Your gift helps Webb City families buy fresh, local food through WIC at our market. 🥕Every dollar you share stretches WIC benefits, putting seasonal produce, eggs, and other staples on neighbors’ tables while supporting small farmers who grow it.Donate today to keep our market a welcoming place where WIC shoppers and local producers meet, share recipes, and build a healthier community. 🍎What is the Market WIC Program? Simply put the Market WIC Program is a privately funded, food assistance program that the Webb City Farmers Market started in late 2017. Our program gives households who are active in the Jasper and Newton County WIC program, $10 in food coupons to come shop for local fruit, vegetables, meat, or eggs. Most of the Market’s WIC families come every week for their coupons, which means, we are helping put $40 into these households' grocery budgets each month.Why do we operate the Market WIC Program? Well at the Webb City Farmers Market, it is our mission “To sustain, nourish, and enhance our community while providing a venue for the success of our local producers and farmers” We take those words to heart… sustain… nourish… so this program was developed to target the nutrition of some of our youngest community members. Partnering with WIC is perfect because if you don’t know it stands for Women, Infants, and Children, so mothers-to-be and children under 5 are who this program targets. Children under the age of 5 grow at an incredible rate and the quality of the foods they are eating affects their ability to grow, learn, be emotionally stable, and in the long term, what nutrition they take in will affect their health as adults. Healthy eating habits of an expectant mother can influence the development of her fetus and sets the foundation for that child's life. It’s a proven concept that children who have the availability of fresh foods at a young age are most likely to continue eating healthy as adults.What does having this program at the market mean to us? By partnering with the area WIC offices, it means that we are blessed with the ability to help grow our next generation. Programs like these allow our market to touch lives in an impactful way and be more than a fun place to shop. We want people to eat local foods that are as nutritionally dense as possible. We hope that our community can get behind the small farms of our area, eating the sustainable foods these farms produce. Having the Market WIC Program open year-round means that we can build positive relationships that aid in developing a healthy foundation to live by, strengthening our community.What does this program mean to its participants? Our program does not have an application, sign-up, or anything past just having an active file at their WIC office. The caregivers we serve do not have to share personal information, which helps them have a connection to a supportive community found at the farmer's market with no compromise of dignity. It means that a caregiver might be less stressed about whether they have enough money to feed their family or if the food they are providing is healthy. Mothers, grandfathers, foster parents, and other types of caregivers report that their children are eating food items they before were resistant to because those children are experiencing food shopping in a unique way. The kids walk through the market to pick out their food and the farmer who grew it greets them, explaining how good the food is and that they are happy the child wants to try it. Positive experiences like this seem so small but have a big influence on our littles.How do we fund the program? We continually seek funding from individuals, groups like yours, or trust funds that can aid the efforts of a program like ours. All money we raise is designated to fund the coupons we give out, meaning there are no administrative costs held out or portions used for anything else. 100% of the money we get goes directly to buy local, nutritionally dense food for young families. When funding runs out, we pause the program to gather funding.