Back to Annual Meeting

Back to Annual Meeting

APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Kelly Thompson, Agency Relations/Core Services, City Harvest, Inc., 575 Eighth Ave., 4th Floor, New York, NY 10018, 917.351.8737, kthompson@cityharvest.rog

City Harvest is a well-known NYC-based food rescue, nutrition, and food security organization which serves to support low-income communities and a network of over 520 community-based agencies in New York City offering emergency food, and to varying degrees social, economic, recovery, and public health services.

In 2005 City Harvest launched Produce For Health, an extensive, multi-tiered project designed to address issues that often stem from hunger and food insecurity. For example, in the South Bronx and in many of New York City's poorest neighborhoods, the high concentrations of poverty, food insecurity, and lack of access to nutritious, low-cost food are often coupled with increasingly high rates of diabetes and obesity, creating a severe health crisis, especially among Hispanic and African Americans.

Produce For Health strives to build sustainable access to healthy, fresh produce and create healthy nutritional behaviors that contribute to reduction of nutrition-related diseases among residents in New York's most at-risk communities. City Harvest is implementing this project through the use of various community-based models that harnesses the energy of the community's greatest resource, its residents.

Some key activities of Produce for Health are discussed in this session including: Mobile Market, a free outdoor produce distribution; Community Food Assessments; nutrition-based Peer Support Groups; and a development plan for a permanent market mechanism. Session participants will recognize and learn from this project and other models used throughout the U.S. that are utilizing the immense power of community in addressing public health issues.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participant in this session will be able to

• Recognize innovative approaches to addressing food insecurity and food access.
• Articulate and apply the process for beginning Community Food Assessments.
• Discuss the value of multi-objective project plans and community partnerships in public health and hunger-related projects.

Keywords: Food Security, Sustainability

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Any relevant financial relationships? No