How do you get healthy food on the table when you can’t find any?
This is a question that Ortilia Lujan Flores had grappled with many times before.
She wanted affordable, nutritious food, but lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have an accessible grocery store.
Flores couldn’t drive, which limited the few food options she had. “There was nowhere to go,” she explains.
Flores isn’t the only one that’s struggled with this problem — 41 million Americans don’t have consistent access to nutritious food.
But when she moved to Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood, she discovered a nonprofit that made all the difference.
This nonprofit is called The GrowHaus, and it takes a community-led approach to tackling food insecurity by giving neighbors the tools they need to improve their access food.
The GrowHaus knew that their community’s challenges went far beyond a lack of grocery stores. They looked at everything from local food production to food waste and education, and they found that the issues residents were struggling with all seemed to be connected.
To address the food crisis in their community, then, they needed to think bigger.
That’s why The GrowHaus partnered with Denver Food Rescue, an organization that rescues food from donors (like stores and restaurants). Volunteers travel by bike and deliver that rescued food to The GrowHaus, where volunteers then distribute it to local families — ensuring it can be eaten rather than thrown away.
And that’s no small potatoes. According to a recent report by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), supported by The Rockefeller Foundation, there’s great potential to expand food rescue in Denver.
The NRDC found that under optimal conditions, 4,232 tons of additional food could be rescued each year — equivalent to 7.1 million meals — from retail, institutional and restaurant locations within the city. When organizations like The GrowHaus take advantage of rescued food, everybody wins.
