Dorchester-based health advocates hope that a new winter farmer’s market will make it easier for families to stock their pantries with fresh food and broaden their culinary and cultural horizons.

Organized by the recently-formed Dorchester Community Food Cooperative, the winter farmer’s market will open it’s stalls Jan. 8 at the Codman Square Great Hall and offer shoppers farm-fresh goods from noon to 3 p.m. each Sunday through March. While a handful of farmer’s markets operate during the summer months, this project marks the first Dorchester-based initiative to make fresh food available during the winter season.

Longtime Dorchester resident and food co-op project manager Jenny Silverman has worked on similar projects in Jamaica Plain and Cambridge and said that while there are efforts to expand those efforts into new neighborhoods, the scarcity of fresh food in the neighborhood inspired her and her colleagues to get the ball rolling themselves.

“We have a paucity of supermarkets in the neighborhood, they’re on the periphery, and they’re not very good in terms of making healthy foods available,” Silverman said. “Rather than waiting for an existing coop to expand to Dorchester, we decided to start a new project ourselves, it gives us an opportunity to create something that really caters to our community.”

To that end, Silverman said the co-op is planning weekly themed events ranging from a “Dorchester Reads!” week to promote literacy and local authors to special celebrations for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and the Vietnamese New Year, complete with craft workshops and cooking lessons to show shoppers new ways to prepare inexpensive, healthy meals.

Silverman said that unlike other Winter farmer’s markets, Codman Square vendors are the first to take part in the city’s Boston Bounty Bucks program, which doubles the buying power of customers using EBT or SNAP cards to make their purchases.

“The bounty bucks is a really, really important part of the effort to make this kind of food available to those who need it most,” Silverman said, adding that the Fields Corner Summer market has seen the use of Bounty Bucks triple between 2010 and 2011. “We’re very appreciative of the city to make these funds available.”

While the market has not yet opened its doors, Silverman has high hopes that the project will be a first step towards a permanent food co-op location in Dorchester which could serve as both a local market and as a distributor for corner stores throughout the neighborhood, making locally-grown food a more realistic and cost-effective option for store owners.

Food co-op community advocate Joel Wool has spent the past year working on community outreach across Dorchester in an effort to drum up interest in the market and said the collaborative model presented by the co-op seems tailor-made to tackle the financial obstacles faced by families looking to put fresh food on the table. 

“We live in a neighborhood where obesity and diabetes are huge problems,” Wool said. “Part of the solution to those challenges is bringing the prices down, part of that is bringing it close and the other part of that is showing people how to cook it.”

“We’re trying to conceit a number of different initiatives, bringing local farmers in, subsidizing the cost of their food, and doing outreach in ways that really get to the people who need it most.”