A display of Urban Roots produce on a table. Kale, beets, green beans, and bell peppers are prominently featured.
What is the Hojas program?
Hojas is a community-led distribution program, an initiative to create networks of resident leaders who have autonomy over how fresh produce is distributed in their neighborhoods. However, this isn’t anything new!
Initially, we worked as a food access partner (providing the food) for the resident leaders, which our friends over at Go! Austin/Vamos! Austin (GAVA) helped with the management and communication pieces. We’ve inherited this program since Fall 2023 from our friends over at GAVA, who started this program to connect local food distribution partners (like Urban Roots) and resident leaders during the pandemic, to ensure that communities facing food access barriers had nutritious, delicious food. We’re continuing that same work while still providing our crops; the difference now is that we’re working directly with resident leaders to make communication and management more efficient, so we can answer questions and concerns, and implement feedback, faster.
You can hear directly from Esther, one of our incredible resident leaders, in our video, Be a Neighbor, here to learn a little more about what the resident leader experience can be like.
Our philosophy behind calling it Hojas (meaning leaves, in Spanish) is a nod to photosynthesis and how leaves absorb sunlight, taking the food it absorbs from the sun and delivering it to other parts of the plant. Reflecting that, the food we grow comes from the farm (lovingly grown by us, youth, and volunteers), and resident leaders take those shares and decide how to best distribute it to their neighbors.
We’re grateful to our resident leaders who organize and work with their neighbors and deliver our produce to them, and to every hand that goes into the soilwork to grow food for our community.
In the past fiscal year in this program, our resident leaders delivered over 35,000 servings of food to 211 unique households! We’re excited to grow this impact as we continue Hojas for seasons to come.
Are you interested in Hojas and being a resident leader? Please reach out to sydney.corbin@urbanrootsatx.org for further details. We review the waitlist and invite new participants periodically, typically early in the fall and the spring of each year.
Are you a distribution partner, or are you interested in being one? We choose our food distribution partners at the start of each growing season (Aug./Sept., Feb./March), but are always meeting with new partners to learn more about their work and brainstorm how we can work together. If you are a food access organization or community group interested in working with us, please contact us at jacob.grob@urbanrootsatx.org to schedule an introductory call.
If you are looking for more emergent food resources, please look at our food resource page.
Would you like to help sponsor these efforts, and help more food go further in our community? Learn more about becoming a sponsor of our work here!
