and Mobile Produce Market bus wrapper. AFH prototyped and created the interior of the bus.
About EPIC: Engaging Philanthropy, Inspiring Creatives
EPIC helps creative professionals and nonprofits join forces, making a bigger impact on the world than either could alone. In regular intervals, we are pairing select teams of “creatives” from the ad/design industries with select nonprofit clients dedicated to education, children and families. During what we call an “8-week creative rally,” each team creates plans, programs, and materials—on a pro-bono basis—that their nonprofit client needs to positively affect the lives of those they serve.
Teams meet once weekly at an ad or design “host agency”—drawn from a pool of Chicago’s most sought-after shops. The Creative Director or Principal Designer at each firm leads the team, which is composed of: copywriters, designers, art directors, strategists, account planners, project managers, public relations experts, web mavens, photographers and anyone whose skill set matches the client’s specific needs.
EPIC follows up with the nonprofit clients who we have served by providing an EPIC “Ambassador” who is available for 2 months after the rally is complete to help roll-out the program that EPIC has created. And, at the close of each year, work produced in rallies is juried in a year end EPIC show and fundraising event.
http://iamepic.org/
About Fresh Moves
You might be wondering what, exactly, is a food desert. Well, in the City of Chicago, it’s a pretty big problem. A problem in which entire communities have severely limited access to fresh fruits and veggies, and therefore suffer from significant health issues related to poor diets.
After a 2006 report for LaSalle Bank mapped food deserts in Chicago, activists Steven Casey, Sheelah Muhammad and Jeff Pinzino banded together to work on a solution.
But this was not an easy problem to solve. The simple fact was that opening a traditional market wouldn’t address the multi-neighborhood needs quickly or efficiently. National chains have difficulty finding large parcels of affordable urban land to support their high costs of operation. Independents can’t gamble on unproven locations, and ethnic markets are slow to grow. So despite high profit margins for fresh foods and substantial unmet demand, Food Desert Action had to think outside the big box.
The answer? Put the whole thing on wheels! So Food Desert Action sprang into, well, ACTION. They were able to secure a bus, donated from the CTA. They partnered with Architecture for Humanity to transform the bus into a mobile produce market. They worked with volunteers at EPIC to put together this website. And now, they’re working hard to bring the Lawndale and Austin community fresh, delicious, nutritious produce – and educating the public at large about how fun it can be to eat healthily.
About Architecture for Humanity Chicago
A regional chapter of Architecture for Humanity, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian issues and brings design services to communities in need. We are a collaborative group of volunteer design professionals and students dedicated to the pursuit of advocacy and social change through the built environment.
We believe in socially responsible design for our communities, nonprofit organizations, families, and individuals in Chicago. We believe in activism in our neighborhoods working collaboratively with community partners developing relationships with those that we serve by fostering a shared passion for clean, healthy, and sustainable spaces. We believe that design matters, people matter, and we should design like we give a damn.
http://chicago.architectureforhumanity.org/
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