new co-op grocery store coming to englewood:
Englewood is getting a new community-run grocery store on 63rd Street
TONIA HILL FEBRUARY 17, 2022
A rendering of the outside of the forthcoming Go Green Community Fresh Market located at 1207 W. 63rd Street. The store will open on Tuesday, March 8. Photo courtesy of Wheeler Kearns Architects.
The final touches are coming together for a new community-operated grocery store that will open in Englewood on March 8.
The Go Green Community Fresh Market is a cooperative-inspired corner grocery store. It is a community-led effort organized by the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) and other local community organizations to improve access to nutritious food options for residents of Englewood.
“The issues that surround corner stores in low-income communities, particularly low-income Black communities on the South and West sides of Chicago, have always been a part of the intense organizing work that IMAN has done for the last 25 years,” Alia Bilal, IMAN’s deputy executive director told The TRiiBE on Feb. 15.
The issues that Bilal referred to include access to healthy nutritious foods, affordable food and education around health and wellness.
The South Side neighborhood has been categorized as a food desert, meaning that the neighborhood has limited access to fresh produce and other nutritious food options.
But long-time Englewood resident Asiaha Butler doesn’t view the neighborhood as a food desert. She’s the founder and CEO of Residents Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E).
“I just feel like a desert is something that’s in its natural state, and it’s starved of certain things. That’s not what’s happening here in Englewood,” Butler explained. “This is like intentional systemic things that have made it impossible for us to have access sometimes to fresh and healthy food. It’s food all over this community, it’s just not the best for you.”
Instead, Butler refers to what’s happening in Englewood as food apartheid because the choices and systems in place dictate what people can access.
“I can walk down 63rd, and I could grab five or six different greasy sandwiches, but I can’t get a smoothie. So, I wouldn’t say that that’s a desert,” she said. “I would say it’s apartheid because apartheid is when it’s actually systems that affect a situation that controls their natural state, and that’s not our natural state.”
The Go Green Community Fresh Market will be located at 1207 W. 63rd Street, just steps away from 63rd Street and Racine Avenue. The new market joins the Whole Foods on 820 W. 63rd Street, which came to the Englewood community back in 2016.
There’s still an Aldi in the neighborhood, located at 620 W. 63rd Street, that has been there since 1991. In 2017, Aldi announced plans to spend $1.6 billion to remodel and expand Aldi grocery stores. The upgraded W. 63rd Street market reopened in October 2021.
The Go Green Community Fresh Market will offer fresh produce sourced from local vendors, along with hot pre-packaged meals from local restaurants such as Majani, a vegan soul food restaurant in South Shore. The market will accept cash, all major credit and debit cards, Apple and Samsung pay and EBT Link cards.
A rendering of the inside of the forthcoming Go Green Community Fresh Market located at 1207 W. 63rd Street. The store will open on Tuesday, March 8. Photo courtesy of Wheeler Kearns Architects.
Construction on the 7,000-square-foot building cost around $5 million and it took about two years to build. The second floor of the building will house store operations and an open meeting space for community organizations and residents. Many of the positions at the store have been filled by Englewood residents, Bilal said.
The Go Green Community Fresh Market was an idea birthed by IMAN decades ago, Bilal said. IMAN is a community organization that fosters health, wellness and healing in inner-city communities by organizing for social change, cultivating the arts operating a holistic health center.