Meet the women behind LA's groundbreaking Black-owned mobile farmers market
A former Hollywood makeup artist and fashion designer both stepped away from their respective crafts to create meaningful change in their community through food.
During the pandemic and amid social unrest in Black communities across the country, Carmen Dianne and Kara Still joined forces to launch Prosperity Market -- a unique new mobile farmers market that features Black farmers, food producers, entrepreneurs, artists, florists and chefs.
With pop-up markets across Los Angeles, the duo created a concept that makes it easy to support local Black businesses and adds food access in their community.
To celebrate their second anniversary during Black History Month, "Good Morning America" met up with the dynamic small business owners at Planet Health Compton as they continue their mission to help ensure those in need have food on their plates and uplift people by providing the ingredients.
"I'm most proud of our resilience because this journey has not been easy, but with the outpouring of love with our vendors and our community, it really lets us know that we're doing is important, so we'll celebrate today and get back to work tomorrow," Dianne said.
To date, Prosperity Market has expanded throughout the city with plans to launch a farmers market on wheels, especially to help with food desserts where people can't easily access nutritious, affordable fresh food.
The pair believe "the first step in addressing any systemic constraints is to strengthen our economy." And to do that, they went straight to the source of health and survival -- food.
They explained that Prosperity Market was started as an initial solution for food insecurity and economic instability that have long been linked in a vicious, systemic cycle.
Their next big initiative is to get their mobile food truck and market operating by the end of the summer, with plans for it to be ecofriendly and sustainable using solar panels and run on batteries.
"We just want to keep growing, we want Prosperity Market to go nationwide," Still told "GMA."
To help Still and Dianne with their business goals, Green Giant donated $10,000 to grow Prosperity Market even bigger.
"This is going to help us build our opperational capacity, right now it's the two of us with our team -- this is gonna help us get very far, thank you," Dianne said.
And to help with their goals of having a mobile food truck, LA Stainless Kings -- the company making the truck -- pitched in an additional $15,000 worth of technology to help make their ecofriendly food truck dreams come true.
"When we get our trailer on the road we can operate daily, we can take all of these products when the vendors can't be there in person," Still said through joyful tears holding up the oversized check. "We're going to be able to help literally hundreds of thousands of people a week with this."
