CONWAY — The Locals in downtown Conway, a venue to sell homemade goods and area-farmers’ food, was scheduled to close Tuesday, but there’s a “silver lining” in the situation, said The Locals’ director, Sandra Leyva.
Leyva said exciting developments are in the works, even though the storefront is closed on Van Ronkle Street.
“Part of the resolution for The Locals is we got a [U.S. Department of Agriculture] grant to do a local food hub, so basically, to build some infrastructure to move higher volumes of food from local farmers,” she said. The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Services Grant is “a little over $90,000,” she said. “It’s a two-year grant; you request it as you go.”
The name of the grant proposal was The Locals Food Hub — Small Town, Big Potential.
“We move forward from having farmers having sales to individual people, and we want to start working with restaurants and bigger institutions to get more local food in Conway,” Leyva said.
She said The Locals will purchase a refrigerated trailer that can move to various locations, and it will serve as a drop-off spot for farmers. Then the trailer will be used to take fresh produce to restaurants and institutional partners.
“We have a couple of people lined up; they actually wrote us letters of support for the grant,” she said. Two initial participants will be ZaZa Fine Salad and Wood Oven Pizza and King’s Live Music, both in Conway. “We are looking to partner with more people, whoever’s interested,” Leyva said.
“We are going to outfit pedal-powered carts that will be able to move from one place to another, and we’re going to invite some of the producers who worked with us at The Locals,” she said. Leyva said the “pop-up” markets will utilize the carts and will include music, crafts, arts, fresh produce, prepared food from producers and more.
She said “cottage goods” don’t have to come from a commercial kitchen, and those include fresh, uncut fruits and vegetables, baked goods or a certain kind of candy.
“We’ll mostly be working with fresh produce, fresh eggs,” she said.
“The thing is, in our space on Van Ronkle, even though it’s downtown, it doesn’t really get as much traffic as Oak Street. It took people a long time to find us. We’re excited to be at different places downtown,” or throughout the city, she said.
The pop-up markets will begin in spring and summer 2015, she said.
Beth Norwood, The Locals program director, said the locations will be announced on the website www.thelocals.be., as well as in a press release.
Norwood was at The Locals on Tuesday, its final day in downtown.
“Of course, we were sad, but I think, thankfully, we’ve moved past most of those feelings and gotten to where we’re excited about the things we’re going to do next year and the projects we’ve got coming,” Norwood said.
The Locals is a program of la Lucha Space, a nonprofit organization that Leyva and her husband, Shawn Goicoechea, co-founded. It’s described on the Facebook page as “a community space that cultivates creativity and collaboration,” and it was in their home for a while. The Locals storefront, which opened in November 2013, was also a place to meet and hold events, or just hang out and drink coffee.
Leyva said the mission will continue.
“I would like to keep being involved in supporting and promoting cultural and art events because even though we might not be hosting them at The Locals, we still think it’s very important for a community, so we might appear with our coffee cart at some things, and we might promote ArtsFest and things like that,” she said.
That brings Leyva to her New Year’s resolution.
“The resolution is to keep buying the local food and support local producers because we still believe the work is important to keep Conway vibrant and to keep helping people support each other, investing and building community infrastructure,” she said.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.