Black Power Initiative
Amidst the heavy impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter Movement of May 2020, Rico Blackman founded the nonprofit Black Power Initiative (BPI) with the mission of supplying Cincinnati’s Black community with resources and opportunities. BPI works to create greater access to better food, transportation, technology, education, healthcare, and housing for all through their programming and grassroots organizing.
In Cincinnati, access to food is a luxury – especially nutrient-dense foods. Cincinnati is home to 12 predominantly Black neighborhoods, yet only one of those neighborhoods has a full service grocery store. The other 11 are subject to what is recognized as food apartheid, where access to healthy, affordable foods has been extremely limited through discriminatory policies.
Through their “Nurture Our Own” program, Black Power Initiative works tirelessly to break down barriers to healthy food access in Cincinnati with a system that is flexible, accessible, and affordable for all. They’ve already significantly impacted the Walnut Hills community through their free food pop ups, rescuing and redistributing more than 1000 pounds of food per week to the residents they’ve built incredible relationships with. To BPI, this isn’t charity work; it’s building and deepening networks of care where people give what they can so others can get what they need outside of unjust systems of power.
Increasing access to healthy foods is only half the battle. Food literacy is equally important and needs to be addressed as well. Food literacy is the knowledge and experience needed to select, plan, and prepare meals within the context of cultural values, societal norms and household habits; it is the result of exposure, social interactions, culture, and education. In taking a step back, we begin to see that this two-fold issue is an inescapable loop — in areas where access to nutritional foods are limited, nutritional food literacy is limited as well. It can be extremely difficult for individuals to develop the skill set to prepare healthy meals if healthy foods aren’t accessible.
Black Power Initiative wants to address these issues by:
Bolstering their programming to offer a greater selection of protein and fresh produce during their free food pop ups
Providing free community cooking classes for the residents they serve
Creating a cookbook filled with culturally preferred recipes that would be free to residents, or offered to the general public for a fee. Any proceeds will go back into purchasing nutritional foods for their free food pop ups.
Funds from this round of the Community Blend Give Back will be used towards helping Black Power Initiative expand their Nurture Our Own program. This programming will reduce barriers to accessing nutritional foods and increase food literacy in many of Cincinnati’s Black neighborhoods through food rescue, redistribution, and the development of culturally-conscious recipes and cooking classes.
