Healthy Food Financing Initiative Helps Spread the Power and Love of Local Food in New Mexico

When you’re planning to spend a day at a museum, a couple logistical questions might come to mind: What am I going to eat? Is the food going to be too expensive and not good?

Luckily for those who visit Albuquerque’s Explora Science Center and Children’s Museum, local, healthy food is available in the attached Three Sisters Kitchen Cafe. With menu items ranging from snack packs and PB&Js to orzo salad and green chile BLTs, there are options for the whole family.

Three Sisters Kitchen is a local nonprofit that has a three-part mission: to create economic opportunities, improve community health, and bring diverse communities together around a shared table, all through the power and love of local food. The nonprofit’s cafe, which just celebrated its one-year anniversary this month, helps fulfil this mission.

“We hope, as the season gets going and we have availability of fresh fruits, that we will be able to have a basket of apples by the register and things like that,” said Amanda Rich, Three Sisters Kitchen assistant director. “We are always incorporating local produce into the cafe menu. Every single thing on the shelves is from a local producer or from a local farmer. It’s pretty incredible.”

The nonprofit started the cafe partly with grant funding from the Healthy Food Financing Initiative (HFFI), a program that provides loans, grants, and technical assistance resources to improve and support access to fresh, healthy, affordable food in underserved urban and rural communities.

“The Healthy Food Financing Initiative grant is helping us pilot healthy food retail and local healthy food retail at Explora,” said Rich. “What better place to pilot what works for New Mexican families than the children’s science center?”

Aside from the cafe at Explora, Three Sisters Kitchen has a main location where it offers classes and programs. The nonprofit’s food business training program, community cooking classes, and food distribution to food-insecure families are just a few ways it supports the community. Three Sisters Kitchen has grown over time, and its staff are now looking for space to build a food campus where they can host their classes, have a retail location, and offer more programs to the community.

“We want to be thoughtful and intentional about expansion,” shared Rich. “Some of this HFFI funding has really helped us take a deep dive into what it would mean to have an entirely local food shop and what healthy food and healthy local food retail looks like.”

Aside from just thinking about what they will be able to offer in a larger facility, they are also thinking about how they can make the new space accessible.

“We are looking into how our facility could feel welcoming and inclusive to all,” said Rich. “How can radical accessibility be applied to the entrance, to retail shelves, to a cooking class, and to the facility itself? What are the ways in which people can feel like they were considered in the development and design of the building or in the design of a workshop? I think the staff as a whole is really committed to thinking through what that looks like.”

To reach their goal of accessibility, they have been working with MASS Design Group in Santa Fe, which won an architecture award for a food campus design it made for Three Sisters Kitchen. The design includes space for 12 kitchens, three classrooms, three production kitchens, and five micro kitchens. This is a big upgrade from the nonprofit’s current space with only two kitchens.

“We have calls every day from groups who want to do community cooking classes, and we just can’t accommodate them,” said Rich. “It will be nice to be in a space where we can fully engage in the community programing that is being requested of us right now. It will give us the opportunity to say yes more often, which we always want to do.”

Three Sisters Kitchen offers affordably priced classes and scholarships, so its classes are accessible for everyone. Its cafe does not currently accept SNAP or EBT, but Rich shared that once Three Sisters Kitchen secures a suitable location for its new food campus, the staff hopes to accept SNAP and EBT there.

“I genuinely love what we do,” said Rich. “We have an incredible team of just really dedicated, thoughtful, hardworking people, and that’s really how it happens every day. That’s how the magic happens.”

You can learn more about Three Sisters Kitchen on its website and find its products at various grocers across New Mexico.

To learn more about the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, visit the HFFI web page.

Source: rd.usda.gov