Springfield Gardening the Community gets $10K for cold storage

MassLive, March 16, 2017, By Jim Kinney.

SPRINGFIELD — Gardening the Community has received a $10,000 grant to add a cold storage unit made out of a refurbished shipping container to its new urban farm on Walnut Street in Springfield.

Gardening the Community received the grant from The Conservation Fund and CSX Transportation’s Grant Program for Transporting Healthy Food.

“Everyone at Gardening the Community (GTC) is very grateful for receiving the $10,000 CSX Transporting Healthy Food grant,” Ibrahim Ali, co-director of the organization, said in a statement. “We have wanted cold storage on our sites for a few years since returning from a visit to Mandela Market in Oakland, California, where we saw how useful it could be for our food access/distribution programs like GTC Eats!”

The three-year-old CSX grant program supports local food distribution organizations by improving groups’ ability to store, package, transport and give communities access to fresh, healthy food, according to a news release. With this most recent set of grants, 11 recipient organizations will be able to serve an additional 40,000 families with 600,000 meals.