Mattapan Mobile Farm Stand

 

With a goal of making it easier for Mattapan residents to gain access to healthy food, a collaboration
was formed among the Mattapan Food and Fitness Coalition (MFFC), Brookwood Community Farm
and Building Research+ Architecture+ Community Exchange (BR-A-CE) to launch a mobile farm stand.
Each partner is key to the success of this project.

• MFFC and its youth arm, the Vigorous Youth, will host the farm stand, providing needed jobs for youth, and connect the farm stand with its other Mattapan projects that share the same goal. These projects are the Mattapan Square Farmers Market, the Mattapan Healthy on the Block Corner Store Initiative, and other healthy eating and physical activity projects.

• Brookwood Community Farm will provide produce grown at its farm located in Canton, Massachusetts – only a few miles away from Mattapan Square. Part of the Brookwood Community Farm mission is to help provide healthy foods to low income communities.

• BR-A-CE, the initiator of the project, is supplying technical and design expertise and organizing the fabrication of the human powered structure that will transport the produce. Many volunteers, including design professionals and students from Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology collaborated with the MFFC Vigorous Youth in the design for the wheeled structure.

The Mobile Farm Stand will be able to carry several hundred pounds of produce and look great doing it. The farm stand
is uniquely designed to draw attention to healthy foods but also to serve as a promoter of biking as a form of physical activity.

As an offshoot of the MFFC Mattapan Square Farmers Market, the mobile market will be part of Bounty Bucks and double the value of produce purchased with SNAP benefits.

This project is especially needed in Mattapan, a community with no full service grocery store and where
obesity and diabetes rates are the highest in the city.

 

Articles featuring the Mobile Farm Stand: Boston.com, Dorchester Reporter

Pictures of the Mobile Farm Stand being constructed