APIOPA Featured in LA Times!

Capture

By Scott Chan

APIOPA was featured last week in the LA Times for the great work that Ailene and Kyle have been organizing around food access in Historic Filipinotown. Read the full article here. To learn more about our food work, you can read about our healthy corner store movement at www.freshhifi.org, and www.rootscsa.org.

In speaking with corner store owners over the past few years, we have learned the difficulties in trying to source healthy produce. Besides issues of demand, there’s also a lot of logistics to think about. What are the prices? Who will go out and buy the produce for the store? Will anyone deliver?

One project APIOPA is pushing for is a buyer’s cooperative. What this means is that we are trying to organize a few corner stores we work with to collectively buy the produce items they need. Often times, the stores don’t need to put in big orders. However, small orders might come with more expensive costs, and/or no ability to have that produce delivered. With a buyer’s cooperative, APIOPA and our partner agencies work on combining many small orders in to something larger that will get us better pricing, and then we use our van to go and pick up and deliver the produce to the stores. We plan to launch this effort real soon; please let us know if you would be interested in partnering with us!