January Partner Highlight: A Red Circle
Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us here at the Midwest EJ Network!
To read more about the region-wide work of our partners, check out our January newsletter. This month’s partner highlight features A Red Circle—a powerhouse nonprofit in St. Louis County, Missouri building community wellness and racial equity in the North County through food justice and ecosystem restoration work.
The staff members of A Red Circle, one of our partner organizations seeking to transform systemic disinvestment in North County through food justice.
A Red Circle was founded in 2017 by Executive Director Erica Williams to address racial justice and inequality in North County–the northern half of St. Louis County. Violence, redlining, and biased policies and zoning ordinances have been part of the historic and ongoing racism that impacts the North County. Serving a high concentration of low-income, low-access, predominantly Black communities, A Red Circle seeks to transform the results of systemic disinvestment in the county’s residents through food justice and food ecosystem restoration work.
Many residents live with the environmental impacts of this systemic disinvestment each day– experiencing the adverse health consequences of now-abandoned manufacturing facilities, a landfill, and a creek contaminated by nuclear waste. About half of North County is a U.S. HUD Promise Zone, marking an intersectionality of race, poverty, challenged school systems, poor health, and lack of food access.
A Red Circle began its work of restoring community wellness and food access by converting three trash-filled vacant lots into the North County Agricultural Education Center (NCAEC) in 2019. The Center is a landscape of community abundance in an area that has all too often been miscategorized by scarcity. It is home to growing and educational spaces, fruit trees, vegetable gardens, rain barrels, solar panels, a hoop house, a refrigerated storage unit, an apiary, and a flock of chickens. Using environmental best management practices (BMPs) to train residents and farmers, the North County Agricultural Education Center now reaches more than 1,000 people annually through its fresh healthy food and through education efforts.
In the wake of COVID’s food chain supply interruptions in 2021, A Red Circle focused their efforts on addressing the need for a community grocery store–a vision that grew and solidified with two years of community input. In 2023, A Red Circle purchased a former shopping center to transform into the North County Community Nexus, which will provide a stable nerve center of programs and services to improve North county health and well-being. The North County Community Nexus will include a grocery Store and bistro along with farming support, educational space, and local environmental remediation through rain gardens.
A Red Circle is building better futures for North County communities from the ground up, creating healing and wellness that is rooted in a system of reinvestment.