Black-Led Food Coop Raising $25K To Open Central BK Grocery Store

BEDFORD-STUYVESANT, BROOKLYN — A Black-led food coop wants to open its first grocery store in central Brooklyn and is raising money to make it happen.

Central Brooklyn Food Coop launched a $25,000 Kickstarter fundraiser Wednesday with the goal of opening a community-led grocery store by the summer of 2020, the Kickstarter reads.

"The CBFC has so much potential in really showing people that we can own stuff together," wrote Ashleigh Eubanks, a CBFC member and Food Justice Program Director at RiseBoro.

"When we own a store together, we're not just thinking about ourselves, we're thinking 'what does our community need?"

CBFC, which purports to be the only black-led food cooperative in New York City, has been bring fresh fruits and vegetables to communities in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights since it launched in 2013.

The project will be funded if it reaches its $25,000 goal by Nov. 22, according to the campaign. As of Thursday morning, the coop had earned about $10,000.

Coop organizers say bring fresh produce into food desserts (Bed-Stuy, for example, has one grocery store for every 57 bodegas, they said) is about more than healthy living.

Co-founding board member Mark Winston Griffith told the Brooklyn Eagle, first to report the campaign, “As black people in a predominantly black neighborhood that has been hit for such a long time that was struggling economically, food became a symbol — a symbol of what we did not have and what we lacked. And this very fundamental ability to feed ourselves and to do for ourselves.

"So building the Central Brooklyn Food Coop is a way to right that ship."