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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Sarita Daftary, BA, East New York Farms! Project, United Community Centers, 613 New Lots Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11207 and Kimberly B. Morland, PhD, Dept of Community and Preventive Medicine, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, One Gustave L. Levy Place, Box 1057, New York, NY 10029, 212-241-7531, kimberly.morland@mssm.edu.

The East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn is a community of nearly 180,000 mainly minority residents with high rates of poverty and diet-related disease. Extensive food store surveys have revealed limited availability of fresh produce, and focus groups have further illustrated concerns about the availability, quality, and safety of food in East New York. A low ratio of open space to inhabitants at 0.5 acres/1000 residents further threatens residents' health. In 1998 The Pratt Institute for Community Development joined with community-based organizations to initiate a participatory planning process to identify local needs and resources. Among needs, residents discussed a lack of retail convenience, with an acute lack of fresh food, and a lack of services to address health issues. An abundance of community gardens was identified as a key local resource. The ‘East New York Farms!' Project came together in an effort to leverage this resource to address expressed needs by increasing local production and consumption of fresh produce. In 2000, four gardens (including a youth training farm) cooperated to start a neighborhood market with sales of $1,996. In 2005, the project had grown to include 23 neighborhood gardeners and 3 regional farmers who operate a seasonal farmers market. Gardeners achieved sales of $10,638.00 in 2005, and provide key ethnic crops to over 11,800 customers annually. These efforts spawned the creation of a local food policy council that has secured funding to open a cooperative grocery store in June 2006 to further serve the nutritional needs of the community.

Learning Objectives:

• Recognize the potential to use vacant urban land for small-scale intensive food production to improve community nutrition
• Identify opportunities for urban planners and community gardeners to collaborate in increasing access to healthful food in low-income communities
• Analyze the effectiveness of a community-generated approach to food access and possibilities for replication

Keywords: Food and Nutrition, Community Health Planning

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No