A Letter from GOFM’s Executive Director & Board of Directors

Galveston’s Own Farmers Market has sought to be a community hub since our inception in 2012. A connector of people to food and to one another. Our business is food access and farming, making, and educating.

Our mission is to build and sustain a local food community through a vibrant, producers-only marketplace, improved food access, and educational programming.

As an organization firmly rooted in the love of people and community, we stand in firm, outraged opposition to the racism, discrimination and violence that has taken the lives of so many Black people across our country. Until Black Lives Matter, all lives do not matter. 

Our own industry is laden with injustice, a reality we know well but are facing now with a new solemnity informed by the acknowledgment that silence is no option if we truly seek to serve our community. Systemic racism is inextricable from the woes of food insecurity, health disparities, and the erasure of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC)-led agriculture.

For example, of the country’s 3.4 million total farmers, only 1.3%, or 45,508, are Black. In Texas, 1 in 7 people are struggling with hunger - and for children, it’s 1 in 5. The prevalence of food insecurity is more than two times greater for Black or Latinx-headed households than white households.

Access and inequity are inseparable from our country’s history of racism. They are truths we witness across every one of our programs, in a myriad of ways. So much of the programming that we’ve created since our early days as a pop-up market in a sun-bleached parking lot stems from observing these inequities, and yet there’s still so much more to do. 

In keeping with our core values of diversity, integrity and equity, we will continue to invest resources and time into researching, reflecting and putting in the work to re-imagine how GOFM can operate better and build our organizational culture to be as truly inclusive and equitable as possible.

GOFM is compelled to condemn injustice and recognize our imperative to embed antiracism in our roles as an employer, marketplace, education source, community hub & beyond. 

My pledge to you as Executive Director is to do even more to cultivate a workplace that prioritizes equity, diversity and shared openness to all, and listen to those who wish to help us find our way.

At their best, farmers markets represent their communities. Our gardens, our classes, our markets and all our events--they bloom from our belief that food is a common human denominator. GOFM revolves around health, the building of relationships and supporting fellow human beings. We affirm our embrace of all members of our community and we vow to reflect & innovate within our organization to find new ways to support BIPOC through long-term sustained efforts.

This organization is in society, not apart from it, and thus we must consider the power structures, habits, implicit biases and covert signals that influence how we do business--within our team at GOFM and as GOFM with the public. 

We sincerely hope to have the energy of our community aiding us in our quest to both amplify the food, work and ideas of Black and Brown folks while advancing food and racial, social and environmental justice through equitable access to better health and food.

We are eager to learn, to work and to grow.

Steven J. Baines,

GOFM Board President 

Casey McAuliffe,

GOFM Executive Director

Here are some of the resources we invite you to visit that we’re using at GOFM:

*data from United States Department of Agriculture (2019) and  Feeding America