 Welcome to our program today everyone. We're here with the staff from the Heart of the City Farmers Market for their amazing program, The Future of the Heart of the City Farmers Market. This program is brought to you by the Business Science and Technology Center at the Main Library on the fourth floor. While we are close to the public, you are welcome to email us at b-u-s-s-c-i-t-e-c-h at sfpl.org and we will help you with questions that you may have pertaining to this department or anything else. You can find a wide array of resources while we're closed and what you need to do is go to sfpl.org and scroll down to the blue tiles under support and services and the Business Science and Technology department has two tiles, one for business and finance resources and one for job resources. So when you click on those for business and finance you'll see that we have a couple of places where you can get support for if you have a small business, if you're trying to start a business, as well as financial information and we've compiled a list of resources for people during COVID-19. I also want to point out that a lot of people aren't aware that we have an amazing collection of databases and you can, I'm getting a lot of requests for programs on targeted markets like science and technology and so forth and you are welcome to increase your skills by using our databases which you have access to with your library card and this is just a really small sample of what you can access to increase your skills if you're job hunting and so forth or you just want to entertain yourself. This is just a sample of databases that pertain to the Business Science and Technology department. I want to point out that our events calendar is full of amazing things happening so please check out our upcoming events. We have a program tomorrow. We'll have the demonstration on how to use the database value line which is an investing database that helps you do your research so that you put your money in places where it's going to grow. We also have business research reference solutions database formerly reference USA database demonstration for people who are looking to target markets if you have a small business. This is a great database to use. It's also amazing for job seekers so check that one out. We have limited library service right now called SFPL2go. You can go online to our website and see which locations are available and who are offering this service. Always check online first if we are experiencing wildfire smoke because we can't operate when the AQI goes over 150 so do check that out. And that's the end of my little presentation. I'm going to hand you over to the executive director of the Heart of City Farmers Market, Kate Price. Hi everybody. I really touched how many of you have registered today to hear about Heart of City Farmers Market how we've been affected by the pandemic and wildfire smoke. Thank you for joining us. It's a stressful week for everyone I know but thank you. We appreciate it. I wish I could meet you all in person but it's a different world now and thank you so much to Leah and her team for giving us this platform to connect with you over Zoom. It's very valuable for us to be able to share our story like this. My name is Kate Kreps. I'm the executive director of Heart of the City Farmers Market. I've been working to promote food justice and community development for 15 years and I've been working here in the Tenderloin neighborhood for 12 years. It's been a long time. I joined Heart of the City Farmers Market in 2010 and at that time I took our nonprofit and shifted our focus to building community partnerships to create a strong network with the social service providers that are already working on the ground here. Our goal is to increase food access for community that faces a lot of food access challenges. There isn't unfortunately a full service grocery store serving this community and especially during the pandemic that makes it very problematic for low income families to access healthy food. We now have over 50 community partners. We're proud of that and our food access programs have grown to 10 times the size what they were in 2010. So you know the sky's the limit for us especially with the amount of need that we're serving on the ground right now. I'm also joined today by Steve Pulliam, our amazing market manager. Steve would you mind making some noise so everyone sees you? Hello everybody. And then also our assistant and our assistant manager Abby Winship Hoyos. Abby can say hello. She's got this amazing background confused me at first but that's our that's our market day. We don't have a market right now. She just knows how to use Zoom. So both Steve and Abby are neighborhood residents and we're shoppers at the market first before they join the market. So they have a lot of love for the market. We really appreciate them. And you might have seen us bouncing around the market over the last five to 10 years. Our job is to keep all of the moving parts running on the back end. The three of us are responsible for the nonprofit organization operations to make sure everything runs smoothly. And so a lot has changed in the world since March 2020. And that's certainly the case here at Heart of the City Farmers Market. Unfortunately we've had a lot of impacts that have changed what the farmers market is going to be going forward. We thought that this would be a great way to communicate some of that to you. The programs that unfortunately we've had to suspend possibly indefinitely and some of our new focuses and where we're going to take the market from here. And I've prepared a presentation for you which I'm going to put on the screen right now to walk you through it. Everybody see this? Yeah, we can see it. Great. So the future of Heart of the City Farmers Market. I'm trying to remember how to go to full screen just a second. You can use the one at the bottom, like the rectangle with the line and the little stand on it further to the left. You can pass it. That one. That one. Thank you. Thank you, Abby. So the future of Heart of the City Farmers Market and we're going to explore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and wildfires on our nonprofit's future. So I really love this picture. It's from the 80s. This is what our farmers market used to look like. We started in 1981 and we're really proud because we're the only independent farmer operated nonprofit farmers market since 1981. But we're still the only one in San Francisco. Here's a poster from our 10th anniversary. This is hanging in our office. And so what we really like is that we center the voices of farmers because we're independent and farmer operated. We really listen to the farmers and they listen to their customers on the ground. And that enables us because we keep our staff team so small to really respond to the needs of the community around us. We're still open after almost 40 years now. Every Wednesday and Sunday rain or shine, including holidays at the United Nations Plaza above Civic Center Bart Station. So it's really important to us that we are an accessible source of food. So we almost never close. Pretty much working year round rain or shine in all conditions. So the market was started on June 14th, 1981 because the neighborhood didn't have a source of fresh produce. It's an extremely low income neighborhood. A lot of families are living here. But to this day, it lacks an affordable supermarket for its residents. And it does have some grocery stores. But the majority of those grocery stores do not sell fresh produce. And as you can see from this picture down on the right, there's a lot of unhealthy options and a lot of as the sign says here, you're advertising to use your EBT card for unhealthy foods. And so our market was created to fill that gap and to say, hey, we're here, you can get fruits and vegetables and we can make it affordable for you or do what we can to try to make it so that your family can afford it. So today over 80 farmers and small food businesses bring a colorful oasis of healthy food from local farms and around about one to three hours away down to the heart of the city, heart of the city to help the struggling community. You can see we put our vendor map here. So it's a little change now. We just haven't updated it after the pandemic. So we're proud to say that our farmers grow what they sell. That's the great thing about a farmer's market in California, what's called a California certified farmers market means that every farmer participating at it gets one of these certified producers certificates from the agricultural commissioner of the county in which they grow their produce. And that means the agricultural commissioner has come out to their farm and inspected and ensured that these products are actually growing in the fields. And then we can see on the certificate when we expect to see them and about how much we can expect to see. And after you'll see that at the farmers market, every farmer is required to post this. And so we inspect that and make sure that everything on the table is grown by that farm. And that means that we could promise our customers that every dollar is spent, every dollar spent with us supports local agriculture. So choosing to shop at farmers markets supports sustainable local hardworking small farm families like this one. This is the Uranus, Poli and Sylvia. And we help customers feel empowered to really change the food system with their purchase. Use your dollar to vote to make the food system stronger and more sustainable. Part of the city farmers market is uniquely independent. And we obtained a 501c4 nonprofit designation in 1982. And we are governed by a board of directors and that board of directors is made up of five farmers out of our member the member farmers that participate with us. All of the participating farmers elect, representative board members to sit on our board. And we call them our farmer advisory board, which means everything that Steve, Abby and I do is run by those farmers and make sure that it is meeting the needs of the farmers that we serve and also aligns with the mission that guides us. And those five farmers elect community board members. So members of the community who either work or live in the community and they help us really gauge the needs of the people who live here. So here's Tony Mello. I think a lot of you guys probably know him. He has been selling in the spot since the very first day in 1981. And he has served on our board multiple times. He's been elected. He's a friend to most of the people, most of the farmers in the market. He's been elected often to serve over the last 20 years. And he has just been invaluable to help us make sure that we're really centering the voices of farmers and listening to them when we run this organization. So he likes to say that he remembers how long the lines were on the first day that we opened, because it was so critical to get food into this community that before the sun even came up on our first day, people were standing in line trying to get to this produce. And a lot of the reason for that is back then in 1981, the neighborhood was dominated by liquor stores, fast foods. There wasn't a lot of healthy food options or full service food options, especially culturally appropriate food options. And the market filled that gap. We're really grateful to the American Friends Service Committee, the Quaker organization that is over on Ninth Street, and the Market Street Association, because those were the two organizations that helped start this market. And then they chose to turn it over to be run by its member farmers. It's a pretty cool story. And so as it says here, the market has changed over the years, but the community's food access challenges have really remained almost the same. There's a lot of good people on the ground working right now, a lot of exciting things happening, but there are still enormous hurdles to get food where it needs to go. And so the oasis of fresh food that the farmers market brings, it's just as crucial today. So here's me and my daughter. Our small staff team runs one of the largest farmers market food access programs in the nation. As I said, we're 10 times the size we were in 2010. We work really hard to keep overhead costs as low as possible at our market. And we employ only three full-time workers without grant support or special projects that we're able to go out and get additional funding for. That's me, Steve, and Abby. It's the inner echelon of our market. And as you'll see later in the presentation, we flex. We get larger as we're able to get more grant support, but then we fall back to our three when we don't have enough money to keep that going. I've been with the market since 2010. Steve has been with the market since 2012, and Abby's been with the market since 2015. So we've all been working for a long time on the ground. I mean, of course, there's a lot more people in this community have been here longer, but we feel like we've been here long enough now to hitting the new challenges that we're up against. We're ready to fight. We've established a strong team and we're moving forward. So as I said, our farmers market is a non-profit, and that means we have a mission statement. And this is the mission statement that the farmers came up with back in the 80s or 90s, and I'm not sure how old this is. Our mission is to support and sustain small and medium-sized growers and make fresh food accessible for low-income customers. And then this was added recently, who struggled to afford healthy food in a city with the highest cost of living in the nation. And so let's focus on the two parts of our mission. The first part is to support and sustain small and medium-sized growers. And this is how our organization realizes that mission. So we minimize operating costs to keep participating fees as low as possible for farmers. I touched on that a little bit, but that's really important for us. Our flexible attendance policy means that vendors only pay their stall fees when they can participate and have crops growing to sell. So farmers are at the mercy of the seasons and anything else you want to throw at them, but our farmers market has been built since 1981 to roll with those punches with them, which means if it is rained on the strawberry crops in the morning and they're unable to pick it because they will spoil if they go into a basket and they can't come, we don't charge them. We just save their spot and wait until they're ready to come back. It makes it a little challenging for us, but that's part of small agriculture, and we're here to roll with those pensions too. Our fundraising efforts directly benefit farmers. We're proud to say that we've raised $650,000 just in 2020 that was passed directly to low-income customers, and then they used that money to buy healthy food from vendors. So that's a big part of our mission is to just get money, and even though it doesn't directly benefit our organization, we pass it along to the low-income customers, essentially helping both parts of our mission through that effort. Our nutrition education outreach program and our partnerships with over 50 community social service providers, hospitals, schools, etc., helps link customers in need with farmers. So farmers are so busy, they don't have time to do their own marketing, do their own outreach, especially not our farmers because we really focus on small farmers that many of them have language barriers, many of them don't have time to get into the office and really do the marketing. We help to fill that gap for them and connect them with new customers that we've brought down to our market, and then we prioritize equity and access for farmers, which is really important, by providing trainings and other assistance that levels the playing field across technology and language barriers. Let's look at the next part of our mission, which is to make fresh food accessible for low-income customers. The community we serve faces enormous food challenges. The main reason for this is that there isn't an affordable full-service supermarket within walking distance, and the neighborhood is dominated by unhealthy foods like liquor stores, fast foods. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of efforts recently to get more excitement around getting a supermarket in the neighborhood. TNDC has been doing some amazing work around that. I have not the last update I heard is in 2017, but I know it's quite challenging. The community now is focusing on working with local grocery stores to convert to sell more healthy food options, but we're here to make sure that there are culturally appropriate produce items and that there's a wide selection of them so that we can meet all the needs of one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the nation. Our food access programs include purchasing assistance programs, nutrition education outreach, et cetera. They work to connect low-income households with the healthy food that farmers bring down to our markets. Our multicultural competency efforts really strive to make this healthy food accessible across cultural language barriers. We're proud to say that over 50% of our leadership team are people of color, and we require racial equity training for all staff. We want to make sure that we are meeting the needs of this diverse community. And then 50% of our farmers, more than that, but our farmers, the number fluctuates, but we thought it was safe to say 50% speak a language other than English at home, and that means that they are able to offer really diverse and culturally appropriate selection of healthy food for this community. So this is our Market Information 10, which looks a little different. We used to have one, we've expanded to two now, and you see this amazing employee. We have Yong serving in her full PPE now, but we're proud to say that we provide $1.5 million in food assistance a year, and that is the counting the number of tokens and vouchers that go out from our information tent and then are spent with farmers for healthy food. So we work to increase access to fresh produce for an extremely low-income neighborhood dominated by liquor stores and fast foods. And as I said, we distribute $1.5 million annually to customers to purchase it. So in the extremely low-income neighborhoods we serve that surround the market and Civic Center, specifically the Tenderloin, people are twice as likely to live in poverty than elsewhere in the city, and access to healthy food is limited because of the issues we have bringing a full service grocery store to the neighborhood, full service supermarket. And the community's food insecurity has increased significantly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We've heard that from most of the partners that we work with. This is compounded by reductions to public transit and the challenges of social distancing on crowded streets because that's left to many residents stranded without access to healthy food. So it is helpful that Heart of the City Farmers Market just shows up in the middle of this community two times a week to bring healthy food to it. So here's some food for thought, which I got from a pretty amazing article that was written called On the Frontlines in Bringing Healthy Food Options to the Tenderloin. This was written about the Healthy Corner Shore Coalition by Sherman Turking from Local News Matters. I just wanted to run through some of these statistics about the Tenderloin that really keep us pointed in the right direction and making sure that we're meeting the needs of this community. The Tenderloin neighborhood has an older and more ethnically diverse population than San Francisco as a whole. The neighborhood is home to a greater percentage of Black African American residents and roughly a third of the residents speak English less than very well. So language barriers are huge here to knowing how to access food and how to access food assistance to purchase that food. The Tenderloin is home to a significant portion of the city's homeless population and of those who are housed roughly a third pay 50% or more of their income and rent and considering how expensive food and utilities and medicine is in a place that's the most expensive place in the nation, that's a really scary statistic. So we're going to move into what the pandemic has done. So participation in heart of the city farmers markets food access programs, which was already the largest in California and one of the three largest in the nation before the pandemic hit has increased that participation 47%. And we now serve about 1400 on average CalFresh EBT customers each market day. And for people who don't know what CalFresh EBT is, that's the name formally known as food stamps. It's the card that families and households have now to make sure that they can access critical food. Over 6000 unduplicated CalFresh EBT customers have accessed a market match program. And that's just since shelter in place began in March 2020. So that's enormous. I've never heard of a farmer's market that has met that been forced to rise to challenges like this. And it's a big testament to Steve and Abby on the ground that they've been able to weather what they have over the last few months, six months. And over 2000 new participants have joined this market match program during that period. We'll explain more about what the market match program is and future slides. Heart of the City Farmers Market, I'm just so proud of this. Heart of the City Farmers Market has distributed $502,000 in free food vouchers and tokens to low income residents just since shelter in place began in March. And that's funded by our market match program and the healthy food purchasing supplements program, which is an amazing program run by the San Francisco Public Health Foundation funded by revenue from the soda tax, the San Francisco soda tax. $474,000 of this food relief has been spent with farmers already, which when you give out food relief in the form of vouchers, food vouchers for people to use, there's always a concern that how much of it is going to get lost in the couch cushions, how much of it is not going to get spent. But our market, 95% of it has been spent already and much of that is not expired yet. So, you know, it might come back to us. But that just really proves how critical this food is that people are getting this money for food and then spending it right away with small farmers. So now I would like to turn it over to Abby. She manages our information tent and holds together all the complicated moving parts of her food access program. This includes distribution and redemption tracking for tokens and vouchers. And I joke with Abby all the time that she's our information tent goddess. We bow down to her. She has kept this enormous program running through the chaos of the pandemic and helped us stabilize after we doubled in just six months. And that's saying a lot because we doubled in size the year before that. But I'll let her explain more about that. It's been really difficult to keep up with the neighborhood's food security challenges, but Abby never gives up because she just loves the market so deeply. And she keeps us stable and strong. I'm really grateful for her. So, Abby, how are you? Well, thanks, Kate. I want to say good morning. Welcome. And thanks to Leah Hillman in the business science and technology center at the library. I, in the same vein, how she said that the library has so many resources that people don't know about or don't know to take it advantage of. I think our farmer's market is not just a farmer's market. We're so much more than that. And I'm glad that we have the chance to do this presentation today for people to learn more about who we are and what we're doing. So in order to make our very large food access programs work, we have our own currency system. And so this facilitates connecting low-income customers with the healthy food sold at the market. We have tokens and vouchers which are provided at our information tent. There's four colors of tokens and vouchers that each have their own programs and restrictions. And do next slide. The market information tent, now tents, are located on the west side of the, of UN Plaza, close to the Simón Bolivar statue on Hyde Street. There are three points of sale serving customers. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we went from one information tent to two information tents so that we could keep our tent support staff and our customers socially distanced. And so three points of sale at the two different tents and two of those points of sale are serving one long line of customers. And we'll talk a little bit about why that line is so long. If people haven't figured it out already, that line, because of the pandemic, we moved from going down the middle of the market to around the statue and around Hyde Street, sometimes past around a little more than that, but we are working on efforts to make that line wait time shorter. The third point of sale is a priority lane for credit cards, debit cards, and our vouchers. And when no one is waiting to use a credit card or debit card or exchange a voucher, that line is also serving the long main line. Next slide. So we do process credit cards. I know I still find people regularly who don't realize that we also process credit cards at our market information tent. We don't charge any fee to do that. The Heart of the City organization covers the processing fees for those. And we do this for convenience. It keeps customers in the market. If someone says, hey, where's an ATM? There's always a chance that they might go looking for an ATM and just not come back. So it keeps people in the market for convenience. And it also levels the playing field among the different farmers. They may have language or technology barriers that make it inconvenient for them to swipe the cards at their own tent. It also can slow down if they've got a lot of customers. Having the tokens is just a very easy way for farmers to accept credit cards without having to stop and process the transaction there. We also have our own $5 vouchers that is an equivalent of the green credit card tokens. We partner with local service, social service providers, nonprofits, schools, and some hospitals to provide these $5 vouchers to their clients. These can be exchanged for the green tokens at the information tent. And this is a way to enable organizations to provide gifts or rewards or participation incentives if they're doing a nutrition education workshop. And another great way to infuse vulnerable low-income communities with healthy food. Both the green tokens and the black vouchers are eligible for any item sold in the farmer's market. Next slide. Our largest program by far is the EBT CalFresh program. We're one of the largest farmers market we are the largest farmers market SNAP program in California. And we have confirmation from friends in USDA that we're in the top three in the nation. The who's ahead of us I can't imagine who it would be but that information is not publicly available. And we've gone from accepting $14 on the market's very first day in June 1981 to in the past 12 months alone. We've processed over $850,000 in EBT sales. And on this side you can see the EBT card. And we also processed the pandemic EBT card that was given to families in California whose children participate in free lunch or families who already have CalFresh EBT were given the white black and white pandemic EBT card that card can also be used at the farmers market. And both of those cards purchase the yellow $1 token that you see on this side. Next one. Then we the EBT program really grew when we became a market match partner. And at Heart of the City Farmers Market, EBT customers get an extra $5 free for fruits and vegetables every market day that they come to the market when they spend $5 or more with their EBT card. That's funded by the Guest Two Mocker Nutrition Incentive Program. And I'm so glad that we get to do that. It is a real draw for customers to come to the market. And those dollars are really being spent on fruits and vegetables in the market. Where the largest incentive program in California and we're a national model to encourage Snap customers to spend their EBT benefits on healthy locally grown produce that supports small farmers in their community for someone who cares a lot about local food and everyone eating healthy. I just can't imagine I'm in heaven. I can't imagine better work out there. So I'm really appreciative of our customers and our farmers coming together in this special place at Heart of the City where it all happens. And since we joined the Market Match Consortium in 2015, we've distributed $2 million in market matching incentives to low income customers. Next slide. I do or go back one side for a second. I didn't explain the difference between the major difference between the regular CalFresh EBT dollars and the blue $1 market match tokens is that yellow EBT tokens can be spent on any CalFresh eligible food and market. So that would include fish, eggs, nuts, and honey as well as fruits and vegetables. And the blue ones are exclusively for fruits and vegetables. So those restrictions are federal restrictions for the EBT dollars. So that's enforced at the market. And I love that people have that flexibility at the market to spend their EBT dollars on what they'd like and that the market match blue tokens are specifically for fruits and vegetables. So really is a nutrition incentive. Okay, now for the next slide. Kate mentioned that our program has doubled a couple times in the past couple of years. Last year was, we had a very big change. Do legislators, where, how did I start with that one? So previously SSI recipients, seniors, and people with disabilities were not eligible for CalFresh in California. It was a, supposedly they had their food benefits built into their SSI benefits. That was changed by legislation and went into effect in June 2019, at which time the, we launched a program to help seniors and people with disabilities enroll in CalFresh who were now, previously not eligible for CalFresh. And now they were because of the SSI cash out reversal. We launched a CalFresh application assistance program so that people could start the application process right at the farmers market. We had a captive audience to also tell about our programs and how they could use their CalFresh EBT card at farmers market once their application was approved. And we offered that application assistance in English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Cantonese. And as a result of the SSI cash out reversal, EBT sales increased by 78% in the first month after the change. We went from our busiest days being like 500 customers a day, maybe 800 customers on like a very busy, like full harvest day to now regularly over 1500 customers a day. So yes, significant growth in the past year and that's generated an additional $375,000 in EBT sales for farmers in the 12 months after that SSI cash out reversal went into effect. Next slide. Okay. This slide shows our EBT sales over time from 10 years ago in 2009. We were processing a not insignificant amount of sales just under $90,000 in that year. And growing with what was probably what should be typical for markets, I think also related to the work of partnering with social service organizations in the neighborhood spreading the word about CalFresh being accepted at the farmers market. And then in 2015, there's the first significant spike in growth where we go from, oh, we passed $300,000, $331,593 our first year in the market match program. And we only started doing the market match program partway through that year. And then we add to that we added $136,094. So a lot of food assistance growth in that year, 2016, 2017, 2018, full years with CalFresh EBT and market match incentive. Very much people would, the same test we would get more customers coming to the market as a result of market match. And then in 2019, you see a significant spike. That's because of the SSI cashout reversal and paired with that. So 2019, we did almost $670,000, paired with over $500,000 in market match incentives. And then we'll show the next slide. We'll have to get everyone a larger screen to show the final numbers for next year, because in only the first nine months of 2020, we've already exceeded the amount of food relief distributed in 2019 by $115,000 with hand-in-hand $616,000 on EBT CalFresh EBT and $615,000 in our market match program distribution. Next slide. Low-income customers have made an astounding $850,000 in CalFresh EBT purchases over the past 12 months. And our EBT program is now 10 times the size it was in 2009 and is believed to be the largest in the nation. In May 2020 alone, it was a very, very busy month. And Heart of the City Farmers Market was able to distribute $168,911 in food relief. That's thanks to funding from the Healthy Food Purchasing Supplement Grant that's funded by San Francisco Soda Tax, administered by the San Francisco Public Health Foundation. So that was all distributed that month. And yes, I'm ready for the next slide. So that, mind you, that was two months into the pandemic. Customers were not as hesitant. I think we did see a dip during the first couple of months of the pandemic where customers were nervous and hesitant. And as I mentioned, a lot of our customers are seniors. So a lot of customers were staying home. But by May, the good summer fruits are starting to come into season and people are wanting to shop at the market. We were able to give that huge amount of assistance incentives to our customers. And as a result, our program almost crashed because we did not have enough tokens in our inventory. And in order to meet the demand for the tokens, at the same time our Token Production Factory was shut down due to the pandemic and had no known date that it was going to reopen. So we decided to act fast and launch a $5 voucher system to keep the food relief flowing into our community. And there's a very demonstrated need for the vouchers or for tokens or vouchers, whatever, any way we could get incentives to our community, they were definitely there to collect it. We also accept the EDSF's vouchers for veggies that are distributed through similar social service partner organizations. And also at the WIC office, we accept the WIC farmers market nutrition program vouchers and senior farmers market nutrition program vouchers. It seems as though the senior ones have mostly been re, they're not being distributed the same this year because of the pandemic. But for future years, we will accept those. And then and also veggie RX vouchers are these ones at the bottom the green and white ones that are given with a program run by fresh approach that includes nutrition education. These partnerships link our first to food assistance programs that provide clients vouchers to buy produce and makes another way to expand food access for vulnerable non income community. Thank you, happy that was great. I do want to say that as large as our EBT and market match programs are our EDSF program, we're hovering around $300,000 a year from that program that becomes, you know, much needed income for our small farmers. So we're really grateful to the EDSF team at vouchers for veggies for building that up from scratch it they when they approached us it was such a small program and we had no idea it was going to become what it is now but now it's a national model for getting using fruits and vegetables as medicine and getting it into these communities of people who might be falling through the cracks and not be able to access fruits and vegetables otherwise. So we're really grateful to see in our team. And so now we're going to look at the COVID-19 pandemics impact specifically on our vendors. Get ready to get sad here. So most of our farmers have been with us for over two decades because of our unique mission to really generate additional revenue for farmers through these equitable food access programs that we run. And this is Matteo and Rosa de Santis. They've been selling with us since 1984. They've been around for a long time. Rosa was a board member when I joined the market in 2010 has really helped us keep the market pointed in the right direction. But unfortunately this family suspended their participation at Heart of the City Farmers Market in March 2020 after more than 30 years and that was due to the impact of the pandemic and especially high-risk health conditions faced by a lot of our senior farmers who have been selling for a long time and are having trouble with finding younger generations to take over the farms because farming is such an incredibly difficult industry to keep sustainable in this modern world that we have. They've said that that's one of their problems. So they're not alone. Unfortunately 52 vendors have reduced or suspended operations at Heart of the City Farmers Market due to the pandemic or around the time of the pandemic and that's reduced critical operating revenue for our nonprofits and programs. So I want to remind everybody that our nonprofit was built since 1981 to really roll with the punches that the farmers have to sustain meaning that if farmers can't participate with us we don't charge them. We only charge them if they show up. And so having so many farmers reduce or suspend operations all in one year has been the biggest challenge that our organization has faced yet. I do want to focus on one of my favorite farms because it's one of our smallest farms. It's Ken Phan and his family, one of the smallest farms at the market. They suspended their operations due to fear of exposure for his family. So a lot of our small family farms, they're the only ones that work on the farm. They're out in the fields picking. They're selling at the market. Ken brings his children to the market to play around because they're selling. So he was especially worried about the impact of the pandemic and virus exposure on his family. And he chose to take he suspended operations when the pandemic hit after March. And we had a really amazing volunteer go around and do some interviews for us. I think Amy's on. Hi, Amy. And we have brought some quotes into this presentation so you can hear directly from these farmers. And this is Ken. He said, I discounted, donated, gave away here and there. We took a loss for three months. No income, no nothing. So just imagine those of us who have a salary, all of a sudden you take a hit 25% of your salary is, I mean, it's not quite that because, you know, farming is not a uniform like that, but still it's a huge hit for a small family to take. And we heard this a lot from the farmers that we spoke to that they tried to apply for federal stimulus assistance, but had trouble navigating the complicated system. So there are a lot of language barriers. There are a lot of technology issues where people are out in the field. They don't have time to be on their computers or standing in line trying to figure this out. He was not able to get assistance, federal assistance, and he was unable to withstand further loss. So he planted a new crop and he returned to the market in June. And so he says income is starting to come back in, but there are not a lot of people working at the offices now. It's really slowed down. He says that his sales since returning to the market have fallen 25% from what we would normally expect at this time of year. And we know that that's going to continue falling as customer foot traffic slows with the winter. It is what it is he said last year was great and then this year, boom, the same thing that's happened to me is probably happening to a lot of people. Ken is such a sweet soul and he's recognizing that he's not the only one being impacted, but we're still really worried about his family in the future. So 52 heart of the city farmers market vendors have reduced or suspended their operations, which is so high considering we have 80 to 85 vendors regularly. And these operations have been affected, suspended or reduced directly as a result of the impacts of pandemic or spoke. And when we added it up, 16 of them are now considered out of business in our records. We don't know they might be coming back. We're trying to figure it out. I don't even think they know. But you can see here, I circled the ones who have reduced their operations from what we're used to seeing. That means that, you know, they couldn't find workers, they couldn't pick, they couldn't get out into the fields. Smoke might have closed them down for for one reason or another. But then I've also circled in maroon red here, the ones that we just don't, we don't know, but don't think that they will be returning. So unfortunately, one of the biggest impacts on us is the closure of downtown offices. And it's had an absolutely devastating impact because of where we're located. It's difficult to find a it's difficult to get to us unless you're working in the neighborhood or you live in the neighborhood, especially once public transit becomes problematic for many people with health conditions or maybe fear about that. So what that's done is it's changed the customer demographics of people shopping at our market. And we have a really fragile balance. We serve the low income residents in the neighborhood, but in order to keep the farmers returning because of making sufficient sales for their businesses to stay afloat, we need to supplement that with higher income office workers and with the closures of the downtown offices and not knowing when or if they're going to return. And also the statistics that we're seeing about how many are going exclusively remote in the future and how many businesses are actually shutting down right now. We're really nervous about the future balance of the demographics of the customers who shop at our market and having to really become resilient and figure out what the future is going to look like for us. So this is a little sad. So unfortunately, Heart of the City Farmers Market's nonprofit organization has lost $72,000 in expected or budgeted Stolfi income due to the impacts of the pandemic and smoke on participation. So you can see over here, I compared the 2019 revenue to the 2020 revenue and we're losing around $10,000 a month now. And what we had budgeted we expected to come in and what is now actually coming in. And gosh, that's not even the worst news. Our vendors have lost $140,000 just between March and September in expected credit card sales income at or in pretend. So Abby explained that we do level the playing field between our lowest and our largest farmers by accepting credit card sales and eating the processing fee so that it doesn't cost anything for the customers to do that, but it also doesn't cost anything for the farmers to do that. We do that because a lot of the smallest farmers have language barriers and can't process square on their phones. And so you can see here at the top are expected 2019 sales. We usually will look at the year before to know what to expect this year. And the sales are just so far so much lower than we expected. And that results in a huge loss for the vendors who rely on this income to just make it through this pandemic. So unfortunately, these losses were sustained during what's normally the busy season at the farmer's market. So we are a year-round farmer's market and we're really proud of our mission that we will be reliable. We will be open, rain or shine, holidays, we're here. It's a voluntary market. So not all farmers will necessarily be here. It's up to them whether they choose, but the market will be here and some farmers will be here to serve customers. We stayed open on Christmas Eve a few years ago, and we're surprised that over 90% of the farmers showed up. So the farmers really need places to sell. And there's such a diverse group of people in our neighborhood that there's always people who need food access. So we're open. But like in accordion, in the summer, we were like, you can see everything's just growing. And in the winter, we go into a little bit of a hibernation mode, just trying to make it through to the next bountiful season. And so all of these losses that I have talked about have been sustained during the busy harvest, the busy summer season. So we're pretty nervous about what this coming winter is going to look like as we go into this hibernation mode. We have a lot of efforts on the back end to make us strong and stable to go through it, but it's still a little scary for all of us. So we're worried about the market survival, of course, in the long run, although we are a strong, stable team, and we're moving it forward. But we're really worried about the future livelihood of our remaining vendors. We're worried that through the winter, this winter, some of them who are just holding on this winter might, we're hoping it's not the one that knocks some of these farmers off of their small business. So here I'm going to turn this over to Steve. Steve Pulliam is our market manager, and he manages all ground operations, vendor relationships, and helps me with partner outreach. I think of Steve as our rock. So the job and the need that we serve can feel really overwhelming sometimes, but his steady and comforting presence really helps the team stay pointed in the right direction and moving forward, even if progress just happens with baby steps. And I also love that he's a driving force for food justice in San Francisco. He also manages the community garden for an underserved neighborhood in Pertrero Hill. And Steve, you can explain more about that if you want. And he also teaches workshops about sustainability and nutrition education. And I just want to say that we pulled him onto the team in 2012 because I was able to get a USDA Farmers Market Promotion Program grant, which helped us launch community workshops for the very first time. And his just amazing ability to connect with the community and really get people excited about food justice and sustainability helped our ABT program participation jump 37% in just one year. So his heart is huge. I'm sure if you know him, you love him. And I'll turn it over to him now. He's going to explain how the pandemic and smoke has affected our vendors and our ground operations. Okay. Thank you, Kate. That was you make me feel pretty good about myself. And thank you, Leah and the library for having us. I first wanted to talk about before I get started with the presentation. I just wanted to make a point that just like we've all been impacted by the pandemic and the wildfires individually. There's a lot of stories that we're not going to include in this presentation. A lot of farmers that weren't able to survive and make it through this. There's like Bachibon Farms, who Hassan realized that he was the, you know, as Kate talked about, Ken Phan, he's the grower, he's the harvester, he works the markets. And his family realized after coming to the market a few times that if something was to happen to him, it would devastate the farm, it would devastate the family. So they decided not to come back after a while. There was Vang's Farm, which they called us and said, Hey, we can come on Sundays. We can't come during the week on Wednesdays because we've got to homeschool our kids, you know, distance learning. And they came for a few markets and didn't realize that was even too much work for them. I'm trying to make sure their kids were getting their education and trying to work farm and come and sell at the market. It proved to be too difficult for them. So they halted coming to the market. We even had one farmer who decided not to come because she didn't feel comfortable wearing a mask all day at the market. So she wasn't able to come back. So there's lots of those stories out there. It's been an incredible impact on our farmers. And I just wanted to give a voice to some of those guys. And we can start with the your slides here. Uranium Farm, I'm happy to start with Uranium. Oh, I just want to let you know, we got to speed up a little bit. We're about an hour in right now. So, okay, all right, I'll speed it up. That was really good. Okay. Uranium Farms, one of my favorites. I love their story. If you ever come to the market and you want to see them and meet them, they're one of the sweetest families you'll ever meet. I love their story. He started out as a picker and ended up having the dream of starting his own farm and made it happen. I ended up growing organic strawberries and now winning awards for a strawberry. So I'm a big fan of theirs. So I'm happy to start with them. Our farm has been through a lot, including an earthquake, recession and fires in previous years. But we've never been through anything like what we're experiencing now with the pandemic, says Poli Uranium. Poli is current. He's on our board. He's been a board member for off and on for some time now. And he's been farming for over 44 years. His family brings organic strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, tomatoes, and vegetables to the market from Watsonville. The families drive home, usually takes about three hours. Typically, since the pandemic has started, that commute time has been cut in half. That's one of the pretty much the only good news for an otherwise brutal year. But I will say that Urania did have some more good news. Their son Alex, who we've seen sort of grow up at the market, was married during the pandemic. So there is a little bit more good news for them. Okay, harvesting and smoking conditions has been extremely difficult. The ashes have impacted Poli's berries and tomatoes. And you can sort of see the effect on the tomatoes in this slide. One of the biggest impacts has been the closure of restaurants who order in bulk. You know, these farmers, these small farmers have to use multiple ways of selling their produce. And this has had a major effect on them. To make up for enormous financial losses, farmers like Poli have been finding ways to sell such as CSA box programs. Developing a CSA model or allowing for drive to pick up is not really possible at our market due to parking challenges for our customers. You can see that that slide is a picture of the parking lot across the street at the library. Closes to local shepherds due to virus transmission resulted in the conversion of our only available customer parking on Fulton Street to sleeping sites for unhoused neighbors in order to create a safe shelter for our vulnerable population. And I would like to say that before they created that safe site, there was still a tent city across the street and impromptu sort of tent city that tents were piled up on top of each other. No social distancing, no hand washing stations, none of the facilities that were needed. So I applied the city for actually organizing this and making sure there was a distance between the tents and providing facilities and hand washing stations and food and that kind of stuff. I thought it was long overdue and I was happy to see it. Unfortunately, it did affect our farmers and sort of affected their sales. But I do applaud the city for that. And providing safe, oh, I guess we can move on. Yes, we can move on. Thank you. Part of the city's farmers market already spends 20% of its annual operating budget on private security due to the challenges faced by our community community. But a rapid increase in mental health and other incidents in the Civic Center has resulted in the as a result of the pandemic has overwhelmed our team and forced us to appeal for help to keep the market safe. The Civic Center Community Benefit District came to our aid and helped us with some temporary security, especially these guys from Urban Alchemy who continue to transform people and communities with love and respect during the pandemic's challenges. I want to give a special shout out to Urban Alchemy also because they were helping us out before the pandemic started. They were a godsend for us helping out our security team. They were here helping with security and cleaning up and doing all the things to help our market become a safe and comfortable place to work. And we sort of lost them when the pandemic started because they were in demand all over the city. But we just recently got them back and I'm just happy to have them back. Thank you guys. Okay we can go on. The negative impact of losing Fulton Street has caused a steep decline in customer foot traffic. Cells are low, there's no parking and it makes it hard to stop by. A lot of people don't want to come anymore. That's the bottom line. Older people can't walk too much so it's important for this market to have parking. Says David Medrano from Medrano's Flowers. Quickly about this this vendor, they sort of got a soft spot in my heart because Khan with Pack Food started out as a seller for a vendor here. He had a dream of starting his own business. He started bringing us food in to taste and we sort of helped him along to start his business, especially Kate. So I feel a special affinity for him because he started his business. He thrived here. He expanded to other markets and now they're sort of suffering. So I'm really hoping that they can get through this rough time and get back to fulfilling their dream. Cells plummeted when office workers left the neighborhood. Our small family-owned prepared food businesses are barely hanging on. Eight of them have gone out of business since March. The remaining owe us nearly 15,000 in loans for stall fees. In last quarter the health department raised permit fees at not the best of timing there. So again our vendors especially our hot food vendors are really suffering right now. Probably the hardest hit amongst our vendors. We've noticed in our market that there's a lot less split traffic, as Musa saw of MA farms. We've seen a reduction of about 50 percent in sales. Farmers markets are the way we sell our produce. We're still producing the same amount of fruit and stuff in storage is going bad because things aren't moving so quick. You know those trees don't stop producing during pandemics so that food has to go somewhere. They had issues finding workers. When COVID hit a lot of the workers didn't come to work and a lot of them were stuck outside of the country due to the border shutdown. So it was Musa, his dad and his sisters farming for the first three months of the season. And you know with Musa he's actually just graduated from med school and he's out there helping his family on the farm. These farmers are incredible. Some of their families just really blow me away with the way they take care of each other and really just you know he's he's going to be a doctor and here he is you know struggling helping his father pick fruit out in the field. This is incredible. Sean Garoni is a board member whose family helped to create Heartland City's Farmers Market in 1981. Forest mongai stores in the ferry building in Santa Cruz were closed temporarily due to the pandemic. I believe that their store at the ferry building is back open. Just updated information. Most of our other farmers markets have been busier. We even saw increased sales at some venues because we supply supermarkets and people are cooking at home. But sales have reduced at the Heartland City's Farmers Market. Most of their markets are you know the the customer base is a little more affluent than it is here in Tenderloin. Most of this neighborhood consists primarily of SROs or one-room dwellings with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. And this lack of kitchen access to the major factor in creating barriers to healthy especially now. One of the biggest impacts for these farmers has been the fact that they've had to increase staff in order to comply with the new regulations. I would say most of our farmers have more than half have had to almost double the number of people they've had they've had to staff in order to comply with the regulations and get the food to the customers. At the same time their sales decreasing you know being cut so dramatically you can imagine how their bottom line is suffering. The Heartland City's Farmers Market has made changes to our rules and regulations to keep customers as safe as possible at the market following the San Francisco's Public Health Directive for Farmers Markets released in May 2020. The new regulations include PPE for all workers, hand-washing stations, enforcing customer capacity limits, expanding, we've expanded to two information tents to help with social distancing, no touch procedures for tent transactions, additional pre-purchasing options and no touch procedures for product purchasing. It's been a major effect on the farmers. Farmers report sales have reduced due to no touch regulations. They complain that in grocery stores you can touch produce in other markets you can touch produce but here we're not allowing you to. Recently we have adjusted our protocol slightly to allow customers to touch produce if the farmer supplies them with a glove or a clean bag that they can use to touch the produce just so that our farmers aren't suffering from competition from grocery stores and the other markets. Extra caution is needed to navigate racial equity issues that's new rules are communicated across multiple language barriers. We do try to put signs up in front of all the stands all over the market to inform people of our safety protocols in different and multiple languages because we do have a quite a diverse customer base I think. Farmer selling high volumes of staple vegetables this no touch rule has resulted in increased cost for staffing as I mentioned new competition with grocery stores and other farmers markets that are not required to follow San Francisco's stricter rules and reduced income from lower sales. Other farmers don't mind this rule and are even benefiting from it. There are a couple of farmers that don't mind the rule and are benefiting from it. This quote from Mark here you have to constantly keep people from touching the produce. It pisses some people off but it's actually great for more fragile products like tomatoes. When the customers could root around in them all day long we'd end up having to discount about 10% of what we sold. I think that Mark's sort of unique in that respect not unique but he's definitely in the minority because of the specialty items that he sells. People know they're farmed dried dried farmed tomatoes are some of the best they've ever eaten. I can vouch for that if you make some marinara or tomato sauce with those tomatoes people will swear you put sugar in them. They're that sweet and delicious so people know what they're getting when they go to stand not to not give them credit for his great greens and lettuces but anyway. The Bartle family unfortunately took the hardest hit this year and lost their family's home and farm infrastructure to the fire in Santa Cruz County but there is no time to stop and grieve during harvest season they had to save what was left. Though the surrounding forest burned the two dogs farms lush dry farm crops survived Mark and his family begged to be allowed behind fire lines to harvest while produce was ripe. Farmers have a short window to harvest before spoilage. So they have to they have to get in there and harvest when even though the conditions might not be advantageous to them being out there. Horresting is backbreaking labor. Yeah you know these guys are getting out there and even though they have masks you know you can walk through the city with the mask and you know how much it can affect you your breathing and your health and these guys are doing you know hard physical labor out in the fields and wearing a mask still isn't going to totally protect them from having to breathe in some of that smoke but they've their livelihood depends on it so they have to do what they have to do. You can move. Every day has been challenging Mark said two weeks after the fire navigating the roadblocks supporting ongoing fire cleanup trying to figure out where and how to store produce without our usual infrastructure. We are focusing on the harvest now and we'll wait to work on cleanup and rebuilding later. Like all small farmers the money his family makes from this year's crops will be used to plant next year. So far customers have donated over $33,000 on GoFundMe to keep his operations stable as they recover and rebuild. We have been very encouraged by the love and generosity we have seen from everyone. I will say the latest with the VARO family as they have they're looking into purchasing a trailer so that they can live in it until they're able to get their house rebuilt and so many homes were damaged during the fires that they're thinking three four years down the road they might not even be ready to rebuild yet because the construction crews are slammed right now so hopefully they can get it their house rebuilt sooner and later sooner than later but right now they're just looking in to get in the trailer to hold them over until it does. This is the largest wildfire season recorded in California's modern history. More than four percent of the state's roughly 100 million acres of land burned that's an incredible number. Every farmer at the heart of the city's farmers market has been affected by smoke conditions. Mask on labor shortages are widespread. Okay sorry to rush you through that Steve. That's just that story. We love Mark so much. So looking to the future I'm going to take over the rest of it and close this out. Our beloved market is going to look very different going forward. The pandemic has suspended all non-essential programs and depends on your definition of essential but we have designated these programs as non-essential so that we can focus on critical food relief. The suspended programs include the Biblio Bistro Program in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library. It's an amazing program run by Leah that teaches simple healthful food preparation for our community. We've also suspended the CalFish Application Assistance Program that Abby talked about to link seniors and people with disabilities especially across language barriers with the EBT program. We have suspended our nutrition education outreach program which as I said Steve helped us launch in 2012. That includes a pretty amazing partnership we had with the San Francisco Department of Public Health HIV program to get into local clinics to really encourage people to use fruits and vegetables as medicine to address their conditions and make sure that they have the money they need to do that. And then we've also suspended all market tours including with partners like Samuel Merritt Nursing Program. They help programs like that help low income residents become more familiar with the market and practice helping shop healthy shopping habits and it's important to us to sort of demystify farmers markets. Sometimes people can think farmers markets are only accessible to people with higher incomes. As you know it's a very white dominated industry. We really want to get people to come to the market meet the farmers get to know us as a team and see that we're just part of your community. You're a part of this market and these tours really help us connect people in that way. So I also want to say unfortunately that our new Friday farmers market was a casualty of the pandemic. We started that market in 2019 to bring additional food access to the neighborhood as we said there's no supermarket here so it's important to bring this fresh food in as many days as we can. And then new market day grew rapidly we're really proud to say that just in the first year we grew to have the third highest EBT sales of all 30 farmers markets in San Francisco behind only our Wednesday and Sunday market which considering those markets are 40 years old. We're doing pretty well although it's incredibly hard to start and incubate a new market now and it was not going to become a Wednesday and Sunday market anytime soon. But we lost over a hundred thousand dollars in city sponsorships for that market and we're just unable to keep it open due to the pandemic and have now closed that we think we're nearly confident it's permanently closed. I also just wanted to address here very quickly that we're moving into a changing climate. Well we're in the middle of watching the climate change around us. California grows more than 400 different crops. Two-thirds of the nation's fruits and nuts are produced in California along with more than a third of the country's vegetables. But over the past decade our farmers and all farmers in California have begun to notice the impact of climate change. Less winter chill, crops blooming earlier, more heat waves, record temperatures, years of drought. Scientists say that agriculture will face much bigger and more severe challenges in the coming decades and there's this pretty amazing study in 2018 that examined 89 research papers and reports on climate change and they gave us some indication of what we're looking at in the future. Unfortunately we have a lot of farmers coming from the Central Valley and more than 50% of the Central Valley is protected to be no longer suitable for growing crops like apricots, peaches, plums and walnuts sometime around the middle of the century and that's not that far away and that's projected to grow to 90% or more by the end of the century. Crop yields are expected to fall for crops like almonds, table grapes and cherries. Summer heat waves are likely to take a toll on corn, rice, tomatoes, sunflower crops. Crops may also be plagued by pests, disease, weeds and rising and average rises in average temperatures, decreased snowpack and changes in precipitation patterns will affect how these crops are grown. So not only are we facing challenges now we have to be prepared to really get farmers through a lot of challenges in the future which is a problem for California but as I said California grows so much of the food for our country so it's a problem for the whole country. So with the difficult winter ahead it's even more important for Heart of the City farmers market and our teams really continue our efforts to increase food access in order to support small farmers give them the revenue they need to really get through this challenging time. Our primary focus now is strengthening our purchasing programs like MarketMatch because these purchasing programs really supplement sales for farmers and then strengthens them with the money that they need to continue into the future. If you want to give some good news we got notification a couple of weeks ago that we got a technology and innovation grant from the Intuition Incentive Hub which is a project with the Fair Food Network and we're going to be able to build program capacity over the next six months to meet the rising demand for this food relief and the grant has expanded two part-time tent support workers to full-time. We're really excited because it's going to help us bring Chinese language skills, Chinese language support to the back end of our programs so that we can become even more efficient and we're going to have a lot of new technology enhancements and try out some new things that keep us moving even faster. As Abby said we really want to address the wait time to access our programs now and we have a lot of projects in the works for that. I just want to say that we remain ever grateful to our customers and community partners because that's what sustained this market for 40 years and so we know that with all these people behind us that we are going to preserve this oasis of fresh food and community in the heart of the city. I want to take some time just to thank our friends. I really wanted to get through so that we had time to do this. Thank you to our funders who have supported Market Match through the pandemic. I just thank you so much. The Stepskey Foundation stepped up and in the first three months of the pandemic where we didn't even know if we were going to be able to keep the market open. They asked us what we needed and came forward with the revenue that we needed to supplement what we had lost for the first three months to stay stable and to keep all of our staff team paid. They're just such a good friend to us. The San Francisco Public Health Foundation as I said through their Healthy Food Purchasing Grant came forward with some additional pandemic really funding for us. That was critical to keep us open. We have not closed since the pandemic. We stayed open all the way through. Unfortunately our Friday Farmers Market was the only casualty that we had. Kaiser Permanente really surprised us and came through with their annual sponsorship this year. Oh my gosh we're so grateful to them. They've been supporting our Market Match program since 2015 and also by right family of businesses. We just want to say thank you to them as well. We know that they are facing their own struggles over there but they came through with annual sponsorship this year and actually increased it above last year. So thank you guys. And then I also want to say the Violet World Foundation Fair Food Network friends of the San Francisco Public Library which is such a lovely surprise. Matter of Trust and USDA's Gastro-Macro Incentive Foundation. Thank you all. And then also we want to thank this is very new for us but Matter of Trust came forward and is acting as our fiscal intermediary to accept individual donations. It's individual giving program. It's the first time Heart of the City has tried to do this. And so far we've raised $1,335 from the following customers and friends of the market. Oh my gosh you guys thank you. It's very each time when something comes in we all cheer. You know we're very grateful to you all and it's a confirmation that the community loves us. And then finally I hope Amy's still on here. An extra special thank you to a new neighbor who just moved into the neighborhood Amy Smith. She came forward and asked how can she help us get through the pandemic and I said well we're going to do this presentation. And she took a camera around with her amazing camera skills. You guys have seen her photos throughout this presentation but also she interviewed our farmers to ask them how the pandemic was affecting them. And that's how we got these amazing quotes to get into the pandemic. Thank you Amy. And so we have very little time but we have about five minutes to take some questions if there are any questions in the comments. But I did want to say here you can go to our website. This presentation is on our website now. You can go and click through the slides if you want to go a little bit slower and digest the information. You can also send me Steve and Abby questions at info at hotcfarmorsmarket.org. We're small staff teams. We're very responsive. It just comes right to us. And then our phone number is down there too. Our information line phone number you can leave us a message. So thank you everybody. Thank you friends community and thank you Leah and your team at San Francisco Public or San Francisco Public Library for giving us this platform to talk to everyone today. You're welcome. It's our pleasure and honor to have you. So somebody was asking how does the public donate and Abby posted the link on your website that maybe you want to just say that out loud. Sure. Our website is hotcfarmorsmarket.org and you'll see a donation button in the main menu. And that has a little bit more information about what your donation will go to support and a link there to donate online. So are there any more questions? I see that Anisa has posted that this program is available now on YouTube and she posted the link in case you want to go there as well to review it. All right. Well if there are no more questions or if you let's see if you want to raise your hand with a question you're welcome to do that. We've got just a couple more minutes for the Heart and City Farmers Market team to answer your questions. Let's just say thank you. That was really great and very sad too at the same time and I hope we all pull through this in another 40 years for your Farmers Market. 40 plus 40. And yes these people I've seen for decades the same amount of time I've been here the same people of the Farmers Market have been here. So thank you so much for sharing this and the information behind the scenes is always just so so good. Thank you Casey. Okay there's a question from Sheila Deavitt in the comments it says my neighbor market is run by Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association. I did not realize that this was a separate organization. Can you talk about the different farmers markets in the city? Is the heart of the city market the only nonprofit one? Well we're not the only nonprofit but we're the only independent farmer operated nonprofit. We're completely separate from all other farmers markets. Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association is a umbrella organization that runs multiple farmers markets scattered throughout multiple counties including San Francisco. And so when you go to a farmers market there the the farmers market that you're at is just one of a larger group of farmers markets and Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association they they do nutrition education outreach and other food access programs like we do through a separate everyone's C3 organization fresh approach I believe. Yes. Yeah so are they still separate? I can't remember if PCF? I believe it's C5 right? C5. But it's a little different so we're not an association of markets we want to be a little bit more grassroots and direct and have the farmers directly involved in the governing operations. There's also COASA that runs the Fairy Plaza Farmers Market the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture that also is a 501C3 nonprofit that does a lot of nutrition education outreach work and sustainability work but then also runs the farmers market as one of their projects of that nonprofit. Unlike us where our nonprofit and our organization is the farmers market itself the farmers market is our main that's what we grew out of and that's what we continue to be wrapped around. Alamany Farmers Market used to be an independent market it's the oldest farmers market in San Francisco started in 1940 some of our farmers say it was just people selling off the back of the truck at first and then the regulations got involved which is really cool but the city took it over from the independent organization that was running and it's now run by the San Francisco real estate department. They do do some food justice work but I think it's not as much of a priority over there as it is for an organization like ours that is grassroots and built from the mission that really sustains us and then there's I believe California Farmers Market Association as well that's another farmers market association a larger umbrella organization that then runs the smaller farmers markets underneath it but there are 30 farmers markets in San Francisco we are not affiliated with any of them that's why we say we're an independent farmers market but we like that that keeps us gives us the flexibility to really respond to what's on the ground and keep our operating costs as low as possible we don't have a lot of overhead and a lot of office workers above that that the funding goes to and that's why if you were to look at our stall fees per hour that we're open we're much much lower than other farmers markets and able to keep this flexible attendance policy it's still challenging for us because we're in downtown San Francisco and the Civic Center neighborhood is just we're not sure how much longer we're going to be able to keep our office we're trying to hold on to it for as long as we can but you know so far so good our our ability to be resilient and flexible has been an asset to us through issue through pandemics you know we're we're not we're still strong and you know we're going to make it through we're going to look a little bit different but we're going to be here so that the farmers can rely on us Sheila says this has been really informative thank you well thank you for being here okay we're two minutes over gosh thank you everybody um it's very it's very uh nice to connect with you hopefully in the future we can meet by some person thank you again all of you you did such a great job and we love the market and thanks for all your fantastic work thank you all right i'm going to end the meeting now thanks again have a great weekend