This toolkit from ChangeLab Solutions provides a range of tools and strategies for advocates to identify and work with prospective WIC vendors, and to help these retailers upgrade their offerings in accordance with the new, healthier WIC food packages.
Learn the eight steps to follow to get more fruits and vegetables in your neighborhood with this helpful California-specific factsheet, developed by ChangeLab Solutions.
ChangeLab Solutions developed a Model Licensing Ordinance for Healthy Food Retailers, along with an accompanying guide that describes how the ordinance works and provides tips on how to implement it successfully in your community. The ordinance changes business licensing policies to require all food stores (not including restaurants) to carry a minimum selection of healthy food and meet other basic operating standards. In short, it sets a "healthy baseline" to improve food quality and accessibility at food stores across an entire community.
It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables. But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.
A profile on Liberty Heights ShopRite located in the West Baltimore neighborhood of Howard Park. The supermarket is a joint venture by two seasoned ShopRite operators, Jeff Brown and the Klein family. The partnership will combine the Klein family’s 90 year background of owning and operating stores in suburban Maryland and Jeff Brown’s experience in running urban-based stores in the Philadelphia region. The project also stands as an example of a successful partnership involving Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), Baltimore Development Corporation (BDC), the Howard Park Civic Association, Calvin Rodwell Elementary School’s Child First Afterschool Program, Klein Family Markets, UpLift Solutions, Opportunity Finance Network (OFN), City First Bank, JPMorgan Chase and The Reinvestment Fund (TRF).
This Altarum Institute Policy Roundtable examined innovative approaches, including financial incentives, to encourage healthy food choices by SNAP program participants. We also examined the added economic benefit that can occur when more SNAP dollars are spent on local food and circulate in the local economy. Speakers from Altarum’s Center for Food Assistance and Nutrition, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Fair Food Network, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation discussed what is being tested, and what is known to be working, in this critical effort to improve health status through healthier food purchases supported by SNAP.
The Healthy Food Access Fund is a lending program that provides capital financing for full-service grocery businesses or developers with a grocery tenant. It was created to help grocers succeed in underserved markets and is designed with those grocers' needs in mind.
A list of supporters for the House Agriculture Committee 2013 Farm Bill.
This report highlights exciting trends in the Fair Food Network's Double Up Food Bucks (DUFB) program. DUFB provides low-income consumers who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds (formerly known as food stamps) with the means to purchase more locally grown produce by matching up to $20 spent per market visit at participating sites. Highlights from the evaluation include increased purchasing of fruits and vegetables amoung consumers and an economic boost at farmers' markets.
The Reinvestment Funds’s (TRF) New Markets Tax Credit (NMTC) program funds community and economic development projects in distressed communities by leveraging private-sector equity and loan capital investment into community development projects to stimulate economic growth and create jobs in the areas that most need it. TRF’s allocations have provided a combination of debt and equity to three project types, each in highly distressed areas in the mid-Atlantic: charter schools, full service supermarkets, and other commercial and mixed-use developments. This fact sheet highlights some examples of their food access projects: