There’s plenty of restaurants to eat at down in the Craft District. Although folks without a car need to walk an hour or take a bus to reach the closest grocery store for food. Several local non-profits are providing means to offer affordable, healthy food in Lincoln Park.

Jodi Slick, the Founder and CEO of Ecolibrium3, is one of the local non-profits providing affordable healthy food. She said there’s several steps improve the health of residents.

“Ecolibrium3 is actually working on three different initiatives that combine to address the food access issues in Lincoln Park,” Slick said. “One is, is we have an urban farm up at Lake Superior College. Two is, we’re taking the community center here and putting in a commercial kitchen so we can do some food education. And then three is what the neighborhood is most excited about is we’ll be opening a small footprint grocery store, hopefully in 2024.”

Some of the steps are combining food, preparation, and education with a sense of social connectedness. Hayley Diem, an Education and Outreach Coordinator with Duluth Community Garden, said there are plenty of community gardens where people can use the free produce.

“The Emerald Community Garden for the past two years, it’s actually been communally managed. That’s sort of a collaborative effort, of course, there is issues with seasonality. As you can see, there’s nothing really growing right now in the gardens,” Diem said. “So an important piece about gardening is knowing how to preserve the abundance while we have it here in Duluth. So we do quite a bit of education around how to preserve foods.”

Diem also said the local farmer’s market has been instrumental with bringing healthy food to the neighborhood.

“Seeds of Success, is a program of Community Action Duluth. They’re doing some really great work in Lincoln Park as far as food access goes. They started a farmer’s market in Lincoln Park, at the Harrison Community Center, weekly throughout the summer months. They also have a mobile market where they purchase foods in bulk. Then they visit different neighborhoods around the city that struggle with food access.”

For more information about Ecolibrium3’s grocery store plans we have more details here. Also for other stories in Lincoln Park you can read more here.