Rachel Jacobson

  The Good Market One in five people living in Los Angeles don’t know where their next meal will come from, equating to two million people living with food insecurity. With Los Angeles being home of the hungry, I saw an opportunity to combat the endless cycle of food insecurity and homelessness. I founded The Good Market two years ago after working at Safe Place for Youth—a resource facility for people experiencing homelessness in LA—and seeing how impossible it is to exit the streets.   Mission The Good Market’s mission is to provide organic, healthy groceries at a low cost to food insecure people and offer employment opportunities for people experiencing homelessness, all while reducing produce waste.   The Good Market is a supermarket that offers healthy, organic foods at low prices in primarily food desert areas. The supermarkets team up with local farms and acquire any produce or food products that aren’t accepted at traditional grocery ...

Food insecurity is an on-going issue in the United States and throughout the world. Food is one of the three basic needs for survival, yet so many people don’t know where their next meal will come from. We all need food, but we don’t all have access to food. Not only is it challenging to find food, but there are minimal healthy and affordable options. With an increase in food deserts, there is an evident lack of affordable healthy options. Organic and nutritious food should not be reserved only for people who can pay a premium; it should be accessible to everyone.   There is a stigma against homelessness that people are lazy, addictive, or incompetent, but often it is a case of people without luck or opportunities. I see this stigma almost every day in the way we treat homelessness in society. One of the reasons why it is so hard for people to exit the streets when experiencing homelessness is because it is difficult to find a job. If you don’t have prior work experience or don’t h...