This spring, the Indianapolis Liberation Center helped community members form the officially-recognized Community Food Access Coalition, or (CFAC) to address the food apartheid in our city—three years after the City codified it into law. Now, month’s after CFAC’s historic formation, the Indianapolis Liberation Center is thrilled to welcome our newest member-organization: the Community Food Box Project.
Sierra Nuckols founded the project before graduating college, as a way to start tackling this serious yet neglected problem. Today, there are 83 Community Food Boxes throughout Indianapolis and, more recently, Southern Indiana. These pantries provide 24-hour emergency food assistance in neighborhoods facing food insecurity.
The Project partners with a range of individuals and institutions—including schools, religious groups, community centers, businesses, and incarcerated people—to design, create, install, and maintain free food pantries for those in need. With eight years of experience proving that collaboration is key to of the Project’s continued success, it’s easy to understand why they’re uniting with our city’s Liberated Center.
Independent spaces for collaborative solutions
What first drew Nuckols to the space was “the fact that there’s a community of groups working on different struggles coming together to both help each other and work on projects together, and help each other build and grow.”
Food insecurity is defined as an unreliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable, nutritious food. In common parlance, food insecurity is suffering from hunger, which recent data shows 14 percent of Marion County residents, or over 135,000 of our neighbors, face. Statewide, 13.9 percent of Hoosiers are hungry or food insecure.
The problem could be eliminated today. According to Map the Meal Gap, it would take less than $1 million to eliminate hunger in the county, or less than 0.0625 percent of the more than $1.6 billion 2025 budget for Indianapolis and Marion County.
What the city refused to do with CFAC for almost four years, the people accomplished in a matter of months: that’s the power of collaborating to address our people’s needs. Debbie Parish, who has been managing the community food box in Shelton Heights Park for six years, sees the need for the project every single day.
“When I first started, this was the only one around within one mile. Now there are several out throughout the community, but I still have people walk up to one mile to our box to see if there’s any food in it… It is a miracle in itself because people put food in all day long and people take food out all day long. Our box feeds probably about 75 to 80 people a week.”
A common goal: Liberation for all through empowerment
Nuckols says she “likes the Center because the culture and mission is to liberate our most vulnerable and oppressed populations. There’s also a focus on empowerment for people who struggle to realize that, and that’s my passion as well: to provide resources and empower the oppressed.”
The incorporation of CFBP to the Liberation Center is an exciting and invigorating jump forward. The connections, skills, and mentorship that we nurture (and that nurture us) have already had profound effects on individuals, organizations, our communities, and city. Yet Nuckols, whose duration of community partnerships runs longer and deeper than the Center’s official formation, still retains the humility key to moving the struggle to higher stages.
“I’m excited,” she said, “to get assistance from very experienced people, folks that have been doing this work for a number of years that can help me with things like logistics, structure, organization of the project.” Everyone at the Center is, similarly, energetic about what her experience and knowledge can add to the collective.
CFBP’s work is only possible through the action of our community. Help meet the needs of our city by sustaining our work, donating as you can, giving to the Food Box Project, and attending our first annual fundraiser on November 14.
Only through collective sacrifice and organization can we build a better city and world for all!
Volunteer for the Community Food Box Project!
Featured image: Two community food boxes located around Indianapolis (Founder Sierra Nuckols on the far left). Credit: Community Food Box Project.
