It's All Local
The streets of your city neighborhood are lined with fast food restaurants and convenience stores. In your suburban town, there's no bus service to the supermarket. Farms cover most of the land in your rural county, but the meager selection of vegetables in your grocery store comes from the other side of the world. Rates of obesity in your community are skyrocketing, but the number of hungry people is on the rise as well.
You would like to see a farmers' market downtown, or a supermarket with an array of local produce. You would like your children to have healthy lunches at school. You would like your neighbors to have easy access to food stamps and other government nutrition programs. You know that diverse communities around the country are making changes like these. You want to improve the health of your community from within. Where do you start?
A community food assessment (CFA) is a way for a community to identify both its challenges and its resources around food. An assessment of the local food system can be a springboard for involvement in other measures to build community food security. By getting the community involved and aware of its food choices, a CFA can motivate people to make change - to partner with a farmer and start a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture); to work with neighborhood institutions such as schools and hospitals to source from local farmers (Farm to Cafeteria); to bring together stakeholders into an ongoing food policy council (Food Policy Councils). A community food assessment is a first step toward developing local, healthy, community-based solutions to local needs. A CFA is a way to bring together the whole community around a single issue that matters to everyone -- food.
The Shape of the Community
Most community food assessments have three basic characteristics in common. First, they use an asset building approach, seeking ways to tap into and build on existing community resources. Second, they engage community members to help set priorities, conduct research, and develop recommendations. Third, they have an action orientation and include recommendations for changes; many also include specific action plans and organizing efforts to help implement these changes.
That said, each community food assessment is unique, and the shape of a CFA can vary as much as communities themselves do. Community food assessments have been done by rural counties, suburban towns, city blocks, Native American reservations, and immigrant communities; by racially and economically diverse and more homogenous neighborhoods. A CFA can be initiated by a local government entity, or -- more often -- result in creation of a government-based food policy council. Research can be conducted by youth, community volunteers, university students, city officials -- or a group of all of these and more. Research can be comprised of formal document review, observation, questionnaires, community events, statistical analysis, government records, interviews, focus groups, surveys, photo diaries, or knocking on doors and having conversations with your neighbors.
Stakeholders in the community food assessment process therefore include everyone: businesses, churches, teens, seniors, parents, farmers, gardeners, food store owners, food stamp recipients, food pantry patrons, community-based organizations, and city officials. A CFA can focus on a neighborhood, county, census tract, town, or city -- however its planners define their community. It can look at a specific aspect of the food system or at the system as a whole.
Community-Based Transformation
Some community food assessments begin as general community assessments. In 1998, the low-income, mostly minority Central Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York conducted a community planning project examining how to create local solutions for local needs based on existing local resources. Some of the defined needs included a lack of programming for youth and a lack of healthy food options, while community resources included the energy of the 30% of the population that was under 18 and the most community gardens in New York City. Several years later, the neighborhood has used this information to transform the community by harnessing the power of its youth to grow healthy food. East New York has created a youth farming training program, an extremely popular farmers market, two urban farm sites, a synergistic network of gardens, and a food co-op, and it has conducted a formal youth-driven community food assessment.
Like in East New York and in other communities around the country, a CFA can be the engine for community transformation by inspiring organizing and planning. A CFA can be a teaching tool for youth. It can be a way for a community to examine and address greater issues of injustice and equality.
Outcomes of the community food assessment can include improved transportation to grocery stores; creation of a food policy council; enhanced connections between local farmers and institutions; assistance for farmers' markets or other farm-based retail; community nutrition or gardening education; and expansion of gardening activities -- and outcomes can also include community invigoration, organization, and dedication to building justice across all sectors.
A community food assessment can be the first step in the creation of a stronger, more food secure community. The other topics of this Learning Center explore alternatives to the conventional, industrial food system -- from how to meet your farmer to how to produce more of your own food to how to revitalize our family farms and rural communities. A community food assessment is a great place to start.
Last Updated ( Saturday, 17 January 2009 18:55 )
