Buy Winter Season Meal Subscriptions - Week 8, VU Food Vendor Coop

Week 8: Winter Season Meal Subscription details

You can buy here a Meal Subscription for the last week of the Winter Season. Meal pick-up will be Wednesday, April 6th (Week 8 - the last week) from 6-7pm at the park at the intersection of 11th St NW & Monroe St NW in Columbia Heights.

On Wednesday, February 16th, 5 vendors part of the Vendors United Food Coop began cooking hot meals every Wednesday for 8 Wednesdays in a row (the Winter Season) through Wednesday, April 6th.

Subscribers pick up their food every week between 6-7pm at the same pick up site in Columbia Heights, the park at the intersection of 11th St NW & Monroe St NW. Sixteen food vendor worker-owners will be cooking a wide variety of Caribbean and South and Central American foods, and subscribers will be able to choose their meal from a different menu each week of 8-10 total meal options (3-4 vegetarian or vegan options). Subscribers can assign their meal for pick-up by someone else, if needed, for any given week. Subscribers can also choose to give away their meal to someone in need of a meal during any given week. The meals are enough food for one person -  you should buy the amount of Winter Season Meal Subscriptions for the amount of people who you want to have meals.

We also encourage people to buy Winter Season Meal Subscriptions for someone else, whether as a gift or in order to sponsor the vendors to provide free meals to people in need.

Why the meal subscription model?

The Winter Season Meal Subscription is based on the Community Supported Agriculture financial model - subscribers pay $160 before the start of the subscription season for 8 hot meals, one meal per week, that they will receive during the subscription season. Subscribers are being asked to pay up front so that vendors can use their sales revenue to buy ingredients and so that the four vendors cooking each week can know that they have a guaranteed floor of 20 meals sold each week. Two huge challenges that vendors face vending on the street is having to front their own money to buy ingredients before they receive the income from selling the prepared food and the uncertainty of knowing how many meals that they will be able to sell each day

Winter Season Meal Subscriptions are the first product sold by the VU food coop. Over the next two years, the cooperative will create more paths for vendors to cook food & sell goods at local farmers markets and other markets and events and will make meal catering from vendors available - both for people having small parties at their house (between 8 and 20 people) and for progressive nonprofit organizations and businesses providing food at events.

What is Vendedores Unidos/ Vendors United? And the larger vendor and excluded worker organizing context

Vendedores Unidos/ Vendors United (VU) is a group of Latinx, Black and Indigenous street vendors primarily in Columbia Heights, Mt Pleasant and Petworth. VU has been organizing, for the past 3 years, to stop the police from harassing them and to win city funding for workers excluded from federal and city covid support programs through the city-wide Excluded Worker Coalition. VU is also hard at work trying to pass two vendor reform bills through the city council by the end of the current legislative session at the start of 2023 - the two bills will decriminalize street vending (take power from the police to enforce vending laws) and create a pilot vending zone in Columbia Heights where vendors, not the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA), will regulate street vending themselves. The VU food coop will provide a way for vendors to increase their income and will act as a base for organizing so that VU can continue to advocate for increased city funding to support excluded workers and their families and communities.

Incubation Support from Beloved Community Incubator (BCI):

BCI provides high-touch incubation support - including leadership development, ecosystem and resource organizing and legal, bookkeeping and administrative support - for new cooperatives that create living wage work and that are led by poor and working class Black, Brown and Indigenous people and people of color.

If you're interested in learning more about the VU food coop or in getting involved with storytelling and marketing support, canvassing and flyering to build the coop's customer base or something else, please contact BCI here.