A long list of what we have been up to, Big Day of Giving 2024 Edition
The Alchemist CDC team is small but mighty. We are always working to connec the community to land, food, and opportunity, but it can be hard to wrap your head around all that we are up to. As you consider supporting us with a donation on the Big Day of Giving, we wanted to provide a long (but partial) list of what we are up to. You can also take a look at our new Impact Map, visually representing the many places impacted by our work.
Alchemist Kitchen
- Our 8th and 9th cohorts of the Alchemist Microenterprise Academy (AMA) graduated in Spring and Fall of 2023. Altogether, we have had more than 150 businesses graduate from AMA since it began in Fall 2019.
- Our 10th AMA cohort is wrapping up soon and graduating later this month.
- The AMA program continues to meet its goal of primarily serving under-resourced Sacramento entrepreneurs. Of the 231 individuals to go through the program so far, they have been: 73% BIPOC, 64% low-income, 62% female, 22% LGBTQ+, 18% disabled, and 3% veteran entrepreneurs.
- The Alchemist Kitchen Incubator Program (AKIP) presently has 26 participating businesses and will soon be opening its application for more.
- AKIP businesses are selling their products at a wide range of locations, from the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-Op to the Midtown Farmers Market to Sacramento International Airport!
- One AKIP business, Sugar Coated Cupcakes, won the 2023 Sacramento Kings Capitalize: Food competition and earned a spot selling their desserts at Golden 1 Center for the entire basketball season.
- We recently put together a Business Directory of AKIP businesses, as well as a map of locations where you can find their products being sold. It’s impressive to see their reach!
- Our commissary kitchen currently supports around 30 small food businesses, providing an affordable place to launch and grow their businesses.
- Several AKIP businesses have incredibly exciting projects in the works, but we aren’t yet at liberty to share details about them! Keep an eye out in the coming months.
Farmers’ Markets
- In 2023, we distributed $639,365 in EBT/CalFresh and $465,725 in Market Match nutrition incentives at 8 farmers’ markets in Sacramento County! This combined total of $1,105,090 is our biggest year yet, despite the fact that two of the 8 markets spent most of the year piloting a different nutrition incentive program that did not count toward this total.
- More on that pilot: Alchemist was the first organization to begin testing a new California nutrition incentive pilot program last year. We have now happily returned those markets to the Market Match program after the conclusion of the pilot program, but were pleased to help put the program through its paces and to provide input to the State of California on the pilot’s strengths and weaknesses.
- We launched a comprehensive Farmers’ Market Guide for Sacramento and Yolo Counties to help people better find all of the information they need.
- Our busiest market day ever was on October 12, with 691 transactions and $12,344 in CalFresh and $9,963 in Market Match distributed at the Florin Certified Farmers’ Market! This means our incredible staff and volunteers were completing a transaction every 21 seconds, with $93 being distributed every minute!
- Speaking of Florin, we expanded our role in local farmers’ markets in February by taking on operations and management of both the Florin and Sunrise Light Rail Station Certified Farmers’ Markets. The Florin market also moved, by necessity, to a new location at the Florin Light Rail Station. We were deeply honored to be entrusted with these markets by Dan and Renae Best, who had been operating the Florin market for over 40 years! If you don’t already, we’d love to see you visiting these markets.
- Continuing the theme of market management, we were selected to create and operate the new Meadowview Certified Farmers’ Market in collaboration with the Office of Councilmember Mai Vang. We are working non-stop to prepare for a successful soft opening on June 2 and a grand opening on June 9, at the Meadowview Light Rail Station. The vendor line-up is coming together encouragingly! Please make a note to join us at the market when it opens. If you know someone who should be a vendor at this market (no stall fees through March 2025!) please pass the information along to them.
Neighborhood Empowerment
- After years of development work, the Pansy Community Garden Park opened to the public in 2023! We have been so gratified to see neighbors making use of the small park whenever we pay it a visit.
- You might recall that we were the first non-profit to ever be selected for a Prop 68 Statewide Park Program grant, to purchase and build out the Oak Park Art Garden. After significant delays in the delivery of those grant funds, the project is finally picking up steam! Late last year, we selected Atlas Lab, Inc. as the landscape architect for the project and submitted our Planning and Design application to the City of Sacramento on April 12. We anticipate the project will be complete and open to the public by next summer (2025)! Take a look at the project page to learn more about what we are building.
- We have continued our work managing and organizing events at the Mirasol Village Community Garden. As more housing units have opened and filled up at Mirasol, the garden is seeing growing interest. The pop-up farmstand (with EBT and Market Match) from We Grow Urban Farm and our taco Tuesday events, making tacos from garden produce with the residents, have been a consistent hit.
- Community Food Connections was first created as Community Connections 95820 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic but has since become an essential long-term project under Alchemist. This project partners with local elementary schools in Sacramento City Unified School District to support some of the most vulnerable families in need of food assistance. A school liaison (such as a school social worker) identifies families in need, conducts a thorough needs assessment, and then connects families to the program. We deliver farm fresh produce and grocery staples directly to around 30 of these families that have barriers to accessing traditional emergency food distribution sites. We also provide food to homeless students and their families through distribution at their schools. We prioritize purchasing our produce from small-midsize local growers such as Root 64 Sacramento and Spork Food Hub whenever possible, resulting in additional economic support for our region. We currently feed around 1500 people altogether and expect this number to increase greatly with some recent developments we look forward to sharing soon!
- The Oak Park Sol Community Garden continues to evolve and will increasingly integrate with our Community Food Connections project. Recognizing shifting dynamics in the surrounding neighborhood, we are converting half of the individual garden plots at Oak Park Sol into a collaborative community farm, with volunteers growing fresh produce to be distributed through Community Food Connections and to neighbors with occasional free farm stands at the garden. We are also working to renew the space and to see it activated more often for the community with public events and classes, and to be available for small private events.
- We also want to thank James F and Troop 8 Sacramento for improving the main pathway at Oak Park Sol from mulch to decomposed granite. This Eagle Scout project (with support from Habitat for Humanity of Greater Sacramento) greatly improves the accessibility of the space.
- With additional staffing capacity on our Neighborhood Empowerment team, we now have regular monthly volunteer days at each of the community garden and park locations and plan to have more programming and events.
Advocacy
- Our work depends on sound policy decisions at the local, State, and Federal level. Over the last two years, we have found it necessary to increase our advocacy efforts to ensure critical services and funding remain available for those most in need in our communities.
- You may remember that Alchemist authored and co-sponsored Senate Bill 907 in 2022, which was signed into law on the first attempt but not funded. When funded, the Local Equitable Access to Food (LEAF) program created by this law will provide non-competitive grant funding to ensure that every certified farmers’ market in California can offer CalFresh/EBT access. Due to the state’s budget crisis, we have not yet been successful in seeing this program funded but continued our advocacy throughout 2023 and will continue to advocate until it becomes a budget priority..
- On the theme of budget crises, the Governor’s January budget proposal for California called for cutting $33.2 million from the $35 million secured last year for the California Nutrition Incentive Program (CNIP). CNIP funds the statewide Market Match program that serves as an essential safety net for food-insecure Californians and California’s small farms. The proposed cuts would permanently end Market Match if implemented. We had a small role in the coalition that secured $35 million over three years in 2023, and now are actively engaged as one of the partners leading the Save Market Match coalition. We have been actively engaged in grassroots organizing, coalition building, meeting with legislators, and even building the Save Market Match website. If you’d like to help save this essential program, please visit the website and use five minutes of your time to take action!
- Alchemist CDC joined the California Food and Farming Network (CFFN) in 2023 to partner with other organizations in California in supporting policies that combat hunger and improve the local food system. We also continue to partner closely with NextGen Policy on food policy issues!
- Our Executive Director joined the steering committees for both the California Alliance of Farmers’ Markets and the Sacramento Food Policy Council, in order to maintain higher engagement on essential food issues.
- A member of our staff has been nominated for a 2024 Freshy, an award for individuals and organizations leading the way in CalFresh.
- We co-led a California organizing effort in 2023 to strengthen and improve the Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program (GusNIP) in the Farm Bill.
- Our staff helped residents of Mirasol Village organize to save the Dos Rios Light Rail Station which was planned to provide them with a direct connection to the light rail system. While many hands joined together to save it, we were able to play an important role in its survival.
- We are participating in the relaunched Food Justice Taskforce with the City of Sacramento and are actively advocating for multiple necessary policy updates for an Urban Ag Ordinance 2.0.
Everything Else
- We have participated as a host site in the new California College Corps program for its first two years of operation and have had an excellent experience working with local college students. Our team has done an excellent job with this program, working through the learning process of piloting something new, and providing important feedback to the program for future improvements.
- Our Neighborhood Empowerment Program Manager has launched a very successful campaign of setting up customized corporate volunteer days for employers in the region. We have had many great teams from different corporations come out to work in our gardens for the day, providing the chance for them to learn about our work and the need for such work. This, in turn, leads to many creative collaborations and important relationships. If you know of a company that needs a host site for corporate volunteer day, send them our way!
- We are currently working through a re-branding process with Elizabeth Wight Graphic Design in order to ensure our visual branding aligns with our mission, vision, and the reality of our work. A broad range of stakeholders have helped inform the process and we look forward to sharing the outcome in the near future!
- Our CalFresh at Farmers’ Market and Neighborhood Empowerment teams are currently working to implement a new volunteer management system that will greatly improve our ability to recruit, train, and communicate effectively with our amazing volunteers!
- On the operational side, our Operations Director and Bookkeeper have moved us to a new accounting system, building our capacity to properly manage, track, and maintain compliance for our budget that continues to grow in size and complexity.
- We have a seat on the California Jobs First (formerly CERF) – Capital Region Leadership Council, helping to guide and prioritize major state funding for inclusive economic development projects in the region.
- In 2023, we secured $12 million in grants from the State of California’s CERF program (now California Jobs First) and the US Economic Development Administration for the Alchemist Public Market project, fully funding its construction. The project is now actively moving forward, with the design team assembled and working on the entitlement package for the City of Sacramento. We anticipate breaking ground before the end of the year and a grand opening by February 2026.
You may wonder why we need your donations after receiving $12 million in grant funding, and we are happy to explain! That money cannot be used to support our ongoing programs or even the future programming of Alchemist Public Market, but must only be used for costs related to its construction. Every dollar of those funds is needed for the project’s construction, as well. If you remember, we worked deliberately on this project for three years before securing funding, and those hundreds of hours of pre-development work were funded by people like you. This is just one example of how individual donors provide us with the capacity to be creative and pursue new concepts.
Your donations help us to take good ideas and develop them to the point that they can win major grants. Individual donations are genuinely a catalyst for change!
If you would like to join in our work, your donation will be matched today (May 2, 2024) on the Big Day of Giving! You can make your gift of any amount at this link.