http://www.denverpost.com/ci_13586527
Denver's aquaponics project aims to turn "food desert" into an oasis of health
By Colleen O'Connor The Denver Post
Posted: 10/18/2009
A dilapidated greenhouse in Denver's Elyria-Swansea neighborhood could soon sprout one of the nation's newest trends: inner-city farming using state-of-the-art technology to grow crops and fish in a single symbiotic system that mimics nature's water cycle.
This would solve a problem for the neighborhood, which lacks a full-service grocery store — if the Denver City Council can hammer out a zoning variance to allow Urban Organics to set up its greenhouse- to-table operation at East 47th Avenue and York Street, north of Interstate 70.
"This neighborhood is a food desert," said Paul Garcia, who lives in the neighborhood and is deputy director of the Cross Community Coalition.
"There's no access to fresh produce — no nearby grocery store. The idea of being able to grow and distribute fresh produce in this particular part of town is so encouraging for the residents."
Urban Organics is the idea of real estate developer and broker Paul Tamburello and local food activists, including Ashara Ekundayo, a principal at Blue and Yellow Logic, a Denver startup focused on diversifying the green economy to include all races and income levels.
Ekundayo, founder of the Pan African Arts Society and a longtime social activist, became interested in the food-justice movement during a year-long fellowship at Green for All, a national organization that trains leaders in low-income communities or communities of color to bring the green economy to their neighborhoods.
During the fellowship, she learned of the work of Will Allen, a sharecropper's son and former basketball star who won a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant for his Growing Power, a nonprofit urban farm in Milwaukee.
His concept is rooted in the belief that the unhealthy diets of low-income, urban people — linked to diabetes and obesity — can be tracked to lack of access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables.
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