With time and steady partnerships, including with Fair Food Network and other Michigan Good Food Fund partners, Pastor Flynn was able to piecemeal capital together into what Tellalian refers to as a “lasagna of funding.” This includes support from the State of Michigan, the City of Flint, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Community Foundation of Greater Flint, Ruth Mott Foundation, ELGA Credit Union, USDA Community Food Projects, Healthy Food Financing Initiative, LISC, and the Food Coop Initiative, as well as other community funders and New Market Tax Credit partners.

Yet it is this type of integrated, long-term support that demonstrates the reimagined healthy food financing that’s often needed. It has been an adventure - more than five years, 12+ sources of funds recruited, tax credit financing, hundreds of hours, and a few thousand emails. With expertise in healthy food retail and community development finance, Tellalian served as an embedded thought partner and collaborator with Pastor Flynn, tackling the financial plan, brokering connections, and coordinating a complex capital stack. We engaged a member of our Fair Food Fund investment committee, Daniel Tellalian, Founder and CEO of Angel City Advisors. This was a project that needed to come to fruition, and we wanted to support moving it forward. It will be a “health and wellness corridor” in Flint, says Pastor Flynn. Indeed, the long-term vision includes affordable housing, healthcare, maternal health services, early childhood education, and community spaces centered around the market. In addition to bringing healthy food to North Flint, the co-op was the first step toward a broader vision of community-first development and cooperative economics. Given Fair Food Network’s deep work in Flint with our Double Up Food Bucks SNAP incentive program, we recognized early on the importance of this grocery project. People in poor neighborhoods just didn’t benefit from the dollars that came in then.”īeyond financing, we’ve been honored to know and partner with Pastor Flynn over the past five years through our work with the Michigan Good Food Fund, a statewide collective of partners working together to improve health and economic opportunity by investing in local food entrepreneurs. “Lots of funding following (the water crisis) went into downtown projects. “I’ve challenged every politician that said they cared about the Black and Brown communities when the water crisis was going on,” he says. It’s called the North Flint Food Market and the model relies on membership, with individuals investing as co-owners of their local grocery store, which will carry pantry staples along with meats, dairy, and fresh produce, with an eye toward sourcing from local farms.ĭespite the deluge of attention following the water crisis, Pastor Flynn found fundraising for the grocery store to be a long-haul adventure. Says Pastor Flynn, “This is a place where corporations come and go at their will.

Instead, spurred by residents, they decided to build a new grocery store - one that was owned by the community, not by a corporation.

Nor was he going to beg them to come back. Pastor Reginald Flynn, a Flint native who returned to the city 13 years ago to minister at the Foss Avenue Baptist Church congregation, was not surprised. After the Flint water crisis in 2014, the last two major grocery stores left the city’s northside, leaving residents without healthy food when it was needed most to mitigate the effects of lead poisoning.

Staples blueprint