Tatiana Garcia-Granados cofounded community-based nonprofit East Park Revitalization Alliance when she graduated from Penn with her sights set on improving the food system in Strawberry Mansion.

After learning some lessons about what works and what doesn’t, the second nonprofit she started in 2008 to help realize that mission is expanding nationally.

The Common Market is a nonprofit farm food distributor that connects regional farms within a 75-mile range of the city and Philadelphia institutions. Garcia-Granados, who was born in Guatemala and moved to the States when she was 7 years old, founded Common Market when she realized low-income farmers serving low-income customers wasn’t working.

“In order to make the food accessible and affordable it needs to be at a volume that can actually have efficiencies and start to bring the prices down,” she said in a recent interview with Story Exchange. Check out the video portion of the feature below.