Charlottesville Built a Food Equity Plan. It Never Built the System To Carry It Out.

On maps of food access in Charlottesville, the stretch of Carlton Avenue east of the railroad tracks isn’t classified as a food desert. But on a weekday morning, the only open doors belong to a vape shop, a laundromat, and a gas station selling shelf‑stable snacks. The nearest full‑service grocery store is two bus transfers away. In this acclaimed culinary town at the edge of Virginia’s wine country, lines form at outdoor cafes, vineyard food trucks — and food pantries, where the wait begins before dawn. In a region ringed by small farms, dozens of grocery stores, and a nationally known restaurant district, food banks are reporting historic demand, driven by steep cuts to federal nutrition programs like SNAP. And the lines are expected to grow even longer as new eligibility rules push more households off the rolls. “It’s not going to happen all at once,” says Jane Colony Mills, executive director of Loaves & Fishes, the region’s largest food pantry. But even now, she says, “40% of the 12,000 people we are giving food to each month are coming to us two times a month.” One in seven residents and one in five immigrants face food insecurity. For the city’s Black residents, the numbers are far more stark: roughly one in three, a rate that has remained persistently high for decades, according to the latest Charlottesville City Community Wellbeing Profile. This wasn’t the future residents envisioned in 2018, when the city endorsed a groundbreaking initiative focused on urban agriculture, healthy school meals, food insecurity, and neighborhood grocery access. Charlottesville’s Food Equity Initiative, first passed by city council in October 2018 and formally adopted into the city’s Comprehensive Plan in 2021, was celebrated by its founders as one of the nation’s first comprehensive municipal food equity policies. It received national recognition when the EPA, USDA, and Northern Border Regional Commission chose the city for the federal Local Foods, Local Places program. The initiative’s tenets were forged by the grassroots nonprofit Cultivate Charlottesville and its coalition, the Food Justice Network, with input from hundreds of community members. Nine city departments signed an internal administrative agreement to support the initiative and incorporate its goals into planning. While this wasn’t a formal council action, the move signaled a shift away from treating hunger solely as a charity issue handled by food banks. (Photo courtesy Cultivate Charlottesville) Why municipal might matters Research backs up the hybrid approach Charlottesville was leaning into. A 2023 peer‑reviewed study from the University of the District of Columbia found that government‑affiliated food policy bodies score far higher on effectiveness, resource mobilization, and equity than nonprofit or grassroots models. Bringing food to more tables and grocery stores to more neighborhoods takes both community vision and government might. Charlottesville has one of the more developed food equity ecosystems for a small Southern city, but it lacks municipal staff or an office responsible for food equity implementation. And the city has no formally designated urban farm parcels, leaving every existing farm site vulnerable to redevelopment. In contrast, other small cities with strong hybrid programs have city‑run food systems. Burlington, Vermont, employs a Food Systems Policy Manager who handles food systems planning, land access, urban agriculture policy and climate‑food integration, backed by permanent municipal funding. In Ithaca, New York, county planners integrate food systems into land‑use and sustainability planning, while Cornell Cooperative Extension runs food access, agriculture, and nutrition programs with stable public funding. According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap 2026, which provides county‑level food insecurity estimates, Charlottesville has higher food insecurity among Black residents than both those cities. It also has higher rates than Seattle, a large city with one of the country’s strongest food equity systems. Seattle tracks and monitors its progress closely, even though its work is spread across multiple agencies rather than housed in a single food systems office. “The City of Seattle plays an active coordinating role across the entire food system,” explains Bridget Igoe, food policy and programs advisor for the city. Working with hundreds of partners and community input, the city sets policy direction, invests public dollars, and ensures accountability, she says. “That structure reflects our belief that municipal leadership and community expertise are essential.” Because Charlottesville is an independent city and legally a county, it’s one of the smallest jurisdictions in the country that publishes race‑specific food‑insecurity data — yet it shows racial food insecurity at the scale of a large city. The most recent public assessment of Charlottesville’s food system — the 2022 Food Equity Initiative update — notes that efforts remain distributed across departments and community partners, and that the city lacks a unified food‑access strategy. Ryan Thayer, co-executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville, says the organization used to be under contract with the city under the direction of city council to advance and track the food equity initiative. When the contract ended in 2024, the city did not renew it. Now they apply under an annual open grant program. “There does not seem to be a coordinated effort around addressing food inequities within the city’s system. I know that the upcoming climate action report does prioritize local food systems and food equity, but is not clear how that will be operationalized.” For Charlottesville to prosper, everyone must have access to healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods, Thayer tells Next City. “Especially now, with national threats to our food safety, climate impacts, and global supply chain risks, it is critical we invest in local food resiliency.” A statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va. was removed in July 2021 after it became a rallying point for white nationalists. (Photo by Steve Helber / AP) How the system was designed On August 12, 2017, there were no summer crowds lined up at the downtown mall’s storied restaurants. Doors were closed in anticipation of violence as hundreds of torch-wielding white supremacists descended on the town to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city known as the home of Thomas Jefferson and the University of Virginia has a long history of racial tensions that include university expansion into Black neighborhoods. That backdrop had already sparked a robust food equity movement. The three nonprofits that later merged in 2020 to form Cultivate Charlottesville — City Schoolyard Garden, the Urban Agriculture Collective, and the Food Justice Network — were already running school gardens, neighborhood farm stands, and youth food education programs. Other nonprofits, such as Loaves & Fishes and Local Food Hub, handled emergency food distribution and regional fresh‑food access. The work was entirely community‑led, small, and fragmented, with no formal connection to municipal planning. The Unite the Right rally in 2017 left one woman dead and dozens injured. In its aftermath, the loose network of food groups began organizing in earnest, moving beyond previous patchy efforts at food access maps and other resources. In the years after the rally, the groups began formalizing a food equity framework built around work they were already doing. New challenges emerged. Community gardens they had helped create were threatened by redevelopment, and although the gardens were doing equity work, nothing in city policy recognized or protected them. A new municipal food equity initiative, they hoped, could help defend this valuable neighborhood resource. (Photo courtesy Cultivate Charlottesville) In October 2018, pressured by the fallout from the rally, the city council approved $65,000 to expand food equity work, the starting point for the Food Equity Initiative. Soon after, the city launched an Office of Equity & Inclusion which focused on internal city operations, such as diversifying hiring, but also managed external programs like the Downtown Job Center. The office had no authority over things that could help implement the food equity initiative: Protecting urban farming spaces, regulating neighborhood zoning, and funding school lunches all fall under the separate domains of Parks & Recreation, the Office of Economic Development, and city schools, for example. Indeed, despite the nonprofits’ efforts to shield it, 90% of the city’s urban farmland was lost to redevelopment. Civil rights attorney Jeff Fogel has long argued that Charlottesville lacks a unified city approach to equity, treating issues like policing and housing as separate. He says he has been unable to find anything about the actions of the Office of Equity. “Frankly, I’m not aware of what the Office of Equity accomplished, if anything,” Fogel tells Next City. In 2020, the city council asked the group for a list of the policies they believed the city should adopt. The resulting policy platform the group created became the basis for the city’s formal adoption of the initiative. But advocates won a major victory when the city agreed to embed 31 of their policy recommendations into the 2021 Comprehensive Plan. For the first time, city planners were required to consider neighborhood food access, urban agriculture, school food infrastructure and the siting of grocery stores in land use decisions — though outside the planning process, the initiative had no binding force. The sweeping win seemed to signal that Charlottesville was ready to treat food access as part of public planning. The city embedded food equity priorities into its December 2023 zoning rewrite, created an urban agriculture map to help identify food production sites in land use decisions, and formalized its partnership with the Food Equity Initiative. Today, though, key pieces of the plan remain unrealized. Charlottesville provides approximately $155,000 to fund the nonprofit’s work in multi-year cycles, yet the city has not created a permanent meal tax fund that would support projects like community-owned grocery stores and transportation improvements, despite Cultivate’s requests. The city has no staff dedicated to food policy and no one mapping grocery gaps. When new housing is approved, there’s no food systems planner to require grocery space, community gardens, or transit links to fresh food. And while Virginia law requires zoning decisions to be generally consistent with the comprehensive plan, the plan itself is only advisory. Even as Charlottesville overhauls its zoning code, the initiative’s central goal of securing permanent, city-supported land for community food production remains unfulfilled. Meanwhile, grocery gaps aren’t being filled. Reid’s Market, a neighborhood fixture, has closed. And in July, a grocery store planned for Fifeville — a private development project that received a small city grant and was expected to fill a gap in a well known food desert — was effectively cancelled when the operator withdrew. “It seems like there is a lot of support for urban agriculture, but local policy has not been created as an investment to ensure the work is sustained,” says Thayer. “I would say the most protected program is the gardening program with Parks and Recreation.” Across the parks system and within site specific plans as well, urban agriculture and gardening has been named as a priority, he says, though the funding has not yet been raised for what would be a multi year process. “Other programs like ours and the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots have had challenges to retain and secure long-term land agreements for our programing.” The city has not responded to requests for comment. A statue of University of Virginia founder, Thomas Jefferson, stands watch over the Rotunda at the University of Virginia Monday, Nov. 14, 2022, in Charlottesville, Va. (Photo by Steve Helber / AP) The unraveling In 2021, Charlottesville’s Human Rights Commission warned the Council about a “shocking number” of departures among Black staff across city government and described its equity structures as “insufficient without significant investment.” The Office of Equity & Inclusion, created in 2019, still had only one staff member. Two years later, the city renamed it the Office of Social Equity, broadening its focus from internal oversight to a department that runs programs and provides services. Last year, another important partner in food justice work, the University of Virginia — facing federal pressure from the Trump administration – dissolved its equity center and transitioned it into the Center for Community Partnerships. The change rippled beyond the university, since much of the office’s work involved partnerships with nonprofits like Cultivate. News reports note uncertainty among local partners. UVA still produces demographic data, but it no longer provides the neighborhood‑level race and income food access mapping that local groups once relied on; UVA once provided fine-grained maps of parcels suitable for urban agriculture, a core focus for Cultivate Charlottesville’s work. When it comes to tracking food access, the USDA Food Access Research Atlas is still commonly used. “However, the data is from 2019,” says Rebecca Coleman, research librarian for architecture at the University of Virginia. “I am not aware of any local organizations that are maintaining similar data but regionally specific.” She points to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap and Reinvestment Fund’s Limited Supermarket Access data for regional food access data. But both tools work at the county level. The switch was followed by the city apparently renaming its own equity office the Office of Prosperity. Its fresh focus: economic mobility, wealth-building, and social determinants of health, or “equity by another name,” as officials said in an internal memo. The office handles “broad socioeconomic barriers,” but does not manage local food policy. The recent hiring of a Chief of Prosperity officer puts a single city leader in charge of coordinating its equity‑related work, overseeing the Human Rights Office, the Police Civilian Oversight Board, the city’s disability access office, and the Home to Hope reentry program. Thayer, with Cultivate, says the group hasn’t been in contact with the city about the new position and its relationship to food equity. “We would welcome to be a part of these conversations with the Prosperity Officer on how to actualize greater food equity in Charlottesville.” For Colony Mills and other food charity workers in Charlottesville, it’s been a perfect storm: the university stepping back from equity infrastructure and the city switching to a focus on “prosperity,” just as safety net programs are slashed and inflation bites. As economic forces threaten to overwhelm food equity programs, Colony Mills of Loaves & Fishes says the city has a clear opportunity to address food access through its focus on socioeconomic barriers to prosperity: “The cost of living in our community, a shortage of affordable housing, and an inefficient public transportation system also are barriers that can prevent people from working and accessing enough food.” Sheila Pell is a freelance journalist focused on environmental issues and agriculture. She lives in Northern California. Add to the Discussion Next City sustaining members can comment on our stories. Keep the discussion going! Join our community of engaged members by donating today. Already a sustaining member? Login here.