Pomona Community Farmer Alliance (PCFA)
The Pomona Community Farmer Alliance (PCFA) is a farmers market based cooperative initiative that helps sustainable and regenerative farmers bring high-quality, organic produce to underserved community members in Pomona.
Through establishing a safe, welcoming, engaging weekly gathering space grounded in principles of food and environmental justice, the PCFA empowers community members to share knowledge, build relationships, and make meaningful contributions to the health of our local community.
In recent years, as surrounding communities of privilege established new markets, our local market--which serves many food insecure & low income residents--dwindled down to just 5 conventional farmstands.
In recognition that market mechanisms simply don’t work to bring high quality foods to communities like ours, the PCFA set out to revitalize our market and establish a farmers market model which does serve low-income communities.
Our market initiative currently provides access to the following resources:
Fresh locally grown, chemical free fruits and vegetables (Pomona Food Access Booth)
Organic Fruits & Avocados (Limelight Groves)
Pasture Raised Organic Meat (Autonomy Farms)
Cold Pressed Olive Oil, whole olives, and traditionally aged vinegars (Nuvo)
Local, raw honey (Harris Family Apiaries)
Heirloom Grains (Fat Uncle Farms and Tehachapi Grain Project)
Seeds (Pomona Seed Lending Library)
Community food scrap drop off (Food Cycle Collective)
PCFA Goals:
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Make high-quality, nutrient-dense, toxin-free food regularly accessible and affordable in our local community
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Support regenerative land management practices, and farmers who are growing produce with attention to environmental and human health outcomes
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Create a space for knowledge sharing that emphasizes health, well-being, nutrition, and food preparation, and uplifts the value of tradition and culture
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Develop a farmers market culture that welcomes diversity, holds space for marginalized individuals and communities, and actively dismantles systemic oppression
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Cultivate awareness of intersecting social, food, and environmental justice issues to minimize and mitigate negative impacts of wasteful, destructive and oppressive systems, and to empower community transformation
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Provide local opportunities for positive engagement with the community through service and volunteering
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Build community around healthy interaction in a reliable, safe community space
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Practice and demonstrate prosocial and humanistic values that promote connection and allow our community to thrive
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Promote an organizational culture of collaborative decision-making rooted in active listening, empathy, and inclusion
Food With Love / Comida Con Cariño
After inviting many of our local community farmers to attend a Spanish language offering of our traditional foods based nutrition course, we realized that although many of the farmers were passionate about growing high quality foods, they actually struggled to access all of the ingredients necessary to prepare this quality of food for themselves and their families. HIgh quality meat was especially inaccessible to our local vegetable farmers. Similarly, we heard from many of the community members making immense contributions to the well-being of others, that they had very little time, money, and access to the quality of food that they knew would keep them healthy. In recognition of these barriers to accessing ready-to-eat foods for individuals making disproportionate contributions to their communities, we proposed to support these community contributors with lovingly prepared meals made from the foods sourced through our local farming networks. We pitched the idea to the LA Food Equity Fund and as a component of a CDFA Urban Agriculture subaward made through the IERCD and both organizations offered seed funding for the program--Food with Love--that launched in May of 2025.
Traditional Foods Based Nutrition
Our traditional based nutrition course offers 18 hours of experiential and lecture based learning elevating the wisdom of traditional food cultivation and preparation methods from all over the world and breaking down the science (in an accessible way) about why traditional foods from virtually every culture worldwide maintain robust health. Participants are supported in understanding how commercialization of the food system has eroded the quality of cultural foods available for sale and reconnected to high quality foods accessible in our local food shed at affordable prices due to the PCFA network. Each cohort shares 6 meals together prepared according to the methods discussed in the course and from ingredients sourced through the Pomona Community Market initiative. Many nutrition courses have an impact rate of 0%, but we have seen that about 25% of participants make significant and lasting changes in their diet and health as a result of taking our course. Additionally, several promotoras have shared with us that our course is the only course they have ever attended that they would feel comfortable to share with their communities--because they could understand the information and agree with the recommendations of the course. Over the past 8 years, we have offered our traditional foods based nutrition course 10 times and have plans to offer the course 3 additional times in 2025.
Pomona Community Market
The Pomona Community Market is one of our oldest initiatives beginning in 2018 and experiencing many changes of format due to regulatory climates and spaces available for our creative food access and community building work. From 2018-2020, the Pomona community market hosted 16 booths at the Pomona Certified Farmers Market, energizing the space with free coffee, seating areas, food demos, a free lending library, and a wide variety of chemical free and organic produce including fruits, vegetables, herbs, olive oil, vinegar, mushrooms, and pasture raised meat. In March 2020, amid covid lock down regulations all community booths were shut down and only farm booths remained. We launched a food access booth at the farmers market where people could take all the fresh veggies they liked without any set price, serving over 250 people on a weekly basis. This program thrived for several years under the supervision of a Pomona-based agricultural inspector, who had supported a regulatory pathway for the food access booth through his interpretation of the regulatory code. However, after his untimely death, the program was shut down by his successor. In 2023-2024, we relaunched the community market as the Pomona Community Health Hub, open 30 hours per week, at a community farm we were stewarding in South Pomona. Late in 2024, we were priced out of the garden and moved the health hub to a small community center in the downtown area, open as a pop up on Saturdays and in early 2025 we had to move again and now run a pop up directly in front of our office location, which is in a residential neighborhood. We’ve teamed up with our neighbors and committed volunteers to revitalize the community feeling of our original community market, donation based coffee, a farm-to-table breakfast and burgers pop up (with all locally grown ingredients sourced through our network) and a wide variety ofchemical free, organic produce all offered to the community at accessible, wholesale prices.
Food Security Deliveries
Beginning in March 2020, a number of extremely vulnerable community members--mostly elders with health challenges or the inability to access safety net services--reached out to us to request food security deliveries. We started with 5 weekly bags that included chemical free fruits, vegetables, beans and grains, and pasture-raised meat, all sourced through our PCFA initiative. We continued this program serving these individuals on a weekly basis for several years, until all participants had moved out of the area or passed away. In August of 2020, we also received a request to support food security in the community, at this time we onboarded 10 families into the food security program, delivering over 500 servings of fruits, vegetables, and herbs sourced weekly from our local farming initiatives to approximately 50 people served by the program. In 2022, Sustainable Together joined us as a partner, helping to make the weekly deliveries on our behalf. In 2024, the City of Pomona Mayor’s Community Well-Being grant supported the costs of the program; in 2024 & 2025, the LA Food Equity Fund supported the costs of the program, and in 2025 & 2026, the Golden State Environmental Justice Alliance supported the program costs.