Tucked in between two houses in a modest Ybor City neighborhood is a wooden archway, intertwined with grape vines. Passing through this archway, you see a garden ten years in the making.
Stepping into the garden, you’re greeted by the sight of bountiful fruit trees, vibrant plant beds, a variety of herbs and a pollinator garden drawing in bees and butterflies. On Fridays, you’ll see a group of volunteers tending the plants, along with the wandering chicken affectionately named “Joe.”
But it’s so much more than just a beautiful garden - it’s a gathering space where residents can connect, learn about sustainable practices and take home fresh produce. The garden is open 24/7 so community members can access it at any
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Tashie TierneyThe archway leading to WellFed Community's Ybor City community garden time. This garden off Ybor Street is one of two community gardens launched by WellFed Community, the educational branch of WellBuilt Cities, a nonprofit focused on community development in Tampa Bay. The garden is a stepping stone for their ultimate goal of food independence.
“Our garden is educational,” says WellFed co-founder Dhalia Bumbaca. “We want it to be an access point for the community to learn how to potentially grow their own food and build community around growing food.”
The beginning
WellFed launched after Bumbaca and three fellow co-founders noticed a lack of focus on fresh produce. As a Canadian born of Italian heritage, Bumbaca noticed that the ingredients she grew up loving were lacking in the Tampa Bay area.
Volunteering with WellBuilt Cities, also known as The Well, she began to notice not only the lack of produce but the lack of demand for fresh produce.
One of WellBuilt Cities’s services is their Kinship Free Market, where they distribute food around six times a week, including fresh produce. The Kinship Free Market serves around 7,500 families a year and distributes around 300,000 pounds of food. Bumbaca, however, noticed a concerning trend at these markets.
“Food wasn’t getting utilized,” Bumbaca says.”The fresh veggies and fruits were getting left behind. People were focusing on canned food and non-perishables. We began to ask ourselves, how do you get food like eggplants into our clients' hands? That's when WellFed emerged. We can create educational programs to provide for some of those needs... Different ways to get people to sit around a table and why we’re growing and distributing their food.”
Bumbaca, Savannah Bennet, Christian Barros Adwell and Richa Bischt co-founded WellFed to work toward a solution. Within six months, they were able to transition to a social enterprise component, meaning they were able to drive revenue for their services and partner with local grocery stores, including Whole Foods and Sprouts to collect their unsold produce.
The organization has now served the local community for around four years, providing nutrition demonstrations, cooking classes and educational programs that teach the public about sustainability and food.
“You can grow all the things you want, but if you don’t know how to consume them then that’s that,” says Bumbaca.
Their Ybor garden even acts as a classroom where kids receive after-school food education. In the back of the garden, there is a group of short logs arranged in a circle. These logs are the chairs for the classroom where they teach weekly lessons about food, gardening, and nutrition.
The children learn to prepare snacks that integrate freshly grown produce into their meals. Along with learning and preparing snacks, they get hands-on experience in planting and potting and learn how the environment around them works in general.
“We try to focus on cooking skills so that they can learn to prepare their own food and certain ingredients that have nutritional benefits,” says Bumbaca. “It’s shocking to see how much they’ve retained. They now know so much about the garden and cooking. They’ll even know the medicinal value of plants.”
Community focus
The heart of WellFed’s mission is strengthening the local community. While their ultimate dream is promoting food independence, Bumbaca emphasizes the importance of connecting with the community.
“Food is a way to create an open space, a shared table for people to come gather around,” she says. “Being very intentional with the community that we’re working with is the goal right now.”
With a parent organization that has been around for two decades, WellFed has built on a foundation of trust in the local community to establish even stronger relationships. They typically work with groups of between five to 20 people at a time and spend years building those community connections.
“It’s gonna be really slow, and the impact is really just gonna be in the community
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Tashie TierneyWellFed Community co-founder Dhalia Bumbaca we’re focused on, but at least some people will be able to see themselves coming away from those lines and grow things in their backyard or even grow in communities,” Bumbaca says. “No one needs a whole tree of avocados, but if you have an avocado tree and I have a starfruit tree, we can make a swap, right?”
By hosting dinners in their University Area community garden, providing open spaces for residents to gather and volunteer and through their Community Food Ambassador program, WellFed works for positive change in the lives of individuals.
The Community Food Ambassador program is a monthly cohort that gathers to learn skills in sustainability, cooking, gardening, and nutrition. The program is open to those who simply want to learn about food, but it also acts as a gateway to take on larger roles at WellFed and paves the way to doing meaningful work in the field of food sovereignty.
“We’re gonna continue to provide the basic need of handing out food. But if that’s all we do, we’re just gonna continue to see those same people ten years later. Being able to provide these additional educational programs & building community relationships allows us to potentially go beyond that,” says Bumbaca.
Future goals
WellFed hopes to further impact the local community by obtaining a mobile commercial kitchen. After winning Social Ventures Partners’ 2024 Fast Pitch, a mentoring program and Shark Tank-style competition for nonprofits, the organization is closer to achieving this goal.
“A big gap in these communities is lack of access to a big kitchen space like that. Our goal is being able to provide that at a mobile level,” explains Bumbaca. “We want it to be able to serve anybody, anywhere, in the exact same way”
WellFed hopes to provide programming out of their kitchen, such as cooking classes and demonstrations. With all fundraising efforts going as planned, the organization is expecting to bring the mobile kitchen to life within the next three months.
For more information, go to WellFed Community