A Red Circle

Farmer tending to crops, smiling holding plants with bee hives in background

What Black Liberation Looks Like

North of Delmar Boulevard, St. Louis County reveals itself slowly, in the small details that come into focus as you drive through it. A kid's playground that remains locked most days. Long stretches of sidewalk where maintenance has fallen behind. At one of the many locations that make up A Red Circle, a little red barn sits in a green oasis with goats, gardens, beehives, and a space that houses cooking classes and food pop-ups.

A Red Circle has created a community-driven ecosystem where food, wellness, education, and economic opportunity fill the gaps left by decades of disinvestment with infrastructure grounded in dignity. Their work comes to life across multiple locations through a set of interconnected programs that turn their values into daily practice.

Good Food Fridays is a no-barrier gathering where residents come through to access fresh produce, pantry staples, recipes, cooking and nutrition guidance while building community. The Healthy Community Market is an affordable farmers market paired with cooking demos, fitness activities, and connections to health resources. God’s Bounty coalesces around partnerships with local churches to distribute healthy food alongside hands-on garden education. The Food & Justice Fellowship is a nine-month paid program where young people learn the intersections of agriculture, business, and policy within the food system. The Community Health Network offers health navigation support combined with access to fresh food and community-based resources. The Good Food Movement is a shared infrastructure initiative supporting growers and entrepreneurs through bulk purchasing, equipment access, and collaborative planning. North County Community Nexus is a growing hub for community life, currently home to People’s Harvest, Bistro on the Boulevard, and the Damu Smith Liberation Garden, with future plans for a learning center, small business incubator, production kitchen, and expanded food systems infrastructure. The North County Agricultural Education Center is a working site for food production, training, and agricultural education, and the Healthy Flavor Community Garden is a neighborhood-based growing space supporting local food access and hands-on learning.

A Red Circle, the Background

A Red Circle was formed in 2017, though its roots reach further back than the year on its incorporation paperwork. Its founder, Erica Williams, grew up in North County, and when she talks about the organization’s origins, she does not begin with nonprofit language or policy frameworks; instead, she speaks about lineage.

Welcome sign in community garden with young tree growing

The idea for A Red Circle grew from relationships and ideas that were already present; neighbors who had spent years imagining what a different future for North County might look like. It was created to begin doing the work of bringing good food to local communities, creating opportunities for new entrepreneurs and farmers, and educating people about cultivating food, healthy cooking with familiar and not-so-familiar ingredients, and bringing the neighborhood together around place, land, and food.

In 2021, A Red Circle convened the Good Food Summit, bringing together farmers, policymakers, consumers, and business leaders to ask a simple question: what does North County actually need? One answer surfaced repeatedly during those conversations. What the region lacked was not more emergency food distribution. It lacked the infrastructure to support a local, rooted-in-place food economy. Emergency food programs respond to immediate basic needs, but they rarely create jobs, build ownership, or generate tax revenue that stays in the community.

Erica says, “As a region, we never set out to rely on charity, but years of disinvestment in housing, in businesses, and in the steady hollowing out of what had once been a thriving commercial corridor left gaps that charity was forced to fill.”

The Impact

By 2026, all those investments in community work and the realness of deep listening are really taking shape. The organization is opening its farmhouse, expanding grocery pop-ups, and laying the groundwork for a future grocery store and bistro built on local ownership. What once existed as plans discussed around meeting tables is now beginning to occupy physical space. And perhaps more importantly, mental space.

Healthy Community Market chef preparing fresh produce in a demonstration outdoors

Among many other programs for their neighbors in North County, A Red Circle supports small urban farmers with tools, washing and packing stations, cold storage, and facilities for drying and preserving produce. It helps growers navigate pricing and marketing, enabling their farms to become stable businesses rather than temporary experiments. Recently, A Red Circle began supporting a group of local food entrepreneurs producing seasonings, sauces, jams, jellies, and salad dressings. The group is now working toward forming a production cooperative that would allow them to increase buying power, share marketing costs, and distribute their products more widely.

At the center of A Red Circle’s next chapter is North County Community Nexus (the “Nexus”), a bold, community-built hub designed to do what fragmented systems have long failed to deliver.

They have secured the building, and are planning an entire ecosystem under one roof: a grocery store stocked with fresh, affordable food, cold storage that supports local farmers, a production kitchen and bistro that turn ingredients into opportunity, and a small business incubator where ideas can take root and grow. Anchored by the Damu Smith Liberation Garden and a rain garden that reconnects people to land and stewardship, The Nexus will also house spaces for learning, performance, and organizational leadership. In a region shaped by systemic disinvestment, it functions as both infrastructure and invitation, creating jobs, expanding access, and laying down the conditions for long-term community ownership.

In North St. Louis County, the landscape is still shifting. But some of those shifts are moving toward ownership, choice, and the expectation that fairness in access to food should simply be part of everyday life. And once that expectation returns, it has a way of growing deeper roots.