This past Saturday, the Durham Farmers’ Market in Durham, NC, began accepting SNAP benefits using EBT as a form of payment. Read more about it here. RAFI is excited to serve as the fiscal sponsor of the market’s Double Bucks program, which will allow SNAP customers to receive double the amount of money they spend on tokens for purchases. This means that for each dollar a customer spends at the market, they will receive an additional dollar up to $10 per visit to spend at the Durham Farmers’ Market. In order to launch the program, RAFI and the Durham Farmers’ Market are accepting donations in an online fundraising campaign.
“Creating EBT access at farmers markets is exactly the kind of win-win relationship RAFI is thrilled to support,” says RAFI’s Come to the Table Director Francesca Hyatt. “It’s good for famers to have a whole new group of customers coming to market, and it is great for food-insecure families to have the option to buy fresh, local food. Sponsoring double bucks is just one aspect of a broader RAFI initiative in the works to increase access at farmers markets throughout the state, and we’re honored to work alongside the Durham Farmers Market.”
“I think it’s completely awesome,” says Durham Farmers’ Market vendor and board president George O’Neal of Lil Farm. “It gives a whole different demographic of people access to the farmers market. In this country, we subsidize crappy food and we make it hard for people to get real food, we create food deserts, we make vegetables in their raw form more expensive than a subsidized hamburger from McDonalds. That’s just absurd, because food is medicine, food is health, and food is a birthright.”
To donate and support the Double Bucks program at Durham Farmers’ Market, visit: www.rafiusa.org/donate/dfm