Shop Small and Black-Owned in LA with Prosperity Market

[Celerity]

The founders of the virtual marketplace and pop-up farmers market share their favorite farmers and vendors.

https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/los-angeles/la-prosperity-market-founders-guide-small-business-saturday



Rather than spend your precious weekends scouring mall parking lots or scrolling through endless pages of identical products on Amazon, avoid the stress and supply-chain delays by shopping small and local this holiday season. And if you’re in LA, look to Prosperity Market, a virtual marketplace and pop-up farmers market founded by Carmen Dianne and Kara Still, that promotes Black farmers and vendors. Prior to launching the market, Dianne was a makeup artist and Still worked in fashion, but both women were inspired to enter a new arena at the height of the COVID pandemic and a racial reckoning in America.



As Dianne explains, “We wanted to create economic impact in our communities. We were seeing such a big push to support Black businesses, but we were troubled by conflicting statistics. You hear about how a dollar only stays in the Black community for about six hours, but then you also hear about how the Black community has over a trillion dollars in buying power. The numbers didn’t add up, and we wondered: how do we use this buying power, but actually keep it in our communities? Exploring that, we found the gap in food.”



Prosperity Market sought to solve a specifically Californian conundrum: our state is the largest agricultural producer in the United States, but most of that food is exported, and Los Angeles is home to the largest population of food-insecure residents in the country. Over the last century, Black farmers have lost over 12 million acres of farmland and their numbers have dwindled from over a million to just 45,000 out of 3.4 million farmers across the country. In California, fewer than 1% of the state’s 70,000 farms are Black-owned or managed. By launching a mobile marketplace that travels across LA County, the market not only helps farmers and vendors expand their reach, but is able to provide fresh, whole foods to food deserts where farmers markets don’t exist.



“Our market is built on two pillars: economic impact and food access,” Still explains. She says that, “Part of the economic impact is being able to provide a lucrative platform for our farmers and our vendors. We want them to be able to provide their products to Malibu just as well as to people in Inglewood. It’s beneficial to them and it’s beneficial to our community. The other piece is food access: being mobile allows us to not only go to places where our vendors or farmers will profit, but to bring it to underserved neighborhoods and help people get reconnected to each other and to food, to create a sense of community and fun in a safe place.”