The final puzzle piece: Community Welcome Center

The progress we’ve seen at Columbia’s Agriculture Park since construction began in 2019 has been significant. We’ve created a permanent year-round home for Columbia Farmers Market, installed beautiful garden demonstrations, there is a classroom, playground, barn, and greenhouse too! We’re not done building this park yet. Gardening demonstrations continue to be added, and construction on Phase 2 of the MU Health Care Pavilion will begin this winter!

The vision doesn’t stop there though. There is one more puzzle piece that will hold it all together and elevate the impact of the project; the park’s Community Welcome Center. The Welcome Center will be built just east of the Schoolhouse, in the grassy area between the parking lot and farmers market.

The Community Welcome Center will provide office space for Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture and Columbia Farmers Market staff, it will provide programming space in the commercial/teaching Kitchen and Resource Library, and it will provide space for community to gather in the Activity Room.

Aerial Photograph of Columbia’s Agriculture Park with the location of the future Welcome Center outlined in red.

Event Hall

A large event hall will host educational programs year-round. The Space will also be available to public and private groups to hose community events and programs—an opportunity for more collaborations at the park.

Meal Kits for Families

Food grown at the park will be processed into pre-cooked meals and meal kits. Kits will be distributed at the Food Bank's Central Pantry, improving access of healthy food for low-income community members.

Free Tool Checkout

Gardening tools like tillers and potato forks, home kitchen equipment like food processors and canners, and books can be checked out for free through a partnership with Daniel Boone Regional Library.

Resource Room

Volunteers and staff will be available to answer questions about gardening and food preparation. Community members can sign up for CCUA's programs.

Offices

CCUA and Columbia Farmers Market will use the space to coordinate impactful food security programs that support Veterans, food-insecure families, beginning farmers, and people suffering from diet-related diseases.

Commercial Kitchen

Farmers and food entrepreneurs can rent commercial kitchen space to launch their food businesses.

This Community Welcome Center will improve access to free and affordable healthy foods for low-income households. Programs at Columbia’s Agriculture Park target families living in poverty with hands-on nutrition and food-access interventions, with the goal of households seeing improved nutrition/food insecurity.

Many programs already operate at the park and throughout the community to support community food security. Office space and programming space in the Welcome Center will support these programs and allow them to grow.

Current Programs:

• Planting for the Pantry

• Opportunity Gardens

• Farm to School

• Veterans Program

• Therapy Gardens

• Henry Kirklin Black Farmer Scholarship

• Produce Prescription and SNAP/WIC Matching

The building and the park don’t just benefit people who live in Columbia. The farmers who sell at Columbia Farmers Market, and the rural communities where they live also benefit. Local farmers will have better facilities to create value-added products and safely prepare product samples for the market. Research shows that entrepreneurial capacity in rural communities increases when paired with educational programming and engagement between farmers and consumers. To date, the development at Columbia’s Agriculture Park has increased sales at Columbia Farmers Market by 39%. Customer counts have more than doubled. Construction of the Community Welcome Center will continue to improve opportunities for local farmers and food entrepreneurs.

New programs and collaborations made possible by the Welcome Center:

• Meal kits for families- CCUA grows a lot of fresh produce for the food pantry, over 46,000 pounds in 2022. The food pantry sees many families in crisis and when you’re in crisis you may not have time to do lot’s of meal prep. That is why we will be using the Welcome Center’s new kitchen to process CCUA’s fresh produce into healthy pre-cooked meals that families can open and eat or quickly heat up in the microwave. These meals will be distributed to the Central Pantry alongside the fresh produce we will continue to donate. This new program will help make the healthy choice the easy choice.

• Resource Library- In a new partnership with Daniel Boone Regional Library, the Welcome Center will have equipment, tools, and books for community members to borrow. Gardening tools like tillers, seeders, and digging forks and cooking equipment like food dehydrators, or pressure canners can be checked out for free with your library card.

• Commercial Kitchen & Event Space- These spaces, both together and individually, will be available for use by community members and partner organizations to host programming and gathering.

CCUA’s programs currently operate out of this temporary office trailer at the Ag Park. It is cramped, poorly insulated, and it has no plumbing. CCUA’s 21 full time staff share this small space to coordinate programs that impact tens of thousands of people every year. Columbia Farmers Market has no office space, it’s employees do administrative work from home. The longevity of programs at the Ag Park and across the community require a permanent office space for these organizations. Talking about office space isn’t exciting, but it is needed.

Please help this campaign make this last piece of the puzzle a reality by making a donation today! www.BuildThisTown.org/donate