WASHINGTON D.C., DC — After being called out for excluding Black vendors at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market, FRESHFARM DC announced this week it would take action to improve diversity.
The first step started on Sunday, when four Black-owned businesses were invited to join what vendors describe as the city’s most profitable farmers market.
“As much as we appreciate the steps that have come forward, we just need to make sure that they are keeping them honest, and we're making sure that they're doing what they need to do because it’s 2020,” Puddin Founder Toyin Alli said Sunday. “We need to be way past all of this at this point.”
Alli took FRESHFARM to task about not being inclusive after she said she applied to the Dupont market for seven years.
“It took me seven years of applying seven years in FRESHFARM markets to get here, and had the moment not been right, had we not spoken up, this wouldn't have happened,” Alli said.
FRESHFARMS Executive Director Hugo Mogollon said it was Black-owned businesses that shined a light on the lack of transparency process and he is making a long-term plan to make the markets more equitable.
“As we move into a new chapter for FRESHFARM, with my leadership, we commit to addressing the concerns this important discussion has raised by 1) clarifying and sharing our vendor selection process, 2) publicly sharing the regulations and guidelines by which vendors must adhere, and 3) ensuring our organization is anti-racist in its direction, strategy, and structure,” Mogollon said in a statement Friday.
The market also announced the immediate addition of four new Black businesses: Dodo Farms, Fight Juice, Sexy Vegie, and Puddin’. All of those vendors joined the dozens of other businesses at Sunday’s market.
"To be honest we are not sure what the process is for acceptance into the DuPont farmers market because we have been applying for 6 years, unsuccessfully," a statement from Sexy Vegie said. "In the last week we were asked to reapply to the market after an onslaught of scrutiny into FRESHFARM's lack of diversity at their most profitable market."
“We've been telling them that we wanted to come here and this week we got a call from our contact person at FRESHFARM saying they're going to try to diversify the market, and they wanted to work with us as a black owned farm,” Tope Fajingbesi of Dodo Farms said. “They asked if we could start today, we were born ready!”
However one of the new vendors said she had been invited to join the market a few weeks back, before she said things got heated.
“The market was not diverse enough,” Fight Juice Founder Ivy Armstrong said. “However I think the process is more fair than what people may think, I'll say. I find that most vendors here, no matter what color, had to wait a really long time to get into the market.”
“I think it's about time that we kind of got some more brown people in the market,” Armstrong said. “But I think that FRESHFARM as a whole is really done a good job of kind of giving back and creating opportunities, and access.”