Designing and Implementing Partnership-Focused Grantmaking Strategies to Improve Food Access in Low-Income Communities

High-quality, affordable, fresh foods have immediate and long-term affects on health and well-being and are essential to healthy communities. But access is limited in many low-income neighborhoods, where produce—and supermarkets, healthy corner stores, and farmers' markets—is limited to nonexistent. Lack of access has dire consequences, including diet-related diseases like diabetes and obesity. Increasing food access can be costly and fraught with risks but is essential to improving health and transforming communities. Foundations with capital and the appetite for risk can be catalysts for change. St. Christopher's Foundation for Children (SCFC), a Philadelphia-based hospital conversion foundation, used seed funding from the Convergence Innovation Fund (CIF) to be a catalyst. The foundation has long funded children's nutrition initiatives, but when the results of a community needs assessment detailed the lack of access in North Philadelphia, SCFC recognized the need for a different kind of intervention. With CIF funding, the foundation created a unique food distribution model called Farm to Families. The system is a network of diverse organizations, each performing a task integral to the goal: getting food from local farmers to low-income families in North Philadelphia. This presentation will include details on the creation of the model, identification of partners, successful strategies for building multi-field partnerships, and use of the partnership model to achieve important public health outcomes.