In the summer and fall months, Seattlelites flock to their neighborhood farmers markets and, conscious of it or not, get the opportunity to be face to face with the people who grow their food. Two markets in the greater south Seattle region — the Delridge and SeaTac markets — value this sort of interaction in a way the dozens of other weekly markets scattered across Seattle and King County might not.
Organized by the non-profit African Community Housing & Development (ACHD), the Delridge and SeaTac markets are BIPOC-priority markets, working to foster community and celebrate the county’s diverse and often underrepresented cultures in neighborhoods with lower access to fresh food.
ACHD purposefully located both its markets in neighborhoods the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has listed as “low-income and low-access” (LILA) areas, more commonly known as food deserts. In an LILA area, residents’ access to quality, affordable and nutritious foods is limited due to geographic distance from the nearest grocery store. A substantial body of research has shown that there is less access to supermarkets in lower income and predominantly BIPOC communities than in more affluent areas. To reflect this disparity and its link to systemic racism, many food justice advocates have turned to using the term “food apartheid zones.”
The USDA’s Food Access Research Atlas, last updated in 2019, maps all the U.S. census tracts that are classified as LILA areas. In King County, these are clustered mainly in the southwest, including in Auburn, Enumclaw, Federal Way, Issaquah, Kent, Renton and SeaTac. In Seattle, these zones include Delridge and its southern neighbor Highland Park.
ACHD’s markets aim to address this lack of accessibility by providing affordable and culturally relevant foods to community members while uplifting BIPOC farmers and businesses. To do this, ACHD does not charge booth fees or take a share of the sellers’ profits; these otherwise standard practices can be barriers to entry for small businesses. The organization also has a buy-back program through which it purchases any unsold produce from vendors to distribute for free at the following market. This initiative works to provide security to the farmers and offers one free bag per family while supplies last.
In a further effort to make goods accessible, the markets not only accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the associated Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, but they also participate in Seattle’s Fresh Bucks program which provides $40 per month for eligible Seattleites to buy produce. According to ACHD communications manager Lauren Rosenthal, the Delridge market can match any amount from a SNAP card with market bucks. At SeaTac, the market can match up to $50.
In July of this year, President Donald Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” into law which changed the eligibility requirements to receive SNAP benefits, including increasing work requirements for people experiencing homelessness, veterans and youth who aged out of foster care. Other provisions include changing the eligibility for some non-citizens and reducing federal support for administrative costs for the program.
A USDA survey found that in April of this year, 906,414 Washingtonians were enrolled in SNAP. According to a statement from Governor Bob Ferguson’s office, the new work restrictions could impact about 130,000 people in the state and changes in the funding for administrative costs may require Washington state to allocate up to $300 million starting in 2027.
The Delridge farmers market launched in 2021 and, following its success, ACHD opened the SeaTac market in 2024. Now in its second year, the SeaTac market has gone from a monthly to a weekly affair and hosts many of the same vendors as Delridge. This season, the Delridge market operates each Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., and the SeaTac market is on Wednesdays from 3 to 7 p.m. through the end of October.
“We’re really trying to create a market that pulls [community members] and allows them to feel held and nourished,” said ACHD Farmers Market Manager Indra Budiman. “We’re trying to bring a sense of community and vibrancy. There’s no downtown core [in SeaTac], so we’re trying to create something there that allows people to interact with their neighbors.”
Being a BIPOC-priority market means that the vendors hail from all over the world, growing and selling a diverse array of produce and foods. Patrons can expect to find anything from Senegambian cuisine cooked by Afella Jollof Catering to African-Caribbean produce and specialty products courtesy of YES MA! Backyard Farm. Budiman explained that this variety is central to the community-building work the markets aim to do.
“We [want] to bring a market that reflects the cultures that are already there. And we’re trying to bring food access offerings that meet the needs of the people that are living there, in ways that other farmers markets in the Seattle area are not intentional in,” Budiman said. “That’s why we work with farmers that grow culturally-relevant produce, because it allows the people in the areas that we’re serving to come to the market and see bitter melon, chayote—things from their home countries, that they are cooking at home every day, that they can’t find at Safeway or Fred Meyer.”
Nhia Moua, owner of Heu’s Blooms and Greens, began farming in 2019 when she acquired a quarter acre of land in Kent. Now operating on 3.5 acres, Moua told Real Change she sells her flowers and vegetables exclusively at the ACHD markets. She said that she stays for the atmosphere the organizers have created, as they “make [the vendors] feel important.” Moua added that organizers regularly share information on available grants, even helping vendors with the application process. In addition, Moua noted that volunteers help vendors set up and break down their booths, and ACHD often provides breakfasts for the sellers.
“A lot of times early in the morning, we’re racing to do what we need to do to get there, and from there, [the market is] full-on work,” Moua said. “So it’s really nice just to know that we’re also being taken care of [just] as the market’s also taking care of the customers and the community.”
To Moua and other vendors, the ACHD markets are a sweet spot for truly small businesses, where they can not solely make ends meet but thrive. For the organizers, that’s the point.
“The market serves as a place for small businesses and farms to incubate and establish themselves as successful small businesses,” Rosenthal told Real Change. “It’s kind of like a springboard.”
Danitra Porter, founder and owner of Queen Sugar Baking Company, says the way ACHD creates space for burgeoning businesses, plus the sense of safety for BIPOC vendors, keeps her coming back.
Porter decided to transform her love of baking into a business during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After investing in initial inputs, receiving licensing and permitting, and researching how to get her business off the ground, she started selling at “literally every market that would let [her] in.” As a Black small-business owner, Porter told Real Change, she encountered racism at many other markets in the county. Before she started selling at ACHD’s Delridge market, she had even considered quitting.
“I had done so many markets, but the problem I was finding as the years were going by was that people weren’t willing to support Black people or BIPOC people in those market spaces,” Porter said. “Or they were coming into the space and just like, completely ignoring us.”
In 2023, Porter began selling at the Delridge market; she joined SeaTac in its inaugural year. Now, she exclusively sells at Black or BIPOC markets, citing a greater feeling of safety and understanding. It’s not just safety but also the shared sense of community she feels. She explained that despite differences in first languages, backgrounds or ages, vendors have demonstrated a shared spirit of generosity to one another, often trading goods or otherwise helping each other.
ACHD isn’t the only organization striving to provide all-around care and food justice to its community. In Rainier Beach, the Rainier Beach Action Coalition (RBAC) has been weaving food justice into a broader plan to invigorate the neighborhood for decades. The organization — pronounced like “our back” because, as the organization’s co-founder Gregory Davis put it, “RBAC has your back” — has made food justice one of the four pillars associated with its Rainier Beach Neighborhood Plan. The plan also centers on community development, safety and education.
Davis explained that RBAC’s emphasis on creating sovereign local food networks arose when Rainier Beach’s main grocery store shuttered its doors.
“That’s what created a real keen awareness that, ‘Wow, as a neighborhood, we are not in control of our food source. What are we going to do to start doing that?’” Davis said. “We needed to inject in our community complementary, nutrient-dense resources for our neighborhood, and that’s where food sovereignty comes in,” he said. “We were needing not to be at the whims of the market, but really capable in and of ourselves to provide our residents with healthy, nutrient-dense produce.”
In 2010, community groups organized to turn a former Seattle Parks and Recreation horticulture site into the 11-acre Rainier Beach Urban Farm and Wetlands, which hosts community farming, educational programs and food distribution. RBAC’s hub — called the Food Innovation Center (FIC) — now sits across the street from the Rainier Beach Link light rail stop. The organization holds a weekly farm stand there where neighborhood residents can receive free food courtesy of RBAC and its farming partners, which largely include small-scale BIPOC cultivators.
The food stand — which runs from 10 a.m. to noon. each Saturday from June through October — has provided free food to 150 to 200 people every week this season.
The FIC spearheads a host of other resources, including a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, a demonstration kitchen and a cold storage facility to aggregate local farmers’ goods, as well as technical assistance to the farmers. RBAC also emphasizes youth involvement in these projects, with opportunities for fellowships and volunteering available. For Davis, there are many critical reasons to engage the neighborhood’s young residents in RBAC’s work, but one is to foster a sense of pride that can combat displacement.
“The Food Innovation Center allows [youth] an opportunity to work in the neighborhood that they grew up in, and allows them to stay here and earn wages here that they can take to their household, which in turn, allows them to stay in place,” Davis explained.
Young RBAC volunteers and employees often are dispatched to help partner farmers tend to their produce, he said. In this way, Davis says RBAC can further champion the cultivators, reinforcing the goal of a local food network that can sustain itself.
“An important aspect of it is not just patronizing them to buy their produce, but to support them in their well-being,” he said.
Davis called this practice of reciprocity a “cultural imperative,” saying, “in our cultures, [which] tend to be Black and brown folks, an inherent value that we have is collective versus individualistic and … valuing age, no matter how young or old.”
Moving forward, RBAC has its sights set on expanding the FIC into a Food Innovation District, which would include expanding the current FIC’s capital and further developing the linkages between different sectors of the local food system, such as providing local restaurants and schools with locally grown produce and spurring economic development and entrepreneurship in the neighborhood.
“We’re pushing this Food Innovation District notion here … as a way for our neighborhood to create jobs, be healthier and to come together,” Davis said.
Read more of the Oct. 8-14, 2025 issue.