Raising Awareness, Building Capacity, and Sustaining Food Systems Transformation on Columbus’ South Side

Members of Food-mapping for Empowerment, Access, and Sustainable Transformation (FEAST) will provide an overview of their approach to understanding and empowering transformation of our local food system. I Am My Brother's Keeper (IAMBK) is one of FEAST's partners with whom they are working to increase healthy food access on Columbus’ South Side. Learn how parents and youth from the IAMBK program collaborated with FEAST to map their lived experience accessing healthy food on the South Side, how they learned to tell their stories, and how those stories are inspiring transformative change in the Southside food environment. Learn how the framework and theories look in practice: collective impact, civic engagement, and appreciative inquiry. Also learn how community coaching helped the task force create a sustainable action plan.

Description

Food-mapping for Empowerment, Access, and Sustainable Transformation (FEAST) is a community-university research collaborative practicing Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) approaches whose vision is to see central Ohio residents who are engaged, empowered, and actively collaborating with decision makers to co-create a fair and sustainable food system that benefits our local economies, our environment, and the health of all people. In this session, you will learn about FEAST's goal of understanding and building a publicly accessible online and interactive health and food environment mapping tool for central Ohio embedded with local narrative relaying the challenges of accessing healthy food in different neighborhood and environmental contexts. In addition to building an online mapping tool, FEAST seeks to understand how the lived experience of food insecurity differs by community typology, race and ethnicity, level of food insecurity, between youth and adults, between summer and the school year, and throughout the benefits cycle by implementing a modified version of Healthy Eating and Active Living Mapping Attributes Using Participatory Photographic Surveys (HEAL MAPPS™), a participatory mapping approach developed at Oregon State University. Last summer, FEAST partnered with I Am My Brother's Keeper (IAMBK), a program that seeks to provide structure, support, and enriched experiences to boys of color between the ages of 9-15 on the south side of Columbus to better understand the lived experience of accessing healthy food in that community. The majority of this session will be devoted to hearing directly from the community researchers about their experience collaborating with FEAST to map their lived experience accessing healthy food in their community. Listen to these parents and youth about their experiences, how they learned to tell their stories, and how those stories are now inspiring transformative change in the south side food environment. At the end of the research, the research team convened a task force to further discuss and implement one community-level solution to address the barriers to food access. The key themes from the research findings were: food access (transportation and financial), healthy food options, community climate (hazards and safety), social networks, and resource availability. The community researchers convened with a small group of South Side residents and stakeholders to host the community conversation to share mapping experiences, followed by a community roundtable to further discuss Cornerstores. Now, the task force is working on a strategy session to create an action plan and timeline to implement a $5,000 investment in a community-informed solution. The solutions are sustainable because they link, leverage, and uplift existing assets/resources. Speakers will also discuss the various frameworks and theories used to engage with the community: civic engagement, appreciative inquiry, and collective impact.
AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Karima Samadi, OSU Extension and research coordinator, samadi.2@osu.edu (Corresponding Author); Ingrid Adams, associate professor, College of Allied Medicine, Medical Dietetics, OSU Extension; Glennon Sweeney, senior research associate, The Kirwan Institute; Daniel Remley, associate professor and OSU Extension field specialist; Clarence Jackson, former program assistant, Franklin County community member, South High School; Stacie Burbage, Community Catalyst, OSU Extension, Franklin County

Keywords

community-based participatory research, community-university partnerships, food insecurity, sustainable transformation, collective impact

Citation

Engaged Scholars, v. 7 (2019).

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/1811/87350

Collections

Engaged Scholars: Volume 7 (2019)

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