Our History

A group of non-profit urban agriculture organizations came together to start Brooklyn’s Bounty to strengthen community-based farmers markets in Brooklyn, increase access to fresh, healthy food, support the local and regional economy, and empower Brooklyn communities. Founding BB partner organizations included: Added Value, East New York Farms!, Urban Oasis at Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, Wyckoff Farmhouse Museum and Just Food. Added Value, East New York Farms!, Urban Oasis and Wyckoff all run community-based farmers markets – AV, ENYF and Wyckoff with youth and UO with Pychiatric Center clients.

As organizations with similar goals, they joined forces in the hopes of finding a way to address their similar challenges instead of competing against each other for the limited grant money available to community-based farmer’s markets. The central challenge all four markets face is getting farmers to come to Brooklyn to sell in a low-income neighborhood, getting customers, finding funding and doing outreach. It’s a “catch-22” situation: farmers don’t want to sell at a market if there aren't enough customers and customers don't come to a market if there aren't enough farmers.

Over a year ago these organizations came together as “Brooklyn’s Bounty” and wrote a proposal to enhance all their markets (for example a cold storage unit to assist in food distribution and a major marketing campaign). The funder, Project for Public Spaces, asked them to first step back and spend a year focused solely on planning and visioning. Brooklyn's Bounty spent a year conducting surveys with market customers, farmers and community gardeners, mainly asking the questions: “What do you like about this market?” and “What do you want to see more of?” The Brooklyn's Bounty consortium compiled the responses received and organized a forum last December at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to share the survey responses and get additional feedback from forum attendees. The forum was open to the larger community interested in building Brooklyn’s local food system.

After the forum, the BB consortium compiled all the feedback received and regrouped to figure out next steps. There was an amazing energy to the forum with many ideas shared to create a more secure, local food system throughout Brooklyn. It was both incredibly exciting and terrifying for the Brooklyn’s Bounty organizations. What should BB focus on first and how can they build a network to make it all happen? All the founding organizations are stretched to capacity just running their current programs. Because of this, the first step is to focus on immediate needs, such as recruiting more vendors for current BB markets and doing outreach.