Interview with The Nashville Food Project

Question: Can you share your organization's mission and what inspired its creation?

Answer: The Nashville Food Project brings people together to grow, cook and share nourishing food, with the goals of cultivating community and alleviating hunger in our city. The organization was born out of a vision of vibrant community food security in which everyone in Nashville has access to the food they want and need through a just and sustainable food system.

Question: How many people does your organization serve annually, and what areas do you focus on?

Answer: Our current principal activities include a community meals program (in 2023 we shared more than 325,000 meals through partnerships with 60 nonprofit organizations across the city), a food recovery initiative (in 2023 we rescued more than 287,000lbs of food), community and production gardening, a market-farming program, and a fresh food distribution program. All of TNFP’s programs and initiatives promote sustainability while increasing social connection and bringing people of diverse backgrounds together. They reduce hunger by sharing nourishing meals and resources for communities to grow their own food, and by leveraging the impact of other organizations serving the most vulnerable in our city.

Question: What do you believe are the root causes of hunger in the communities you serve?

Answer: The root causes are complicated and deeply embedded within our economic, educational, and cultural systems - whole dissertations exist to answer this question! But briefly, many of the communities we serve live in one of Nashville's long-standing LILA (low-income-low-access) areas, which have suffered from racial discrimination and under-investment for decades. These zip codes lack grocery stores, the food retail options that exist lack fresh and nutritious food, residents are more likely to lack reliable transportation (which has a profound effect on food access, especially in this city), and myriad health, education, and economic disparities leave residents particularly vulnerable to food insecurity.

Question: How does your organization address not just hunger but also the underlying factors contributing to food insecurity?

Answer: TNFP uses healthy food as a tool to disrupt cycles of poverty, working toward a vision of community food security where everyone in Nashville has access to the food they want and need. Through a holistic, systems-based approach, we partner with 50+ poverty-disrupting and community-building organizations to create a just and sustainable food system for everyone in Nashville. We work toward this vision using collaborative, community-led solutions, including a meals program in which we share 6,000+ scratch-made meals each week. By aligning scratch-made, nutritious meals with anti-poverty partner organizations, we support the reduction of poverty-induced burdens, like homelessness, violence and abuse, incarceration and more, all of which are social drivers of health outcomes. Our programs support people facing health, social, economic or cultural barriers to healthy food access, including people experiencing poverty, seniors, immigrants and refugees, children and youth, and other individuals faced with food insecurity.

And by providing land access through our Garden programs, TNFP provides Nashvillians with opportunities to grow food for themselves, their families, or other community members. Through our Growing Together program, farmers are earning supplemental income to help them achieve financial stability. 

Question: How do you ensure the food provided meets the nutritional needs of those you serve?

Answer: All meals contain 2-3 servings of fruits and vegetables. We prioritize using whole-food ingredients and fresh produce, and avoid processed and pre-packaged food and snacks. Our menus take into account the needs and preferences of those receiving them, including food allergies, and we vary proteins and include at least one vegetarian main meal each week.

Question: How can individuals or local communities get involved with your organization to support your efforts?

Answer: We welcome volunteers in our kitchens and gardens most days of the week, including Saturdays in our gardens during the growing season. We offer catering services and facility rentals to help support our work. And we host a number of public fundraising and educational events throughout the year (following us on social media or signing up for our monthly newsletter is a great way to stay in the loop on upcoming opportunities. 

Because we grow produce in our gardens, recover as much food as possible and work with volunteers in our programs, we are able to stretch a dollar far in our work to alleviate hunger and cultivate community in our city; every dollar donated helps share nourishing food throughout our community. 

In addition to financial contributions, The Nashville Food Project welcomes in-kind donations of food items that can be used as ingredients in nutritious meals. Find out more here: Give Food — Nashville Food Project

Newsletter sign up: Nashville Food Project bottom of the page

Socials: @thenashvillefoodproject

Question: What partnerships have been essential to your success, and how can others collaborate with you?

Answer: All of them! 

More information about our community meals partners is available here: Community Meals — Nashville Food Project

Our food recovery partners include Costco, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Aldi, NextGen Away, Bells Bend Farms, Cul2vate, Second Harvest Food Bank, Society of St. Andrews, and countless other local farms, producers, retailers, and organizations. 

The partnerships that anchor our garden programs include Christ Lutheran Church on Haywood Lane; the McGruder Family Resource Center, and Mill Ridge Park.

For more information about getting involved or collaborating, you can email info@thenashvillefoodproject.org

Question: What are your long-term goals for ending hunger in your area, and how do you plan to achieve them?

Answer: The Nashville Food Project embraces a vision of vibrant community food security in which everyone in Nashville has access to the food they want and need through a just and sustainable food system. We hope to achieve this by growing and helping steward a vibrant urban agriculture network, continuing to expand on our food recovery and meal partnership program, and participating in cross-sector initiatives aimed at building more just, sustainable systems for our food and beyond. We are also always experimenting with various "pilot" initiatives (most recently, a culinary jobs training program, produce sharing programs, and produce prescription/food-is-medicine opportunities) to explore where we can grow our impact in partnership with other organizations.

Question: How does your organization incorporate sustainability into its practices to create lasting change?

Answer : One of TNFP’s values is stewardship, which includes a commitment to pursue the highest, best use of the food we receive, the land we steward, and the time our volunteers provide. Through our food recovery and food waste prevention programs, TNFP works to combat the reality that fully 40% of all food in the U.S. ends up in the landfill. When food is wasted, all of the water and energy it takes to grow, harvest, transport, and package it is also wasted. According to the World Wildlife Fund, 6-8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced if we stop wasting food.
TNFP focuses on developing food donation partnerships with local farms, grocers and restaurants to reduce the amount of food that ends up in our landfills while allowing us to produce high-quality, fresh food to use in our kitchens. In an effort to use our resources more efficiently, we prioritize donation of nutrient-dense fresh produce and high-quality proteins, ingredients we need most in our kitchens. Fully 80% of each meal served contains donated and/or recovered food. Any food that we cannot use in these programs is shared directly with a network of our partners that need regular grocery delivery support.

Our garden programs promote organic and regenerative agricultural practices. As we seek to expand our urban agriculture network and scale the acreage under sustainable production, we'll also be enhancing carbon sequestration, water catchment, and biodiversity conservation in our city. Currently, one of Nashville’s greatest climate-related challenges is an increase in the city’s heat island effect, which is correlated with the decline of tree canopy and green spaces due to the city’s rapid development. In 2025 we will launch a partnership with the Giving Grove to expand our community agriculture work to include building and managing a citywide network of community orchards and urban food forests. We define community food forests as growing spaces on publicly accessible land, managed by and growing food for community members, that incorporate design principles inspired by forest ecology, such as incorporating multiple layers (trees, vines, shrubs and ground covers) that provide food, in particular, among other ecosystem services.