http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/50-solutions/this-small-town-refused-to-settle-for-wal-mart-when-its-last-local-grocery-store-closed-20170102
[links in on-line article]
This Small Town Refused to Settle for Wal-Mart When Its Last Local
Grocery Store Closed
After 10 years without an independent grocery store, the residents of
Iola, Kansas, found a way to bring one back.
Melissa Hellmann posted Jan 02, 2017
This article is part of our state-by-state exploration of local solutions.
For two months in 2012, longtime Iola, Kansas, resident Mary Ross
trudged through the sweltering heat, waving gnats from her view as she
walked door to door with a petition. It was the hottest summer since
moving there with her family about 30 years ago, but Ross was determined
to gather signatures requesting a grocery store be established in the
small rural town of fewer than 6,000 people.
Iola had lost its last independent grocery store four years earlier,
shortly after the Wal-mart Supercenter—with its own expansive
aisles—came to town and drove out all of the competition.
“I live in a small town. That was my choice,” she says. But since Iola’s
three smaller grocery stores went out of business, she has to drive 8 to
20 miles to find healthy food choices and the specific ingredients for
her home-cooked meals. “It’s like they’re trying to kill this small
town,” she lamented. But the 800 signatures she gathered worked.
In October, Iola’s first grocery store in nearly a decade broke ground,
thanks to a unique public-private partnership. Allen County agreed to
sell property for it at a steep discount to G&W Foods Inc., a
Missouri-based chain with stores scattered throughout the region.
“Basically, our community said that having a supermarket on this site is
a priority, and we’re willing to put some skin in the game,” says David
Toland, executive director of Thrive Allen County, a health and wellness
center.
But the problem is bigger than Iola.
The absence of grocery stores in rural towns is a familiar tale
throughout Kansas and the rest of the Midwest. In Kansas, nearly
one-fifth of rural grocery stores went out of business over the span of
four years, according to a 2010 study by the Center for Rural Affairs.
Throughout rural America, 2.3 million people live in food deserts—areas
10 miles or more from a supermarket.
And when those rural towns lose their supermarkets, just as in Iola,
workers lose their jobs and their health is negatively impacted. The
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ranked Allen County one of the
unhealthiest in the state for a range of health concerns, including its
high obesity and physical inactivity rates.
In response to the dwindling number of rural supermarkets, Kansas State
University Center for Engagement and Community Development (CECD)
partnered with storeowners and local organizations to create the Rural
Grocery Initiative (RGI). Through this initiative, CECD aims to attract
more customers to rural Kansas supermarkets by encouraging owners to
sell additional goods like hardware, and offering support to communities
with stores that have already closed. When the RGI was formed in 2007,
there were 212 grocery stores in rural towns throughout the state that
served populations of fewer than 2,500. Since that time, 33 of those
stores closed and have not reopened, says David Procter, director of CECD.
To avoid further closures, the initiative is partly designed to inform
communities of the importance of supporting local grocery stores, as
well as show the financial and social consequences of their loss. The
initiative’s community dialogue platform called FEAST (Food, Education,
Agriculture and Solutions Together) involves a town hall-style meeting
to talk about the local food system and the significance of the grocery
stores.
It’s necessary to remind rural dwellers about the importance of grocery
stores, says Procter, because there has not been as much research on
rural food deserts as there has been on urban areas.
“[Kansas] is growing billions of bushels of wheat, which has turned into
bread for everybody in the United States. It becomes tough for that to
happen if there’s no community to support the ranchers and farmers that
live in the rural parts of the state,” Procter argues. “If there’s no
place for these folks to go to get food or to get hardware or to get
pharmacy stuff, then it’s a domino effect, and at some point it’s going
to impact the food that people in the cities are buying as well.”
Within the past few months, the RGI has received calls from food policy
councils and wellness groups from two communities in Kansas that are
struggling to maintain their supermarkets. Procter’s team plans to visit
those towns to hold community dialogues, and work closely with leaders
there to develop strategies that increase healthy food access.
In addition, there’s a rural grocery toolkit component to the initiative
that addresses many of the challenges storeowners face. Within the
toolkit, located on the RGI website, are several examples of how to do a
marketing analysis, as well as a list of the legal requirements and
licensing that new grocery stores will need. Financing opportunities and
marketing plans are also available through open source, meaning that
they’re freely accessible to the public. Also shown on the website,
these open source models and case studies can be replicated in rural
communities throughout the country.
Procter says many Kansas communities are looking at the RGI suggestions
of community-owned, nonprofit, and school-based models (in which grocery
stores operate through the local school system) as they learn how to
navigate the next steps of dealing with the supermarket closings. Many
stores that have become nonprofits have extended their missions to
improve the overall health and wellness of their communities, he notes.
Among some of the innovative solutions to food deserts in Kansas, the
Allen County GROW (Growing Rural Opportunities Works) Food and Farm
Council is one that, in August 2014, was created as a resolution passed
by the Allen County Commissioners. It was the first rural food and farm
council in the state, and has spearheaded the launch of several others.
Debbie Bearden, coordinator at the Allen County Farm Bureau Association,
helped develop the council, and speaks at regional events about the
importance of rural food committees. She encourages county leaders to
think more broadly about how to achieve health and wellness.
“Getting a grocery store is a project and once it’s obtained, then we’re
done. But if we were to create a food policy council, that’s a much
broader umbrella,” Bearden says.
Over the past few years, the council has worked tirelessly to improve
the county’s health ranking. It has pushed for the farmers market to
operate an extra day and to also offer food demonstrations using fresh,
local produce. The council is now working with five restaurants in Allen
County to include nutritional labels on their menus. To further promote
healthy eating, one council member, who is also a caterer, operates a
food truck that sells salads and wraps in front of business complexes
during lunch breaks.
“The towns that are going to survive are the ones that are creative with
solutions, and building partnerships between supermarkets, local
producers, and local governments to fix these food access problems,”
says Toland, of Thrive.
Through Thrive’s work and the community’s efforts, Allen County plans to
open the G&W Foods in Iola next spring. For Mary Ross, the opening of
the market, only a half-mile from her home, signifies that the town is
not dying. In fact, it’s a rebirth of sorts.
Now, not only will she have access to healthy food selections for her
family, but she’ll also be able to find the ingredients she needs to
experiment with different meals again. Ross says it was necessary that
the community come together as they did to bring a new grocery store to
town.
“If we don’t help each other, we will become an island unto ourselves,”
says Ross. “Everybody is supposed to help everyone else.”