Dream Vaults Provide Essential Fresh Produce to Communities

Dion’s Chicago Dream recently placed a Dream Vault at the Discover Shine Bright Center. The Chatham location is one of four Dream Vault locations in the city that provide fresh produce. PHOTO BY BAKARI PRODUCTIONS.
Dion’s Chicago Dream recently placed a Dream Vault at the Discover Shine Bright Center. The Chatham location is one of four Dream Vault locations in the city that provide fresh produce. PHOTO BY BAKARI PRODUCTIONS.

Dream Vaults Provide Essential Fresh Produce to Communities

By Tia Carol Jones

Dion Dawson, Founder of Dion’s Chicago Dream, recently placed his fourth Dream Vault at the Discover Shine Bright Center in Chatham. This is the fourth locker that has been placed in a community in need of fresh produce.

Dawson founded Dion’s Chicago Dream with the goal to decrease food insecurity and improve health outcomes in communities across the city by delivering fresh produce to people. Dion’s Chicago Dream delivers fresh fruits and vegetables to more than 20,000 residents per week in more than 159 zip codes.

With the Dream Vaults, Dawson and his team are able to reach more people. The dream vault works similarly to a delivery locker. People who are enrolled in the program, receive a text telling them they can pick-up their items from the vault on a specific date. Those people put in a code and receive their items. 

Dawson said the dream vaults enables residents in need to receive their products in a dignified way. In addition to the newly placed dream vault in Chatham, there is also a vault in Englewood, Morgan Park and West Lawn.

Dawson said he wanted to put the dream vault in Chatham because Discover supported the idea of having a dream vault there from the beginning. Dawson said that for Discover, with them creating so many jobs in Chatham at the Shine Bright Center, they wanted to be participants in the community, and not extractors of the community.

“They agreed that in order to be a good business in the community, they had to make sure the community was being taken care of, and that’s what we’re able to do with the vault,” Dawson said.

With the other three vaults, Dawson said Dion’s Chicago Dream spoke with the companies where those vaults are located, and they agreed to let the organization place them there because they want to be good community partners. He said that because his program provides a great product, organizations and companies want to partner with them because they see it as a way to stabilize those communities, by providing access to essential items.

“To their credit, those partners agreed it was a great idea. They’d seen the impact and they wanted to be involved,” Dawson said. He added that access to fresh produce is a right, not a privilege.

The dream vaults take all the technology that is used outside of philanthropy and the community, and brings it into the community in a way where it is guaranteed that access to fresh produce is consistent. He said at Dion’s Chicago Dream, they are advancing and innovating with the quality they are providing, as well as making connections and relationships with the people who are picking up the produce.

Dawson said it is vitally important for what he does with Dion’s Chicago Dream to have partners, large and small, support his endeavors to bring fresh produce to those who need it the most. 

“They see the hard work and they see the consistency, rain, sleet, shine or snow. They see that and they want to be part of it,” he said.

Dawson said that while there is no way, in the foreseeable future, to cure food insecurity, it can be managed. He said there are plans to place more dream vaults in communities, with two slated for the end of the first quarter of 2025.

For more information on Dion’s Chicago Dream, visit www.dionschicagodream.com.


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