NC communities identify food insecurity as one of their top struggles during the pandemic

This article was written for our sponsor, the ncIMPACT Initiative at the UNC School of Government.  

The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened many of the most challenging issues facing North Carolina.

To collaborate with communities in addressing these problems, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created Carolina Across 100. This five-year initiative offers University-based resources to communities in all 100 counties to "solve problems and improve lives," as called for by the university's strategic plan.

One of the primary challenges exacerbated by the pandemic is food insecurity.

"Including resources through Carolina Across 100 to address food insecurity will be important for the health and resilience of North Carolina communities, especially after the disruptions and challenges we've all faced through COVID-19," said Erin White, executive director of the Community Food Lab in Wake County. "Working together, bringing community voices together with researchers and partner organizations, should help uncover new opportunities and collaborations to help build food security and address the root causes of hunger across North Carolina."

Students at UNC-Chapel Hill gathered data through interviews of local leaders working closely with communities across North Carolina early in the pandemic.

"Coming from Bladen County, a rural community in southeastern North Carolina, I personally know the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on so many aspects of people's daily lives," said Ana Zurita Posas, an environmental health sciences and geography major who conducted interviews with officials from Duplin and Cumberland counties. "A main challenge that all of the people I interacted with expressed was the different ways in which the pandemic made pre-existing issues in the community even harder to address."

Nearly half of 3,200 survey respondents reported that food insecurity had gotten worse in their communities due to COVID-19.

The good news is the concerns about food insecurity have decreased since the early days of the pandemic. The decrease is likely due to quick and aggressive action by many organizations in 2020. While these organizations are already hard at work trying to fix food insecurity, they say more help is needed to adequately address this issue.

"Right now, we're working with Wake County Parks and Recreation to deeply embed agriculture into two new parks that are in the planning phases — demonstration gardens, orchards, edible landscaping, all kinds of things," said White. "Parks seem like a really natural space to build health and physical activity through food engagement."

It was when White earned a master's degree in architecture that he became interested in using design thinking "to design food systems for better human outcomes."

The Carolina Across 100 initiative will provide data, insights and approaches, such as design thinking, to help other community leaders better understand the issues they're facing and to spark collaboration in search of solutions.

The Food Lab is also aiming to start working with a nearby county to strategize on a network of farmer's markets, allowing them to reach underserved populations.

The pandemic highlighted different ways that farmer's markets can function across county lines to reach more people, said White.

"In the early summer of 2020, when people stopped going to grocery stores and restaurants all closed down, that put some very unexpected pressures on small- and medium-sized farms," White observed. "All the farms that were selling to restaurants lost their market overnight. They were scrambling on ways to sell. The farms that were not set up to serve customers directly got slammed."

Carolina Across 100 looks forward to partnering with these types of regional teams that represent multiple communities in a county or communities across several counties. The decisions about geographic scope will be left to communities. However, the program will ask teams to represent multiple sectors with their desired footprint.

The effort will draw on lessons learned before and during COVID.

For instance, "Programs through the CARES Act and others were used to buy food from local farmers and initially distribute that to hospitality workers who were hit hard early on by losing their jobs," said Alice Ammerman, director of the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention.

Other innovations during Covid include the USDA quickly releasing some waivers for flexibility on how meals could be served to kids and school buses being used to deliver food to families, said Ammerman.

The UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention is part of a national network of 26 prevention research centers aligned with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since the "center has historically done a lot of community-engaged work," Ammerman said, it was already well-situated to help with the Carolina Across 100 initiative.

 That's good news to organizations such as the Community Food Lab.

"At the end of the day, people who have trouble getting food can have their needs met by this partnership with Carolina Across 100," said White.

This article was written for our sponsor, the ncIMPACT Initiative at the UNC School of Government.