Gowanus Produces
Gowanus Produce is a community-led farmers market and creative arts program featuring fresh food and homegrown arts in Gowanus.
Leader
Lynn Neuman
Location
Wyckoff Street between Hoyt and Bond Streets Brooklyn, NY 11217
About the project
As part of Neighborhood Relief, Artichoke Dance Company is partnering with local residents of Gowanus and Boerum Hill, Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens residents, area performing and visual artists, and Seeds in the Middle to create a farm, flea and arts market featuring fresh food, locally produced goods, and arts workshops, performances and exhibits each Saturday on Wyckoff Street between Hoyt and Bond Streets. This initiative is in coordination with New York City’s Open Streets program and aimed at creating healthy lifestyles, building community bonds, and job training and creation.
Gowanus Produces addresses physical and mental health as well as the social trauma from the Covid-19 pandemic, providing local healthy jobs in a food-insecure community, building on partnerships forged between low-income residents and the wealthier neighbors during the pandemic and in relation to the impending neighborhood rezoning. Even though Boerum Hill and Gowanus are becoming known as tony neighborhoods for their artsy, trend-setting gentrifiers, the pandemic exposed the vast health and economic disparities between the "brownstoners" and their neighbors in NYCHA developments. During the pandemic, connection was created between these two worlds just blocks apart.
This market initiative builds on these relationships and expands them into sustainable healthy businesses, providing training and mentoring in building and sustaining markets, craft industries, and arts practices. Our greatest hope is that success of this market will enable low-income residents who work on the project to start rising out of poverty and enhance education and enrichment for the local underserved youth of color.
The Steps
To date we have secured permits, indentified suppliers and interested vendors and artists, and held three market days.
Contributions will enable us to continue to pay for market permits, provide training and stipends for market entrepreneurs, offer retail space for area makers, and retain artists to offer free creative and enriching experiences for the community. Funding will enable us to run the market with these services through 2021.
Why we‘re doing it
Through Gowanus Produces, we are working in partnership with our neighbors to build the type of world we want to live in, one that is co-created, equitable and sustainable. Artichoke Dance Company has been working in and around Gowanus, focusing on arts and environmental action, for nearly a decade. With the impact of the Coronavirus, a need to come together around the whole health of people and the neighborhood became glaringly apparent. Learning about, and providing steps to create, a healthy lifestyle includes eating healthy food, personal and cultural expression, social interaction and community building.