While everyone deserves the opportunity to eat healthy, Houston’s Sunnyside neighborhood has historically been overlooked for fresh food options.
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Most of the folks in Sunnyside live more than a mile from a supermarket or large grocery store. Roughly 30% are transportation insecure.
The two combined have created a crisis of food inaccessibility.
“When I walked across that bridge leaving the hospital, I had no clue what I was going to turn this into.”
Determined to turn the tide of food insecurity, Ivy Walls courageously made the decision to trade her career in health care for a calling and started Ivy Leaf Farms.
That was almost four years ago back in August 2020.
“My 1st grant that I received was from Beyonce and the NAACP. And they helped us. You know, soil is very expensive. They helped us get the soil so we could grow this. When I started growing vegetables, it was an outlet to bring some of those things to my community. What we harvest, we take over to Fresh Houwse grocery. We participate in the Black Farmer Box, which is a collective of Black farmers here in the city,” Walls said.
Since its inception, Walls said Ivy Leaf Farms has been embraced by the community.
“I would honestly say that I’m everybody’s little sister, auntie, and friend,” she added. “It’s been an amazing reception. We’re part of such a beautiful aspect of connecting people back to nature as well as growing food.”
In hopes of igniting a revolution in the way her community thinks about fresh food, Walls wanted to make a bold statement.
So, she embraced the SLAB car culture and bought a vintage green 1974 Catalina.
“Why not green to do the salad SLAB. And so something that resonates culturally as well as its fun and cool and people take a picture and share it and the movement can keep going and going and going. It just tells a bigger story. Like meeting people where they are at. I mean, you could tell people to eat healthy all day long, no matter what socioeconomic class, right? It’s a task,” Walls said.
Walls added that what’s been accomplished in Sunnyside can be replicated in other communities across Houston.
“We’re working with Acres Homes, Trinity Gardens, Kashmere Gardens to implement, you know, the food pathways that they have. When we think about food insecurity, we have to think about ourselves as a community, as one big community. That if we’re not shopping locally, or growing locally, our food system, at any moment could change. I think we have to be realistic about whose stories we’re uplifting and whose narratives we’re going to lean into. I think when it comes to the success and the notoriety that Black Farmers have created, it’s the fact that we are truly the neighborhood personified. That’s the spirit of Sunnyside. Can’t hide that Sunnyside pride,” Walls said.