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all right welcome everyone to today's webinar food literacy partnerships and strategic planning with hillary dodge my name is rebecca anthill i'm the youth services consultant for the south carolina state library and one of the project managers for our ready grow food literacy statewide initiative and let's see a little bit of housekeeping we are using zoom um you should all be familiar with some of the ins and outs of it but you can click on the chat down at the bottom and share an introduction ask questions give your reactions to what hillary's talking about uh we also do have closed captioning available that's the you'll see up on the right hand corner where it says live on zoom um that is our closed captioning service and you can click on that there at the bottom to start those if you need them we are going to be using breakout rooms later on you'll be automatically assigned you just have to click the little button when it says you've been assigned to a breakout room and say yes i'm going to go um please go ahead and remember to keep your microphone muted while the speaker is presenting unless you have a question um and let's get right into it so um we have with us today the author of gather around the table food literacy programs resources and ideas for libraries that was published last year hilary dodge is a library director in colorado and in 2016 she and her husband mark quit their jobs to relocate relocate their family of three to chile south america for two years of food waste research which i absolutely adore and am totally jealous of upon their return hillary began to focus her energy on the intersections between food literacy libraries and community hillary and mark consult with libraries around the country to provide food literacy training hands-on culinary instruction which we'll someday get back to curriculum design and kitchen design so hillary it is all you hey can you hear me okay yes ma'am perfect okay rebecca's gonna let me know if i have any tech issues or if my voice cuts out i have headsets i am prepared um thank you guys for having me and thanks for joining me today i'm really excited to be here to talk about food literacy which is a passion of mine and libraries which is another passion of mine today we're going to talk specifically about let me make sure i can advance did you guys see the slide advance perfect okay we're going to talk specifically about tools to help you understand the food needs in your community including the community food assessment we're going to learn about implementing key pro components of successful food literacy programming and we're going to be exploring ways to connect with community partners for success so as rebecca i gave you the teaser a little bit i'm going to start my presentation by telling you a story back in 2016 i was a library branch manager for the boulder public library in boulder colorado and my husband mark was a chef at a local hotel and convention center and we were working all the time i was missing out on time with my daughter i had i think a an hour or an hour and a half commute to and from work back then it was just too much um and we were both burning out so we came up with a plan and we came up with a creative project that would engage our passions and allow us to work on something together we sold everything we owned and we packed up what remained including our car into a shipping container and we sent that halfway across the world to chile in south america and there we were going to spend the next two years traveling the length and breadth of that country while researching and writing about food and food customs of chile so i have pictures to show because this is always fun when i talk about this so my husband is chilean he was born there um but he spent a lot of time in the u.s and being a chef and me being a writer we decided that working on food and just researching food literacy would be something that would connect both of our passions and we went to chile because um that was a country where we have some heritage from mark's side of the family and it was really fun to explore we spent two years there's our subaru in the picture there and we had a little trailer and we just hit the road for months at a time and we explored my daughter was five and six years old at the time she turned seven a week after he came back to the states um which was really fun it's a really beautiful country if anybody's hasn't has been there or anybody would like to go there please let me know um as we were traveling around we went into different towns and we would just start asking questions who is known for being a really good cook who makes the best x y and z what are the best foods of this region and we got invited into people's kitchens and they showed us how they made their their dishes and so we learned a lot and it was a really fun time we made some lifetime friendships as well and as we were nearing the end of our time in chile i began to get curious about what was going on in libraries in relation to food and i was still getting copies of public library all the way down in chile although it was about three months late and i opened one up one day and there was an article about um some food literacy programs that were occurring in some public libraries and i thought wow what a great idea there's got to be books on this topic there weren't so i reached out to ala and i said hey i have this idea would you be interested in a book focusing on food literacy and libraries and they said absolutely so i came back to the us and i spent two years researching and writing this book which just came out last year right in time for the pandemic but that's okay we can still do food literacy um i reached out to libraries around the country asking if they did any programs that included food and that included teen programs where you know if you feed them they will come and that included more specific food literacy programs like partnerships with food banks and workforce development centers and so the product was this book gather around the table which rebecca mentioned earlier um there's a little snapshot of the table of contents because that gives you an idea of kind of what what's in the book i do define food literacy and i base my definition of food literacy on helen vidgen's work she is a nutritionist and food scientist in australia and people use the term food literacy they tossed it around left and right and it meant different things to different people so i tried to come up with a definition that we could all get behind and i relied heavily upon her research i talk a little bit about the food world things that we know and we hear about we hear about gmo we hear about gluten-free we hear about all these things related to food and i try to break it down and define it for us and then um in the book i also discuss community food assessment i'm going to go into a little bit more detail with you guys today and how to design food programs and then i have a bunch of case studies from libraries that are doing this around the country so i'm gonna jump into our conversation and i have a ton of content to share with you guys today so brace yourselves here comes all this info i'm going to start by asking how can we understand the food needs of our community and the answer is first we need to know what a food need is thinking about the possible food needs in your community can be overwhelming task especially if you don't consider yourself an expert on local food and public health issues so i found that the best way to get started is to think about this through the lens of food literacy now food literacy the way i define it is it's a set of interrelated knowledge and skills having to do with all aspects of food from farm to store to kitchen to plate to table everything in between and it can be broken down into four distinct domains of knowledge and skills planning selection preparation and eating now each domain represents like i said a particular aspect of food literacy and when it's within each domain there are two to three specific components so you'll see planning here has to do with prioritizing resources for food planning food intake and making informed decisions about food preparation has to do with demonstrating kitchen skills applying kitchen safety and good hygiene selection means understanding how we access how we access our food and being able to determine what's in a food product what is what are the what are the list of ingredients mean on the back of a of a food product and judging the quality of food knowing when something's ripe and ready to eat versus when it's gone bad and when you should toss it and then there's a domain of eating which is understanding that the choices we make impact our our wellness and our well-being and it's demonstrating a self-awareness of health and food needs both on an individual a family and a community level and of course being able to join others you need socially is also a part of this domain so as we consider these components we begin to extrapolate the various applications associated within each domain and this can help us be specific in our queries and explorations so again remember i'm talking about these four domains to help us understand what food needs are so that we can start to think about what the food needs are in our community so what do these domains look like in practice so what what does all this stuff mean so for planning some examples of of the the planning domain in practice would be setting aside time and money for food and food preparation making a meal plan for the week ahead those are those are practical ways of of um demonstrating the skills and planning also choosing whole foods over processed foods and knowing what those are for selection some practice some items in practice would be knowing the difference between foods available at a convenience store and a local farmer's market being able to read the food label i mentioned a few minutes ago being able to tell again when food is ripe and when it's when it is bad and how long you can store it and how do you store it for preparation this is the one people most commonly associate with food literacy this is the in the kitchen the hands-on the doing so knowing how to use a knife to peel and cut foods that's a skill that's a skill set understanding how to avoid contamination this is one that's really important especially important in libraries as we're starting to do food literacy programs and then in the eating domain in practice this could look like understanding the nutritional differences between choosing a soda versus a glass of water knowing how to prepare meals that are low in sugar if you have diabetes running in your family demonstrating social awareness when eating with others so what what are our skills and customs that are associated with that here's another way to look at food literacy this is a graphic that illustrates the various aspects of the various systems related to food and how they interact it's a big picture i took this graphic from nourishlife.org this is a great website and they actually have food literacy guides and some curriculum for free so be sure to check that out when we look at food literacy through systems lens we can look objectively at our communities and consider what roles these systems play in our communities and how it might impact local food issues so if you have a big agricultural presence in your community think about the agriculture systems and where they might be where there might be gaps in your community so of course equipped with some basic food literacy perspective we can now begin the iterative process of program and service design which starts with exploration so to understand the needs of our community we have to explore first all right this is not going to be a surprise to anyone here but i'm going to review it anyway when designing a program service or other solution to community need we don't generally design and release because there are real resources behind our offerings such as time money and people we need to do our due diligence to justify the program its goals in the implementation process and in almost every case we make changes or tweaks to what we offered our community either after we've offered it or before it's even out there for our community to use so what you see here is a graphic representation of the design process it's an iterative process which means there are checkpoints evaluations and redos and i took this format from maker center learning which is written very much on the try try try again process so when deciding to look into communities food needs we are often embarking on a larger journey which involves trial and error to get started we have to explore we need to ask questions we need to determine a focus we need to build a team and design a research process and that explore phase is what i'm focusing on in today's workshop okay all right tools for exploring so there are various tools we can turn to discover and learn about food issues in our communities a lot of us are probably already familiar with many of these because we're librarians and this is what we're good at um to gain preliminary perspective or perhaps to better focus our research efforts we can perform an environmental scan hold stakeholder interviews and or host community focus groups those are ways we can kind of understand some of the questions we need to ask sometimes we do the work and sometimes it's done for us by other organizations which produce or manage quality of life reports local health dashboards or local government initiatives which is why it's really important to stay connected with your community once a rough direction of inquiry has been identified so once we've done this ask business over here um then we can move on to the research so um once we've we've identified that level of inquiry and we've been determined it's been determined by our libraries that in information organizations that we have a role to play in that process we can dive into more in-depth research so this can be in an ongoing capacity such as through embedded librarianship when librarians serve on county or city boards and commissions to lend our expertise or it can be through a more formal process like a community food assessment are there any questions so far i know i'm covering a lot of material pretty much rapid fire nothing yet hillary we did get one question in the chat about whether you're going to share the slides out afterwards oh yeah yeah absolutely i can send it to you rebecca if that's okay and you can share it with the participants cool thanks guys okay let me make sure okay so i'm jumping ahead and behind and backwards and forwards here we go today i'm going to speak about specifically the environmental scanning of community food assessments so like i said there's all sorts of other tools you can use to do the exploration phase to ask those questions and to dig into those questions but these are the two things i'm really going to focus on today environmental scanning is first and foremost this one is good it is it can be a snapshot or continuous so you can have a team that does this on a continuous basis but you can also just do it as a one-time snapshot to get an idea of what your community looks like in regards to a food need so i start with this one because it's a shorter a process it is the process of gathering information about an organization's environments and relationships it allows us to explore and begin to interpret our internal and external environments this will enable us to better understand how we may be affected by current and emerging issues and scanning also helps broaden our perspective and attunes our planning processes to a more proactive approach so it focuses on tracking trends it's really from pretty much from an organizational perspective you're taking a look at your organization and how you relate to other parts of your community and generally speaking you can do it with few resources so an environmental scan is an information gathering process that can be used to identify a need track trends and find and understand relationships to perform an environmental scan you're going to consider several environments you're going t start you're going to look internally you're going to review your mission your strategy your resources which include everything from people money facilities collections tools equipment everything you have at your exposure disposal then you're going to look externally you're going to explore the micro environment which is also known as your media community so it includes customers stakeholders suppliers competitors and regulation and then you're going to go a step further and explore the macro environment and i use an acronym steep for this macro environment which stands for social technological economic environmental and political and i'm going to go into that a little more detail here in just a minute okay steep the macro environment this is really fun to play with it has a lot to do with who people are how they live their health and wellness and other trends having to do with daily life um this is something that will allow you to i mean it's a useful tool for not just food literacy for all different areas of interest and inquiry in your community the technology environment is centered on advances in fields that affect development innovation learning and transformation the economic environment relates to value generation and exchange environmental topics could include those of both local and planetary scale as well as abstract concept like place making politics is an environment inclusive of ideology and participation so you see kind of i have a list a bulleted list here with some ideas of what falls into those categories scanning the macro environment has strong ties to futurism and strategic foresight so this may seem like a leap but consider that when we observe new products technologies or trends these have a basis or a foundation in our communities new things aren't created without a point of origin or shift in values so when you're scanning the micro environment when you're thinking about all of these items here in my list you're going to ask yourself what does x trend or x product on the market say about the underlying changes of my communities values and interests and you're going to want to connect this back to the organization are we also exemplifying these this change in values and interests hillary yeah uh can you break that down a little bit more you know so a lot of our folks that are on this webinar or you know front line programmers circulation folks and things like that um so what does this i mean this is not like not necessarily does not have to be a company coming in and doing this grand formal thing this can be you at the circulation desk talking to folks about how they how they communicate how they get their news things like that correct absolutely yeah so uh for instance at the pikes peak library district where i'm a director we are starting a scanning team and it's composed of library staff from all levels so we have some management but we also have a lot of frontline people because they're very much in touch with the community not only are most of us members of the community but when you have those interactions and relationships on the front line you're finding out more all the time so for the macro environment these are really really big picture things so what we recommend for scanning the macro environment is that you're reading widely across the spectrum of domains outside your industry and you're identifying things that are interesting and important so this can be done through um getting a news app on your phone and kind of reading about things of different industries i know a lot of people are following the mars rover and how that information is being is going to be used in the future um a lot of people are into tick tock right now too what are the trends that are going on that you're seeing nationwide so this is the big picture but then we do go down to the next level the micro environment is where we really talk about those community connections and this is where the frontline people have um a heads up this is where they are the leaders in finding um the shifts and changes in the um in the community so this is the micro environment here this is where we talk we explore and learn more about our customers stakeholders suppliers competitors and regulation and this is like you said those front-line conversations um have a real application here this is where this is where the majority of the knowledge about our community comes from so this is more familiar to us than the previous slide and i bet many of us are already doing all of this on a day-to-day basis so again as you're having these conversations with your community members as you're making observations from a frontline perspective on how people are moving around your library what resources they're using you're going to look for what's new and different and you're going to think about you're going to look for changes to places processes and thoughts and then you can ask yourself what do these things tell us about the shifting values in our community because again it's all about the values when things change it means it's because that matters to someone in our community whether it's a group or individual and um again how is our organization responding to these changes and interests or in processes or conversation in our community does that help answer your question rebecca yeah i know this stuff can get really like esoteric and and up in the clouds but it does come down to the frontline level too absolutely so in addition to those conversations and observations from our desks or from our service points we can explore community publications local government nonprofit reports minutes meeting minutes we can even attend those community meetings we can map local businesses and neighborhoods sometimes i will pull out google maps and just look at the businesses around my libraries to see what's changed sadly we're in an environment where businesses come and go pretty rapidly right now a lot of restaurants are going out of business um there are grocery stores too that are really struggling right now so kind of seeing where those holes are in service where things are disappearing might tell you a lot about your community so um focal issues and scanning we're going to do a little a group activity here in a couple minutes but i'm going to give you a little background first so when you are scanning there's a whole heck of a lot out there for you to take in or and there's lots of little paths and rabbit holes for you to go down so in order to kind of focus um on something we come up with a focal issue or a focal question it relates to an issue or a decision or question that is critical to the future of your organization right now so a focal issue has long-term implications it's affected by the external environment so there's some things that are beyond your control and it's imperative scanning through the lens of a focal issue ensures you can wade through an ocean of information without capsizing so we also know this is information overload and that's no surprise to us we help people juggle that all the time in our profession we need information that's explored and collected with an aim or a focal issue it's so much easier to kind of use that perspective to do scanning so really quick example would be here's a question what good services and experiences related to nutrition might libraries offer that will not only provide for individuals and communities but will enhance them as well so this question serves there's three bullet points right up ahead that's long-term implication it's imperative it's crucial to our community right now and it's very much affected by our external environment so you craft a question of this nature when coming up with um when embarking on a environmental scan so we are going to do a group activity i am going to do one thing real quick so in the chat i'm going to upload a file and the file will list all the instructions for the group activities we're going to do today so that way if there are any questions um you can take a look at that real quick okay i am sending that now hopefully did that come through rebecca do you see it on your end should be a word document in the chat yes you sent it just to me though oh i want it to everyone here we go thank you technology okay now it should be to everyone so this again is the instructions for the three group activities because when we go into breakout rooms you won't be able to see the slide anymore so i want you to have that available what we're going to do and this i'm going to cut back on our time rebecca for this activity okay i'm gonna probably have us do um six minutes what i want you to do in your teams and maybe just three groups i'm thinking i want you to brainstorm two to three focal issues that could be a starting point for an environmental scan so you're going to remember they need to be issues of long-term impact so it's not just reactive now it's something that has the potential to be sustainable in the future is affected by the external environment so that means it has an impact on your community and it's got to be pretty darn important to your organization so um we can go ahead and go into those rooms now rebecca whenever you're ready three rooms and probably for six minutes and then we'll pull folks back okay i'm just sorting everybody out and we're gonna do it for six minutes and here we go thank you all right so i put the instructions into the chat can everyone see those instructions for activity one i'm trying to get it to open i also just pasted the them into the chat if you can't get the word document open then you should be able to just see them in the chat box thank you i'm hoping six minutes will be enough time for folks to come up with at least one so it's terrifying how fast the time goes yes it does i have my little my chart to keep track of like the times i need to be moving on to various sections um let's see looks like pretty much everybody got into their rooms so i have 12 36 right now so i'm guessing if we pull people back at 12 42 yeah okay that would be perfect that'll keep us on on track okay do you mind sending a broadcast to all the team to all the rooms asking them to choose some someone who can report when we rejoin sure thank you if i can spam perfect thank you looks like it okay hillary cool um great so sometimes just articulating your query or your area of interest is the most difficult part and i know that was a really short chunk of time but did any of our three groups come up with a focal issue even if it's not beautifully articulated does anyone have a focal issue that they brainstormed that they would like to share i heard several things when i was popping in and out of rooms so there was good conversation i'll start on ours i won't say it's articulated properly but we were able to talk about how um just access to non-processed food in your community and being aware of that um like when you have a community fridge or community pantry that trying to get different types of food excellent yeah in our group um we talked about doing like community gardens um i was telling them about uh the small town that i come from in clarendon county well here i'm in south carolina um very rural um we have no grocery store they had a family dollar but that closed down um so just like having local farmers and farmers markets um and then we talked about transportation being an issue um how would they buy the supplies you know is is the soil decent enough to even start the community garden so that was great yeah those are all fabulous topics any one of those would give you a lot to work with when it comes to performing a scan or digging in and researching more in your community thank you guys for sharing there was one other group we had talked about almost the exact same thing and just going into schools bringing like farm to table to schools um rather than you know having to rely on food from far away but just kind of relying on closer farms that may be in the area great access points are hugely important when we consider food and and what's available in our community and transportation which was mentioned by the group just before um people are being affected by what they can physically access and what is available to them there so i think that's being really smart to think about the points of access people already have in their communities whether it's through um parking lots at community centers churches schools so absolutely those would all be good good starting points for this work so that was environmental scan in a nutshell we didn't actually perform an environmental scan because that's a very hands-on process and it would require us all to hop on our computers or go out for a drive and do research but that helps you when you talk about a focal point it really sets you up for embarking on that process so we've talked about scanning as a tool for exploring and now i'm going to take us on the next level of exploring which is the community food assessment a community food assessment is a formal in-depth process to identify resources strengths opportunities of a community with an aim to identify patterns of need and service gaps and design a response this is a much more in-depth process more resources are required a community food assessment can be used to identify a need justify a service response build buy-in and engagement and a plan for allocation of the resources available so it's a big process here here it is broken down into four distinct phases multiple steps or activities within each face um the foundation phase is is all the work you do ahead of time sometimes this is all you need to do because often times you'll discover that this work is already being performed in your community and you can either jump on board or you can reap the benefits of other organizations that have done community food assessments for example right now in el paso county colorado where i live there are two concurrent health assessments going on one is directed by our local hospital systems and one is by our healthy community collaborative which is run through el paso county department of public health so we have two different food assessments um or health assessments going on both of which have food as an aspect of their overall search and research and findings so there's a lot of information that the library will be able to use so we don't have to start this process in our community right now we can work with these other organizations and i am sitting on both of those groups to kind of get involved so there's ways we can we can get this information but if you decide you want to do one it is a large commitment there are there's a lot involved typical community food assessment takes anywhere from months to a year to do um i've seen a lot of libraries and organizations plan one in a quarterly cycle so they have each phase here that takes roughly a quarter of the year to do and because performing a community food assessment is such a large commitment of time and resources you're going to want to ask yourself some questions prior to embarking and i also refer to this as pre-work for community food assessment and again this could be the only work you need to do if you already find that this is already happening in your community so why perform work if it's already been done this is the main question if the information is out there and current you can use it to look internally and match strategy for action if there is information out there but it's dated is there any new information that could provide a longitudinal perspective of the issues in your community over time so how has x issue changed over the past five years how has x issue changed over the past year during the pandemic um this could be extremely useful in identifying those long-term trends or endemic issues that really need solving within your community question two is um is there interest in your local food system this question will help you reflect on the arc of your journey will it be an uphill battle are there entities set against this in your community are you going to need to expend resources in building buy-in before you even get started or is your community ripe for this kind of action so question two leads into question three you're go ng to consider the focal issues we worked on a few minutes ago that type of query framing also works for the community food assessment although your questions may evolve once you get started it's good to have a starting point an idea to pull in partners with and knowing that you can reshape its final form together question four you want to ask are who are the stakeholders that might be engaged in seeking answers to these questions so who in your community individuals and organizations would be great partners what resources might they have at their disposal to help such a project succeed and how can you convince them to join forces you're also going to want to ask has your organization identified subject experts to assist with the process again this question follows naturally from the one before are there any community experts or experts within your own organization who might be able to take on leadership roles in this extensive project you're going to want to think about resources that have been identified for possible use you're going to want to have this discussion again when you're starting to form your team but it's also smart to think about this before you begin what can your organization contribute that would be meaningful to other partners as we all know collaboration with community partners is often a give and take situation and each party needs to be willing to commit resources for the collaboration to be successful and then the final thing you want to ask yourself is how will the results be shared considering transparency and follow-up action in advance is pretty important when determining your approach you want to make sure you understand your interest and that you can articulate what you're hoping to achieve or do with the information once the assessment's complete so asking yourself these questions before embarking on a community food assessment will set your organization onto a strategic path for the work ahead any questions so far it's a lot to think about all right so also in phase one the foundation phase you're going to be building your team and it's really important to think to to give careful consideration to who will be on your team do you just need names or do you need people who will have time and skills to contribute engaging members in the community helps strengthen the project in many ways it makes easier connection and entry into the neighborhoods and groups that you want to learn more about it builds buy-in and support for project and the community so you're creating a strong shared vision um community members have better familiarity with issues and individuals they're they can provide richer informal networks to help you with your project and they are also the key to building that capacity to enact change afterward so after you've done all your research and you have your findings to actually do something with it and make a difference then once you have your team you're going to want to define your community so conversations about how your community about your community and how it is bounded or defined should happen alongside conversations of what you're interested in learning more about and what issues need addressing they should be linked one should be dependent upon the other if you change the community the question should change to reflect the new community so there's different ways to define a community you can do political or jurisdictional which is county lines cities neighborhoods service designations such as special districts voting precincts census tracts or even ethnic cultural social or environmental bounds but keep in mind the smaller your bounds or the more um more focus your bounds probably the less information is already out there that you can use to work on your research all right we have another small group activity again we're going to do just six minutes i would like one person to share a little about their community and i want the team to help come up with how would you define that community what are the issues important to the community and what role do food systems play in your community and who might be great potential partners this is a lot to cover in six minutes so that's why i want one volunteer per group to tell us a little bit about the community and then the team members take turns asking questions to kind of bring out the information that's listed here under discuss to help that team member fully um uh hopefully come up with the idea of how they would describe their community all right rebecca are you ready to open those rooms back up again six minutes cool so still the quickest six minutes ever so quick i know i'm sorry that it's so wham bam but i we i the group i was in was having a really good conversation would we have some folks want to share a couple thoughts about their communities and how they're choosing to create boundaries or define their community well i mean i'll share because i was that was we're talking about abbyville county in south carolina um in our group and that it is rural and it has a fairly low income population educational wise is somewhat low but it's also the access to the food being that the closest town is 15 20 minutes away there's one grocery store some people doing the bulk of their shopping at dollar general and just trying to find ways to connect them to real food and garner an interest in wanting to know more about real food does anyone else want to share from the one of the other two groups um i'm in camden which is only about 40 miles from the capitol columbia uh i see an awful lot of economic growth happening here there the the county is going after businesses to for an industrial park we're growing we still but but at the same time we still kind of have this rural feel to to the community um it's not camden itself is not that large the county has maybe 150 000 people in it or so [Music] i with growth in economics and such i can see more opportunities coming through here so food systems what role will they play um i just think more more food stores available we do have the farmers market that goes on i'm sure there's lots of uh backyard gardens out in the county not so much in the city but um in the county area that's where we're at i think okay county is kind of your defining boundary yes but then since you're close to the capital there might be a little bleed over too yes and that's what we had in our group um i live in lexington county which also but i also live in the city of lexington but lexington county is so diverse that we have very rural and then we're right here by the capitol also so it's hard to define whether it's the city the county and what part of the county because in in the city and there's plenty of stores and shops and businesses and a market and a farmers market but that doesn't mean that all those same things are out in the other areas of the county yeah in the group i was in um we talked about there being possibly two definitions for boundary one being based on transportation so where people could actually get to versus the people who had transportation their boundary would look totally different so we talked about that too great great conversations for such a short amount of time i'm impressed okay so um the second phase of the um community assessment food assessment is preparation so this is determining resources available developing a timeline creating work plans and recruiting participants so you're going to do all of this after you have your team and after you have started asking yourself questions about who is your community what what defines your community this is the logistics phase of a community food assessment and it's pretty similar to the work required in other types of assessments or project management work so this won't surprise any of us you have your team and you can put all your cards on the table at this point it's a good idea to perform a swot analysis or something similar the swot analysis is a good way to review and allocate resources for the project as well as aiding and sketching out a rough timeline for the work so to perform a swot analysis you go through each quadrant on the chart and you ask key questions of all the team members and the participating organizations so under strengths the team should ask itself what does each member do well what unique resources do they bring to the table discussions about a team's strength can be useful in determining owners or roles for various actions or pieces of the overall project under weaknesses you want to know what isn't in a particular organization's wheelhouse where do they have less resources do they have any restrictions that would affect the project discussing week's weaknesses and restrictions now will help the team devise workarounds and backup plans for later when thinking about your opportunities this is always the fun part this is the brainstorm part what developments in the community can this project take advantage of can we combine strengths to make something special happen this is where teams can pose and chart out various possibilities for working together when thinking about threats you need to think about what could harm or stall the project is there any competition or are there hurdles to pass bringing up the stallers and stoppers now will allow the team to plan for these in advance and build them into the timeline for instance if you know you'll meet resistance from a particular segment of your community you can plan ahead to build an extra time and strategies to help overcome these hurdles all right we've got another group activity this builds on the activity we just did so again six minutes each group is going to talk about the community they identified in the last activity and what you're going to do is a swot analysis we don't have time for all four quadrants so pick one that you want to talk about um i always like to talk about threats because those can actually turn into opportunities um but it's up to you i'll let each group decide which one they want to use and on the handout that i sent you'll see the copy of the swat analysis quadrant and it has the questions that you should be thinking about in relation to the community food assessment having such great conversations they really are we were lamenting the date that we can't do these in person yet yeah next week next year we will definitely do this again next year we'll have a full day that'll be so fun get food trucks we have dreams of doing another one of our reading grow summits and i think you know doing an afternoon workshop on something like this would be spectacular so that would be fun don't you don't lose hope people we will do all the fun in person things again yes we will we're just learning how to get really creative in the meanwhile we are and just remember you didn't have to drive to columbia and try to find a parking space casey didn't have to spend two hours on the road this morning yeah that is a benefit my commute is different depending on what day of the week it is it's either home to my office or drive down the street to my library well and i mean in a lot of ways we're lucky because no matter where you are in the state you can get to the middle in about two hours um but that's still that's a long day yeah we're coming into the capitol for training at the state library and it's a two-hour drive there and a two-hour drive home that's a long day well i'm leaving for the whole day making sure everything is covered and taken care of and so this is kind of nice to be able to just pop in for an hour and a half we are not that fortunate it sometimes takes people five or six hours to get to our capital yeah you guys are a little more spread out happens the further out west you get it's very yeah wide open mm-hmm absolutely i'm always everybody back yes when i used to travel for work it was always fascinating to be in like the northeast and some of some of those cities and then go out to denver or someplace out there and the difference in the space usage is just fascinating yeah absolutely cool well we have 15 minutes left and i still have a lot of things to share with you so i'm gonna just ask for one volunteer to share the conversation they had about their mini partial swot analysis i volunteered last time in somebody else's turn but nobody wants to volunteer i'm going to pick on ashley in my group do you mind talking about the threat you mentioned no the threat i mentioned was that we have a lot of small organizations that um are each doing their own thing and to try to get them to come together and do one big collective thing and that maybe um like say that was a food bank or whatever maybe the the library would be the bridge between those organizations to sort of bring them together to be more effective in the end yeah we had a great conversation around the library's place in food literacy and in being kind of the central the common ground for people to gather on and and share their ideas about the various work that's already happening thank you okay so we are going to move on i'm going to try to get through the rest of this content before our time is up the actualization phase is the phase is the meat and potatoes of a community food assessment so this is where this is the portion of the assessment that will likely take up the most time and resources this is the boots on the ground research this the success of this phase is highly reliant upon the work of the two previous phases the foundation and the preparation so you do not want to rush through to get to this part this begins with a review of existing data also known as secondary data and this is where us library and information professionals have the advantage this is where we have a lot to contribute but once we've exhausted secondary data we may discover a need for additional information that doesn't exist or circumstances where secondary data isn't current enough for our uses so in these cases we may opt to collect our own information and this requires selection and or design of research tools and finally we need to pull all that information data together in a way that makes sense and in a way that we can use to develop indicators and chart outcomes so here are some of my favorite resources about food food access agricultural health and wellness and i'm just going to highlight a couple here the food environment atlas provided by the usda provides over 160 indicators linked to food choice diet quality health and well-being and food access and it pulls data from state region and county-wide information the food research the food access research atlas also usda uses a map of the united states to identify locations of food deserts so you'll see it relies on census tract data a food desert for those of you who are unaware is if you are in an urban environment your nearest source of fresh food is more than a mile away if you're in a rural environment the nearest source of fresh food is more than 10 miles away the modified retail food environment index is uses census tract data and helps locate and identify different types of food retailers so it helps you map out where fast food supermarkets convenience stores are the arc gis food deserts group is a mapping tool overlaying food access information with health data and it relies upon county census block group and address data there is a cost associated with that one but it's a really cool database county health ratings you probably are already familiar with this this is county-based indicators with connections to other environmental factors and then community commons is a vast mapping database with data from state congressional district county zip code address you name it it includes demographics socioeconomic information health education political environmental data it has a lot of interesting tools that include vulnerable populations footprint which i find really helpful when talking about food access so when you're conducting research here's an example one of the ways to conduct research for a community food assessment is to assess the food retail environment of your community sample indicators for this focus would be distance people live from a source of retail food low income poverty status of the people in your community household vehicle ownership because this tie to transportation which ties to access and ratio of retailers with healthy versus unhealthy food options a food all right i've told you before what a food desert is defined as but some sample questions to ask would be on average how far do residents in low-income urban areas have to walk to get to supermarkets or grocery stores that sell healthier food options such as fruit and vegetables whole grains and low-fat dairy and there's a variety of different measurement tools that can help you get at that information food store surveys measure food availability and affordability linear shelf space we know that term from library world but what this does is it helps us um basically take account of how much of that shelf space is devoted to healthy versus unhealthy food options a marketing audit measures the percentage of marketing campaigns or advertisements that are geared toward healthier items as compared to less healthy items and of course you can talk to the store owners themselves they can give you a lot of qualitative data about the habits of their customers so that's one way to go about research another example would be household food security so one of the questions this type of assessment seeks to answer might be is household food insecurity a problem that is directly or personally experienced for a significant number of people in the community and some indicators for that question would be how much money does the community spend on food weekly the federal food security measure is it is a tool that has three levels of severity uh in relation to the physical sensation of hunger so that one it would be you would ask people you know how hungry are you today on a scale of one to three food access behaviors or coping actions of how to obtain food so how do people get food if they can't go to grocery and buy it do they really utilize food pantries soup kitchens do they use techniques to make small amounts of food last longer and you can find all these things out by doing household surveys this utilizes a reliable set of questions about general types of household food conditions so for example anxiety that the household food budget or food supply may be insufficient to meet basic needs or perceptions that food eaten by household members is an adequate and quality or quantity the final phase um the final thing you want to do is evaluate your findings you want to summarize and present so considerations for collecting analyzing and sharing information there may be ways to obtain the information in your research and you need to you need to document your process so you need to document how the information was obtained where it was obtained participants and sources of information delays encountered and hurdles overcome you need to be sensitive to your community and the individuals you interview developing privacy protocols for sensitive information will help maintain a community's trust so something to think about in the beginning before you launch on your research you need to be aware up front of any biases or built-in influences you and your team may be bringing to the process and you want to be really careful you want to use critical judgment and careful consideration when interpreting data and making claims just because there's no data for something does not mean it does not exist so as you're compiling all your data and summarizing and getting ready to present or share your findings you need to think about those considerations and of course when you're finished with the um with the research phase and you've collated your findings and presented you have to evaluate the process sometimes you find a bunch more unanswered questions that you need to dig into and then it becomes a cyclical process or sometimes you're able to pinpoint key actions that you and your community or your communities organizations can take to help work on the the question the issues you identified but of course you always need to celebrate because performing any forward sort of community food assessment is a lot of work um that is the end of my presentation i know there's a ton of information i will be sharing all of these slides with you i will send them to rebecca i will also send an evaluation if you don't mind offering me some feedback on things that you liked things that could be improved i greatly appreciate it this is my contact information if you want to be in touch i'm happy to chat with any of you guys about some of the things that we talked about today or questions you have about food literacy and then we do have about five minutes left for questions for any follow-up questions if folks have those all right thank you so much hillary um i will follow this up by saying i am part of a working group of a lot of different organizations um to deal with um health and nutrition around the state it involves several of the food banks it involves dhec it involves all the snap ed representatives across the state and we are talking about a health clinic slash nutrition slash food access mapping project um for for the entire state so that is something that is on the horizon and hopefully will become a thing um modeled after what massachusetts has for their food is medicine um um statewide project um so that that is something that is already kind of in the works that will give you guys some of this information and help you in some of these projects um now i also want you to sort of think about this in terms of many of you are working with the nnlm project um some some of you are are doing you know those of you who are not involved in the project you're still doing food literacy type things in your libraries um this presentation from hillary today was thinking along the lines of sustainability and long-term planning right how do we make this part of what our library is offering and how do we become um like hillary said you guys were discussing in the one small group um that connection point for these other organizations that are that are doing um food food things and looking at food insecurities so some of those some of those types of long-term thoughts i am going to go ahead and stop the recording