Rooted: A Pop-Up Care Village Grows at Franklinton Farms

Franklinton Farms started its Monday morning the same way it always does. Dew painting the quiet rows of vegetables waiting for small groups of people to stroll through picking the available produce. This isn’t the setting you expect to have a food truck, clothing store, hair salon, barber shop, courthouse, and nineteen service tables lined up beside the soil . By the time MAD’s Rooted Pop-Up Care Village wrapped up at 2:00 PM, nearly 200 neighbors had walked through the space clearing barriers in more ways than one.

Why Rooted?

Since April, MAD has been partnering with Franklinton Farms to create this event. Columbus’ Franklinton neighborhood is near and dear to our hearts as the place we first set up shop. It’s where we prep our meals before traveling to outreach sites, where we operated our rent assistance clinic for two years, and where we first cultivated partnerships with the community in the community. As our services have grown, we wanted to make sure that the folks who first put their trust in Make-A-Day, reaped the benefits of what our organization has become.

Franklinton Farms’ u-pick garden is a vital resource to the neighborhood, providing 7-day access to produce grown on-site. However, the story we kept hearing over and over again from guests, partners, and volunteers was that they didn’t know it existed. Food insecurity is not a side issue for the people MAD serves. It is a driver of housing instability, a barrier to employment, and a chronic stressor that makes everything else harder to address. Rooted treats food access as what it is: a social determinant of health.

The u-pick garden gives participants something most food programming doesn't: agency. The ability to grow, select, and use fresh food is part of what it means to be stable. We want to demonstrate that practically, not just describe it. Right now, SNAP benefits are being cut for many of our neighbors, and local food resources are facing closure, making it all the more vital that our guests know where they can find food.

A Day in the Garden

OSU’s College of Nursing turned the garden into the centerpiece. They ran a scavenger hunt through the rows, stopped at each plant to talk about what it could do for your health, and then put neighbors to work brewing tea from the herbs they had just learned about. In the food truck, Alex, Jesse, and Chef David put together a meal packed with veggies and herbs grown in Franklinton Farm's’ various community gardens.

A few feet away, our Move the Box attorneys sat in folding chairs running back-to-back consultations. They finished 14 of them by the end of the day, which turned into 10 expungements and 6 fee waivers for people who had been carrying old charges for years. Most of these consultations took part towards the end of the event with the legal team insisting they could see just one more guest. The Franklin County Tap In Center was available for anyone with a non-violent misdemeanor warrant who needed a way to clear it without fearing what walking into a courthouse might cost them. By the end of the day, 26 individuals had connected with the Tap In Center, resulting in 12 warrants recalled and 9 cases fully dismissed.

Our small but mighty team of two stylists and one barber gave twenty-five guests renewed hope with a free haircut. The Mt. Carmel Street Medicine team saw 10 patients. Our Dignity Market offered hygiene supplies, pet food, clothing, and shoes. And then there was the garden itself. Neighbors filled bags with kale, a variety of herbs, radishes, and more. Some guests even took home plants to start their own urban gardens.

Around all of that, the courtyard of partners hummed. Molina and Columbus Public Health each talked with 60 people. COTA and the College of Nursing connected with nearly 100 guests apiece. Anthem, CMHA, LSS, The Breathing Association, OSU’s James, and Sanctuary Night kept folks moving on everything from Medicaid enrollment to harm reduction supplies to housing vouchers.

Of the nearly 200 neighbors we connected with that day, a third had a history of homelessness, and close to one in four were sleeping in a shelter or outside. Sixteen percent had a record still following them through the courts. Roughly one in seven were navigating a disability or a substance use history. None of those numbers stand alone; most people carry more than one. That is why the day worked the way it did. The same person could get a haircut, sit down with an attorney, sign up for Medicaid, and walk out with a bag of fresh greens, all within a few steps.

Franklinton Farms did not just host us. They handed over a working farm on a Monday and let it become a multifaceted community space for three hours, then went right back to growing food for said community that afternoon. That is the kind of partnership Rooted was built on, and it is the kind of day that reminds you stability is not just one thing. It is a haircut, a cleared record, a bag of vegetables, and a new pair of shoes, all on the same afternoon, in the same place.