A Neighborhood Market, A Call to Action
Shante Woody and the People's Market are creating neighborhood resiliency.
Chicken empanadas. A pile of just-picked collard greens. Fresh-pressed ginger juice that will knock your socks off.
On Thursday nights, I walk a few blocks down the cracked and aging sidewalks to my neighborhood’s market. It’s held in a grassy lot next to a church, and there are usually a dozen vendors or so, kids running around barefoot, a free table to exchange something you no longer want and maybe pick up something you never knew you needed. Sometimes, long orange extension cords are dragged across the grass to an amp where a band is playing or to a microphone set up for someone reading poetry. The air smells like macaroni and cheese and fresh tomatoes.
If you go, don’t miss Nadira’s Famous Bean Pies.
Shante Woody has been managing the People’s Market for five years now. She knows it well; she was a vendor herself. As I recall, she sold a helluva slice of cake. Now, every Thursday evening, she jumps onto Facebook Live, showing her viewers what vendors are selling what, and asks them to come on out.
The vendors are mostly people working side jobs and trying to supplement their incomes. We live in a poor neighborhood with old, sagging houses. Dented work trucks are parked in driveways, and the bus stops are full of people headed to construction and service industry jobs. “Our vendors are single moms, older people living on fixed incomes, and teachers making some extra money during the summer,” says Shante. “They are just working-class people who get off work at 4 PM and already have their car loaded up and ready to come set up over here.”
Many market customers are from the neighborhood; others are students on break from the Millenial Trade Academy, a beauty school up the road. One of the appeals of the market is that Shante has not only set it up so that the vendors can take SNAP, but she’s also secured a grant that allows families to double their SNAP dollars when they use their EBT card. “I hear from people who say ‘I only get $8 in food stamps, and I say, ‘Well, that’s $16 at the market!’”
SNAP ends up being a significant portion of the market sales, benefiting the vendors as well as the families using food stamps. “When you use your EBT at our market, not only does it go twice as far, but you’ve helped Miss Eillen pay a bill, put gas in her car, or buy her medicine. It’s like a full circle.”
Shante is a mother of seven and now a grandmother, too. She’s been connected to the Glenwood Neighborhood in Greensboro, North Carolina, for over a decade. She was first introduced to the neighborhood through a small Black church operating out of a storefront on Grove Street, though she lived in public housing only two minutes up the road.
At this church, she first saw the need in the neighborhood. The convenience store on Grove Street, which sells cigarettes and malt liquor, also has a steady stream of customers trying to make meals out of the few canned goods on the store’s shelves. While a Food Lion sits at the edge of the neighborhood, it’s a long walk for a mom with children or an elder with bad knees, and we’ve often commented that the produce sold in the grocery store seems to be vegetables at the end of the line anyway.
Shante began distributing food through her ministry at the church and later became the meal coordinator for “The Table;” a community meal served in a large, empty church a block away that had once hosted an older white congregation. She became a bit of a legend at The Table because she would whip up beautiful cakes and desserts to serve.
Shante liked the work, but the truth is, she, too, was in need. Being the mother of seven wasn’t easy, but she was used to hustling to make ends meet. “You always have to keep different ways of making money, keep your hands in different things in case one thing falls through,” Shante says– a philosophy and way of life familiar here. This is how she ended up a vendor at the People’s Market, selling slices of those mouth-watering cakes.
Shante’s vision for the People’s Market grew beyond a place for her side hustle. She saw the culinary and artistic talent of the vendors (some vendors sell art, jewelry, and crafts), and immediately saw the possibility of growing local entrepreneurship and, eventually, economic independence for the people here. “I want this market to be more than just a farmers market,” Shante says. “I want it to be a call to action.”
Neighborhoods like ours, filled with poor and working-class people, often become the objects of either scorn or charity– sometimes both. While some outsiders forbid their children from coming here (as was the case of a Boy Scout troop pulling out of a volunteer commitment due to “risks”) others flood in to run food programs, do trash pickups, or minister to us. Shante wanted to move beyond this charity-framed work in the neighborhood and into organizing.
She started Side Hustle University during the market’s off-season to support vendors with skills, including marketing and how to get their paperwork together. Through this process, small businesses have been born. My Brother’s Cookies – which I first enjoyed walking home from the market two summers ago– is now sold in small grocery stores and coffee shops all over town. Another young woman making Black hair care products is now selling them in the local coop– no longer as a side hustle but as a full-time job.
The call to action that Shante dreamed of is coming to fruition. The market, the neighborhood, and the people who live here see themselves as not just consumers but producers, contributors, and idea generators. “Dollars are circulating in our community,” she says, smiling. “We are not just charity and need, but organizing and power. There’s a cycle that happens every Thursday of buy, sell, trade.”
Added together it all comes out to equal possibility and dreams.
Note: I want to thank Greensboro local mom, writer, and photographer Christina Petersen for documenting The People’s Market. I’m glad I asked her because she’s got a good eye for things. Also, I want to encourage local folks to check out The People’s Market on Thursday nights at 7 PM off Florida Street in the Glenwood Neighborhood.
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