Release Date: September 1, 2023

Due Date: September 29, 2023

Introduction:

Community and regional food access partners, and King County (KC) and the South Seattle Community Food Hub Advisory Committee, with fiscal sponsor Food Lifeline, are aligned in efforts to strengthen local food systems, improve the capacity of the hunger relief sector, and thereby increase access to healthy, affordable food for underserved communities.

These efforts hit a major milestone in 2014, when KC adopted the Local Food Initiative—a roadmap for reinforcing and enhancing local food systems across the KC region. Since its formation, the KC Local Food Initiative and associated efforts have discovered two major weaknesses of the local food system: a deficiency in affordable food related infrastructure and a lack of coordination among stakeholders. Specifically, the County and partners have observed that:

• There is insufficient, aggregation, processing, storage, and kitchen space to connect local food producers adequately and efficiently with target distribution channels, such as food access organizations and institutions
• The diversity of food organizations and farm businesses complicates coordination of their activities and the exploration of creative partnerships, and
• BIPOC, Immigrant and Refugee -led and -serving farms and community-based organizations disproportionately experience challenges accessing needed infrastructure and resources to serve their stakeholders, who are also disproportionately experiencing the impacts of hunger and food insecurity.

To address these challenges the South Seattle Community Food Hub Advisory Committee, with fiscal sponsor Food Lifeline and with the support of KC’s Local Food Initiative, will be building a shared-use, collaborative food facility in south Seattle. The food facility would allow hunger relief agencies to increase their capacity, collaborate and innovate to serve more of Seattle’s food insecure population, and to source more local, sustainable, and culturally significant food from local growers. Farmers would also access the food facility for aggregation, packing, storage and processing of produce for distribution to hunger relief agencies as well as to institutional retail channels.

We seek proposals from Construction Management firms who can successfully support us through the design-build process for the South Seattle Community Food Hub. This project will take place adjacent to Food Lifeline’s Hunger Solution Center located at 815 S 96th Street Seattle WA 98108.

Project Advisory Committee

An advisory committee guides the South Seattle Community Food Hub project. The committee makes project decisions in support of the project’s goals and objectives, brings forward community concerns from their networks and their own both lived and professional experience, and facilitates the stewardship of the project into its next phases. The selected Construction Management Firm will work in partnership with the Construction Committee, a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee, and with fiscal sponsor Food Lifeline, who will together provide feedback at critical points throughout the design-build.

Objective

Our objective is to establish a “team” relationship with the Construction Management Firm selected. The selected team will foster a relationship of trust and confidence between itself and the Advisory Committee and will utilize processes to complete work in an expeditious and economical manner consistent with the best interests of the Advisory Committee.

All Construction Management Firms responding to this RFP should understand and have fluency in the management of grant and/or public funding and have the capacity to respond to and comply with the requirements (procurement procedures, approval process, periodic reporting, and project close-out) for oversight agencies.

About the South Seattle Community Food Hub

The South Seattle Community Food Hub (SSCFH) is a community-driven initiative designed to address systemic gaps in the local food system and food insecurity. A core element of the SSCFH is the development of a multi-use shared food facility that can provide much needed cold storage, aggregation, processing, and distribution infrastructure to regional food system stakeholders, with an emphasis on advancing racial equity and development of community-led solutions that prioritize the needs and assets of local growers and hunger relief organizations. The SSCFH facility, which is slated for development to begin in early 2023, is located at 915 S 96th Street in a warehouse adjacent to Food Lifeline’s headquarters. 

Community stakeholders advising the development of the SSCFH have identified three goals:  1) Increase the capacity, resiliency, and collaboration between hunger relief agencies across the region through shared infrastructure; 2) Create additional market access for local producers such as the hunger relief sector and help build needed infrastructure to support this market access and to support local economic development related to the food system and; 3) Support and promote a more local, just and sustainable food economy by prioritizing food hub resources, services and infrastructure to BIPOC, Immigrant and Refugee -led and -serving growers and community-based organizations that have not traditionally had access to such infrastructure.