Healthy food in New York’s low-income neighborhoods
The New York Community Trust, in partnership with United Neighborhood Houses (UNH), is engaging older adults to help increase access to and use of fresh healthy food in low-income communities. The project is a part of The Trust’s involvement in Community Experience Partnership (CEP).
Through its CEP participation, the The Trust sought to identify a community need that was basic to the wellbeing of New York City’s communities, especially low-income communities, around which a project with achievable and measurable outcomes could be structured. Low-income urban neighborhoods have always faced significant challenges. In today’s economic environment, these challenges have become even greater as poor neighborhoods are besieged by rising hunger, disinvestment, increasing crime, higher rates of unemployment, and lack of access to some of the most basic needs, including healthy, affordable food. These same communities also suffer significant health challenges, many of which are associated with diet—including higher-than-average rates for obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease—adding billions of dollars to society’s annual health care costs.
One of the most powerful strategies for addressing these challenges has been rallying a community’s resources (human, political, financial) around the very basic issue of food, especially the need to increase access to and use of fresh, locally grown food.
The increasing importance of building the capacity for localities to increase access to healthy food is underscored by the fact that in New York City, one in six adults and children live in households suffering from hunger or struggling at the brink of it, and nearly 70% of emergency food programs have not supplied enough food to meet their current demand. Through its partnership with UNH, a membership organization representing one of the largest human service systems in New York City, The Trust is engaged in efforts to add value to the array of civic engagement opportunities that already exist in the city.
