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Green City Board Chairman Paid Tribute in the Wake of Her Depature.
Mandy Moody's tenure as the executive director of Chicago's landmark Green City Market officially concluded on November 15. Her decision to step down for personal reasons came as a surprise to the region's local food community, as Green City soared to new heights during her four years as the farmers market organization's leader.
Mandy, an experienced non-profit fundraiser, joined Green City in June 2019. She took the helm at a particularly challenging time — the middle of the COVID pandemic — first filling a vacancy as interim executive director in November 2020 and becoming permanent in the role two months later.
She took over at a time when consumer interest in locally produced food was soaring because of major supply chain issues in the conventional grocery sector. But even after the crisis abated, Mandy and her team cultivated this expanded base, shattering attendance records.
The market's outdoor season was expanded first to just before Thanksgiving in November; the outdoor market's opening date then was moved up a month to the first Saturday in April. The non-profit's biggest annual fundraising event, the much-beloved Chef BBQ, was moved from the dog days of July to early September and also enjoyed major growth. And after forgoing its indoor winter market near its Lincoln Park flagship location for the two COVID years, Green City resumed in a new location in the Avondale neighborhood in the winter of 2022-23.
Under Mandy's leadership, Green City also increased its efforts at promoting greater food access for people who face food insecurity, replacing its match that doubled federal food assistance benefits with a triple match that gives recipients up to $75 in healthy food purchases per visit. Farmers enduring catastropic losses from fire or natural disasters also benefited from a fund that Green City created during Mandy's tenure.
On Monday (November 18), I met with Green City Market Board Chairman Mitch Weinstein at Lincoln Park's Verzênay Patisserie, which also is a longtime Green City vendor. Here are takeaways from Mitch's tribute to Mandy Moody's work.
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"Mandy has really done a phenomenal job... In the five years she's been with the market, we've seen tremendous expansion, both in the number of vendors and farmers that we have. Our revenue stream has... certainly doubled since Mandy's been there..."
"Increasing the grants [that the Market has received] is really one of the principal things that I really give her a lot of credit for, diversifying the revenue stream... Previously much of the money came in from the barbecue. Now I'm very proud to say that we're about a third each between grants, events and donors. She's really done a tremendous job..."
"We pivoted around COVID... doing deliveries during that time. And we were able to keep the vendors and the farmers going, we continued to do whatever we could as far as maintaining revenue streams for the farmers... We are here to support the farmers, and we want to make sure that we have local, sustainably raised food stuffs for everybody... Mandy just stepped up and really did a tremendous job there."
[Discussing the role of Green City Market as a touchstone of the "old normal" during the 2020 COVID shutdowns] "You could just see the smiles on people's faces behind their masks, because everything was behind the mask... We were able to sustain the market. We were able to help the farmers sustain themselves... It was the first step back to a new normal, but still normal to some extent."
[About Green City maintaining the consumer interest that spiked during the pandemic] "We tried to operate as normally as possible. We tried to get back to 'the old days.' I think we did because it's not just a market. It's really a community. It is Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food. It's a different place... It's not just a matter of going in and shopping. You're socializing. You know the farmers, you know the vendors, you know the staff, the market. You take your time. It's like building any other friendship, any other relationship. And I think that goes a long way into why the market came back the way it did, and really just mushroomed... You see the same faces there week in and week out, whether they're shoppers, whether they're vendors, whether they're farmers, even the security guards there, you know who the people are. It's a nice way to spend a couple hours on a Saturday morning."
"Probably the greatest passion I have for the market is the ability to give people significant buying power. At present we're at three-to-one [match of food assistance benefits]. So if you walk in with $25 worth of currency, so to speak, to shop, you can shop for $75 worth of goods. It's great for people to be able to have access to healthy foods on limited budgets, it's wonderful for them. And if you look at the trickle effect... it's great for the farmers, too....It's really helping them to continue to support themselves.... With that kind of match, you're better off shopping at the market than you are at a supermarket."
[On the Market's focus on broader food accessibility] It's a priority... I'd like to think that we're making a difference in the community at large, and not just at the market itself..."
[The transition period following Mandy's departure] "Right now, certainly from the operations and a program perspective, everything is status quo. We have the staff that knows how to run the markets. They know how to run the programs. They have the relationships with the farmers and the vendors and with many of the shoppers.
Taylor Choy, who is our [Operations and Programs] director, is amazing... She has just kept things running very smoothly. I speak to her very often now, and she's got things under control. I'm not concerned with the operations and the programmatic side of it..."
"On the development side, we had lost our Director of Development a few months prior, and so Mandy had picked up a lot of that... We've got our arms around that at this point. I have been doing a lot of outreach to our major donors and funders. I want to let them understand that we've got things under control..."
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Green City Market's outdoor season ends on Saturday (November 23) at both its flagship Lincoln Park campus and its satellite market in the West Loop neighborhood. This is a great opportunity for shoppers to get delicious local food for their Thanksgiving tables.
The Market then takes a one-week break before launching the indoor market season at 3031 N. Rockwell St. in Avondale on December 7.
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