Improving food access in Pittsburgh’s East End – and beyond

Val Parm of Village Collaborative and Roshia Furnace of Urban Strategies

Since Giant Eagle first announced it would be closing its Shakespeare Street store in East Liberty several years ago, we’ve been advocating together with the affected communities and other organizations to protect access to healthy food for nearby low-income residents.

In January, we helped organize a meeting to discuss needed food access solutions with residents of East Liberty and Larimer. There they heard from Giant Eagle’s representatives about free grocery delivery to the area that the company had made available, and residents provided their feedback on these and other possible offerings and the plan for the new store.

In March, we worked with the Kingsley Association and Urban Strategies Inc. to help Cornerstone Village residents set up accounts and place orders for the free delivery service. Throughout, we continued our advocacy with Giant Eagle to improve access to its Mobile Market and to find a way to serve WIC recipients, who lost the only nearby grocer that accepted these benefits when the Shakespeare Street store closed.

So we were thrilled that this month Giant Eagle added an after-work stop at Cornerstone Village Apartments, in front of Liberty Green Park, at Larimer Avenue and Kalida Drive on Wednesdays, from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. In even bigger news, they have informed us that effective immediately, the PA Department of Health has approved the Mobile Market to accept WIC benefits, making it the first and only market of this type to do so in Pennsylvania. In addition to four East End locations, the Mobile Market visits five other communities each week: Northside, Hilltop, Rankin, Braddock, and West End. They report that they have doubled the variety of items on the Mobile Market since they introduced the program in January 2022, with more than 650 items now available.

We owe these successes in the East End to the principles we commit to in our organizing around food access. We aim to help communities struggling with food apartheid to

1. maximize their strengths and resources, which includes their community leaders;
2. determine the solutions that they most want and would be the most sustainable;
3. improve the private sector’s response to communities’ needs and demands; and
4. leverage public policy and investments.

These principles, and our methods, are detailed in a new report, “A Seat at the Table: Engaging Communities in Defining Racially-Equitable Food Access Solutions” by Emerson National Hunger Fellow Angela Zhang. She worked with us in these East End communities in 2022 and early this year.

Just Harvest will continue to work in the East End to make sure Giant Eagle meets another key request of the East Liberty and Larimer communities: that they have access to the jobs at the new Shakespeare Street store. We are also monitoring Giant Eagle’s plans for the GetGo they’re building on Frankstown Ave and Washington Blvd., on the edge of Homewood. Giant Eagle tells us it will likely open in 2024-2025, depending on zoning and other regulatory issues.