After almost two years under the fiscal sponsorship of Madison Main Street, MCGP has graduated to independent nonprofit status! This is a culmination of two years of hard work, but it also represents an exciting beginning.
You’ll continue to know our initiatives as the Madison Community Grocery Project, but organizationally, we will operate as Madison Youth Unlimited. MYU is committed to improving quality of life for Madison area youth and their families. This commitment led MYU to design, fund, and build three local parks to serve as safe places for outdoor recreation, all of which are now under the City of Madison’s care. With the completion of those projects, MYU is ready to turn its focus to food access. Our community and school gardens are a natural continuation of MYU’s historical commitment to outdoor spaces, and now MYU can also create space indoors through the grocery initiative, community kitchen project, and more. We’re so grateful to be able to continue MYU’s work in our community!
Our first big programming initiative will be building a network of community sharing gardens, which will put fresh food right in our neighborhoods. Check out the next article to learn more about this exciting initiative and get involved!
On the grocery front, we’ve narrowed down our research to a few workable partnership models, from corporate partnerships to grower cooperatives to educational initiatives. Now it’s time to build the formal partnerships that will enable our first concrete steps. Any concrete step forward will be a leap of faith. If we’ve learned anything from the past two years of research and data and consulting, it’s that small groceries can’t survive without a community behind them. That’s why we’re more committed than ever to a community-supported model, and being a 501(c)3 is a huge step in that direction!
If you’d like to be one of the first funders of our nonprofit chapter, now’s the time to donate. We believe this is a historic moment for food access in Madison and Jefferson County, and your early donations will represent a community of support as we walk forward into our future. Click here to lay a stone of any size in our financial foundation.
As we look eagerly ahead to this new chapter, we can’t help but look back and feel grateful for Madison Main Street’s nurturing support. MMSP’s combination of expertise, community engagement, and creative vision have been vital to our success up to this point. We are where we are now because of their help and enthusiasm. Someday, we hope to celebrate a new downtown grocery store alongside them!
