More Access to Healthy Food
Over the last few years, Carvd N Stone has reported on the lack of access to fresh food and grocery stores in Milwaukee while providing resources and solutions. We’re back again with another resource that’s coming to the city to fight against the food desert crisis. On July 15, 2026, nonprofit Kinship MKE broke ground on its 28,000-square-foot Kinship Community Food Center.
The Kinship Community Food Center is an extension of Kinship and will be located at Holton and Locust.
Kinship (formerly the Riverwest Food Pantry) fights hunger, poverty, and isolation through serving five zip codes across the City of Milwaukee. It provides free fresh produce, a working urban farm, workforce job training, and a sit-down café on Martin Luther King Drive located at Thrive On King.
After 47 years operating from a subleased basement, the new building will roughly double food market access over five years and add space for additional crisis resources, a production kitchen to expand workforce training capacity, a greenhouse, a chapel, and a courtyard.
President and CEO Vincent Noth said Kinship is “healthy food forward” first.
“A tenth of all of our costs in America go to diabetes-related care because a lot of the food we’re eating is getting us sick. At Kinship, we want food to be delicious, but we’re also always playing with, okay, everybody loves barbecue sauce, but there are a lot of different ways to make barbecue sauce delicious and healthier, right? So that’s why we always have chefs in our space, and we’re always collaborating around food,” said Noth.
More than A Community Food Center
In 2025, Noth said Kinship gave away half a million pounds of produce and grew 20,000 pounds of fresh produce at its urban farm in Glendale, Wisconsin.
The food grown from the urban farm is used for Kinship’s Fresh Food Market, which provides community members with a choice of fresh produce, non-perishables, dairy, and whole grains.
According to a Kinship report, the Fresh Food Market serves over 80% of children, the elderly, the disabled, or the underemployed. The report also stated that 79% of households Kinship serves don’t have sufficient access to healthy fresh produce because of proximity to grocery stores or lack of income. And 72% of the households it serves have someone in their home with type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure.
Noth said the food market is the starting point that brings people in, but they stay for the community and resources.
“They come for the great food, and they discover the transformational community,” Noth said.
Noth stated that even if the organization doesn’t directly offer certain services, they will reach out to its 80-plus community partners to ensure the community members have what they need. For example, he said a community member was going through cancer treatment and reached out about a wig, so Kinship utilized its resources to make it happen.
“We believe that food is that kind of equalizer. It’s like a language that we all speak, and all of a sudden now we’re speaking the same language, and we can kind of begin to trust each other and walk together,” Noth said.
Kinship is continuing its fundraising efforts to bring the community food center to life. $2.5 million is left of its $18 million fundraising goal.
For more information on Kinship, click here.
Nyesha Stone founded Carvd N Stone in 2017 to cover positive news while attending the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Stone has a B.A. in Journalism. She has raised over $30,000 to award grants and scholarships. She has also been featured in ESSENCE and worked with the American Black Film Festival.
- Nyesha Stone
