It’s been 36 years since the West Boulevard community had a neighborhood grocery store.
On Saturday, the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition held a community mixer to celebrate progress in its quest to launch Three Sisters Market, a community-owned grocery cooperative. Read more at QC Metro
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — Plans are underway to open a grocery store in an underserved Charlotte community for the first time in 30 years.
The West Boulevard neighborhood is considered a food desert with no reliable access to affordable and nutritious food.
“I do not know if this community understands how unlevel the playing field has been,” said Janiqua Jackson, the general manager of the planned Three Sisters Market.
The Market will be a 12,000 square foot grocery store located at West Boulevard and Clanton Road. Read more at Queen City News
Rickey Hall grew up in the West Blvd corridor. He remembers the stores that used to sit on every corner, the neighborhoods and neighbors that looked out for each other and the schools that helped shaped him including Amay James Elementary school, an all-Black school between Clanton Road and Tyvola Roads.
“We had inferior books, but we did not have inferior minds,” he said. Read More at the City of Charlotte
The West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition’s effort to bring a grocery co-op to a Charlotte community termed a food desert has yet to materialize, and the project is short on funds.
Organizers with the coalition said they started strategizing to fill a void of a grocery store in the community in 2015, to bring the Three Sisters Market to the West Boulevard corridor. The area has been without a full-service grocery store for more than 30 years. But that void has yet to be filled. Read more at WFAE
Jul 7, 2025 — Work on Three Sisters Market, a local initiative to bring a grocery store to Charlotte’s West Boulevard corridor for the first time in three decades, has stalled as backers work to secure additional funding, its executive director said. The project was initially set to be completed last month. But since the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition announced the initiative in 2023, the organization has raised only a third of the funds needed to make the project a reality. Read the full article at the Charlotte Observer
Despite numerous setbacks in securing a grocery store, members of the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition say the opening of Three Sisters Market, a community-owned food cooperative that is planned for the corner of Romare Bearden Drive and West Boulevard, is now within sight. The co-op is expected to open in 2025. Continuing reading here.
Four new food markets are set to come to Charlotte’s West End.
During this week’s Sarah Stevenson Tuesday Forum on Aug. 6, several organizations discussed their plans to open grocery-centered concepts and community additions.
“It takes a village to address the massive need of food insecurity that’s impacting our community,” Kimberly Scott, Mecklenburg County assistant health director, said during the forum.
Read the full article here.
The West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition was recently awarded $300,000 by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation to strengthen their capacity to advocate for healthy foods. The funding is spread over three years and will enable the Coalition to enhance their advocacy efforts to change the policy and systemic factors that limit access to healthy food. This work ultimately seeks to increase access to healthy foods for community members of the West Boulevard Corridor and surrounding neighborhoods.
“The West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition is thrilled to receive this award from the Blue Cross NC Foundation. This grant gets us one step closer to our vision for health equity and community wealth building in the West Boulevard Corridor,” said Rickey Hall, Board Chair, West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition.
The West Boulevard Corridor lacks healthy food in retail stores and there is no full-service grocery store. Plans are currently underway to build a community-owned cooperative market on West Boulevard, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. This grant funding will enable the Coalition to build relationships with local, state, and federal policymakers and elevate the voices of community members experiencing barriers to food security.
The Coalition sees firsthand the urgent need to remove these barriers at the systemic level, and we look forward to working with Blue Cross NC Foundation to move the needle, not just in the Corridor, but for citizens across the state.
