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Illinois Municipality At “Forefront” of Local Food and Sustainability
- Bob Heuer
- Mar 25
- 6 min read
Park Forest's April 11 Expo Showcases Chicago Suburb’s Investment in Local
This article is by Bob Heuer, a longtime advocate for thriving regional agriculture economies and a friend and frequent contributor to Local Food Forum.
The piece focuses on efforts by local officials in the Chicago suburb of Park Forest to increase access to locally and sustainably produced food. Park Forest on Saturday, April 11 is hosting its 5th annual Southland Local Food System and Sustainability Expo, which is discussed in the article. Click here for more information about the event.
Bob Heuer leads HNA Networks. The Evanston-based firm is helping the nature conservation coalition Chicago Wilderness Alliance build common ground with both commercial-scale and community-centered agriculture. Readers are welcome to join the Alliance’s Growing With Agriculture Committee — register here for the next quarterly meeting at 1 p.m Friday April 17.
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One day in August 2024, three south suburban Chicago women drove 90 miles southwest to visit a farmer in Illinois’ Livingston County. The trip set in motion efforts to turn a vacant building owned by the village of Park Forest into the Roots & Vine Food Hub.
One of the travelers was Park Forest village trustee Erin Slone, a former investment banker whose day job is deputy director for outreach at the Illinois Treasurer’s Office. Slone leads municipal initiatives to address food desert challenges as the village board’s Liaison to the Economic Development Advisory Group and Environment Commission.
The village of Park Forest straddles Cook and Will counties. Seventy percent of its 22,000 residents are Black. Per capita income is $29,400, which is 40 percent below the average of the 284 municipalities in the seven-county metro Chicago region.
Large grocery chains are “unresponsive to communities of color,” Slone says. “There’s no way we can get a national brand to come to Park Forest now. We need to be thinking about what we can do to fend for ourselves.”
Building Rural Connections
Joining Slone on the summer drive through Illinois farm country were Park Forest Sustainability Coordinator Carrie Malfeo and Environment Commission member Kate Baker.
A month earlier, the Environment Commission had screened “Sustainable,” a 2016 documentary film that tells the story of farmer Marty Travis, a seventh-generation farmer and pioneer of the sustainable food movement in the Chicago region.
Travis came to Park Forest from his Spence Farm in Fairbury for the screening. The three women then decided it was their turn to go visit him.
Travis, a former furniture maker, inherited his family’s farm — the oldest in Livingston County — two decades ago. He set a new path for Spence Farm, shifting from production of commodity crops to building a supply network as a source of sustainably produced food for the Chicago restaurant community.
Today, Travis, his son Will and a network of 125 farmers make up the Down at the Farms collaborative (formerly known as Stewards of the Land). Down at the Farms now delivers products to dozens of restaurants and more than 1,000 families.
Marty showed his visitors around the warehouse, then they sat down in the living room. They talked about how local supply networks enable farmers to get the price they set, and how Park Forest can tap this bounty of good food.
Buying Power
“There are 200,000 people living within a 15-minute drive of Park Forest,” Slone said. “We have people who want to pay for food that tastes like food. The question is, what can we do to cut out the middleman?”
Slone left Spence Farm convinced that Travis is “the real deal,” a sentiment strongly shared within the region’s local food community. On the car ride home, she said the conversation focused on a food venture for Park Forest, “starting small with a group of like-minded people getting buy-in from the village.”
“Marty has a way of asking questions that really gets you thinking,” Baker explains. “That conversation in his living room started the ideas flowing about how to get local food into Park Forest.”
COVID Game Changer
Baker grew up in the west Cook County suburb of Westchester. Her mother loved vegetable gardening. Her father loved camping. Baker’s own passion for local food and outdoor living crystallized a decade ago when she first saw the movie “Sustainable” in a College of DuPage classroom.
“I began to appreciate the value of producing food closer to home,” Baker says. “Grow, eat, compost. It was so simple, so elegant.”
Yet she also realized achieving anything at scale requires a generation-long shift. The power of a highly concentrated and nationalized food system based on consumers’ desire for convenience and low cost seemed insurmountable.
Then came the pandemic. In April 2020, worker illnesses caused a brief shutdown of large food processors and meat processing plants, and there were other food supply chain bottlenecks. Grocery shoppers were stunned to find empty produce bins and meat counters.
COVID exposed “the fragility of our global food systems and the need to make change,” Baker recalls. “I realized nobody is coming to save us.”
In October 2021, the Environment Commission decided to organize a local food expo. The idea was to build common ground between gardeners, farmers, consumers and community organizations.
Six months later, Park Forest hosted its first annual Southland Local Food Systems Expo. Over the past four years, the event evolved into a place where people gather to buy goods from farmers and to build community-supporting local food systems.
With Expo attendance leveling off at about 100 people, the Environment Commission decided to expand the program to include general topics of sustainability.
At the “Forefront”
In January of this year, a Park Forest contingent attended the Everything Local Conference in Springfield — presented by Illinois Farmers Market Association, Illinois Farm Bureau and Illinois Specialty Growers Association — and took part in the municipal farming session. They made an impression on moderator Kelly Lay, previously profiled in this Local Food Forum report.
Lay’s takeaway: Park Forest is at “the forefront” of Illinois towns supporting food and farm enterprise. Sustainability coordinator Carrie Malfeo came home with a greater appreciation for the statewide “community of people working on the same issues.”
She continued, “We learned best practices for advertising for our food hub and farmers market.” Malfeo encourages readers to check out this Park Forest sustainability page.
The next Park Forest Expo is coming up on Saturday, April 11, and the addition of sustainability programs represents a step forward for the village’s Climate Action and Resilience Plan. Malfeo expects attendees to learn about the "benefits of local food, energy efficiency, composting, reducing and recycling waste streams correctly.”
Village trustee Slone’s idea for Expo success means creating synergy with the new food hub: “I’d like to see 40 to 50 people committing to making weekly orders of food.”
Roots & Vine Food Hub: Purpose Driven
Slone calls Roots & Vine Baker's "brainchild," adding, “Kate built the relationships with Marty and rallied the troops to volunteer. I’m playing a supporting role on the process and government angle.”
After the 2024 trip to Spence Farm, Slone says village leadership was quick to jump on board — the mayor, the village manager and the director of economic development. Meanwhile, food hub planning led to the decision to run Roots & Vine through a non-profit.
“Our purpose is to promote food access and culinary and nutritional education,” Baker explains. “You can tell someone they need to eat healthy food, veggies, fruits and good protein. But if people don’t know how to cook from scratch and the food they’re cooking isn’t delicious to begin with, then the reliance falls on the ultra-processed, salt-, fat- and sugar-laden ‘foods’ that have taken over our food system.”
In fall 2025, the hub secured a $60,000 grant from Chicago Food Policy Action Council, a leading non-profit that promotes local farming, community food sovereignty and improved good food access. The grant has funded development, hiring a manager and initial operating costs.
In shaping the program, its leaders have reached out over the past couple of years to farms that have community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscription programs.
Baker noted that these conversations revealed that “people have started opting for choice over curated farm boxes; they simply want or need to choose what they eat. So we pivoted from the farm box idea into an ordering platform complete with bundle boxes, subscriptions and itemized ordering, with products changing as the seasons progress depending on what is available from the farmers every week.”
Roots & Vine operates out of a downtown building owned by the village. The discounted three-year lease includes utilities. The hub is working with Down at the Farms year round and hyper-local producers during the growing season.
And so starts the newest chapter in what Baker describes as Park Forest’s “long history of implementing and encouraging sustainable practices.”
“Municipalities showing up for and supporting grass-roots community efforts is essential in creating a healthy, sustainable local food movement,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to fight City Hall.”
The 5th annual Southland Local Food and Sustainability Expo takes place on Saturday, April 11 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Dining on the Green, 349 Main St. in Park Forest. Click the button below to register for free.
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