Participatory mapping to address neighborhood level data deficiencies for food security assessment in Southeastern Virginia, USA

Findings connect data disparities with a community perspective of contributing factors and actionable recommendations. A nuanced spatial and socio-economic understanding of neighborhood level food security is presented in light of existing and needed connective agency.

Additional food resources

Food source data presented during the workshop did not include all local sources. Some sources were missed during initial data collection due to the data not existing on a public layer or outdated sources not providing correct current information. Figure 3 shows added sources. Almost 6 percent of total food sources and over 15 percent of healthy food sources were missing from the original dataset. Table 2 shows the participants identified missing source counts. An additional 72 points, 68 healthy and 4 unhealthy, were added to the 1145 from pre-existing sources, 383 healthy and 866 unhealthy sources. Additional food sources included community gardens, seasonal or pop-up markets, mobile and programmatic services, food pantries not connected directly with the Foodbank, CDC projects, education locations other than K-12 public schools, and community centers, nonprofits, non-traditional locations, and faith-based organizations that provide meals.

Fig. 3figure 3

Food sources webmap. Location attributes including name and food type are accessible in the LIFE storymap interface [58] (derived from ArcGIS Business Analyst [60], Food Pantry Directory [61], and participant inputs) [58]

Table 2 Food source counts (Adapted by authors) [58]

Non-traditional locations contributed to the discrete data collected. Prisons, the Chesapeake Health Department, schools, and other non-traditional locations operated community gardens. In some instances, ownership of the garden was transferred to the community once established, as was the case with those established by Bon Secours Medical Center. Community fridges (i.e. refrigerators) offered free groceries outside restaurants, such as the one outside Mea Culpa restaurant. A farmer was also reported to deliver food to Norfolk from a farm in the nearby city of Suffolk. Mobile programs, such as Youth Earn & Learn, provided food in varied locations or drop-off options. CDC programs, such as VA Investment Fund Grants, also brought healthy food options to small community markets and allowed new locations to open, such as Turners’ and St. Pauls’ markets in Norfolk.

Meals were provided at locations not traditionally categorized as contributing to the food mosaic. Nonprofit organizations, including The Boys & Girls Clubs, the Salvation Army, and homeless shelters, as well as childcare and early education centers, and private schools that prioritize underprivileged groups, such as Park Place, were added because meals are served. Head Start, Childhood Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), and backpack programs that make food available through schools and childcare centers were also added.

Rapid turnover and integration of long-standing programs in Norfolk were explained during additional data collection. Participants shared local knowledge that the Ghent Grab & Go, though not typically categorized as having healthy food because it is a convenience store, will have vegan and international options after planned refurbishing in 2022. Also, during COVID-19 a hotel was converted into a homeless shelter that included meals. Further, access to food programs expands as students can start in or progress through emerging education opportunities. A participant explained, “health food education is needed in elementary school education […] not short-term, but long term and improve selections when healthy food is available.” For example, YELLOWHAB opened in 2021 for low-income students. The Hague School has also been expanding the grade levels offered from 2019 through 2023. Changes in leadership at the Ghent Montessori School may create opportunities for new educational and outreach approaches, as well.

Food resource lists and nutritional support programs available for all three cities were considered by participants to be more current. Public food resource lists with local information included Foodbankonline.org, ABBA List, 211.org, Unite Us, Resources757.org, and City Virginia Beach and Chesapeake Social Services. Nutritional and health support programs existed through Anthem health insurance and Sentara hospital grants, Bon Secours hospital after care, nonprofits connecting backyard gardens to food insecure individuals, and Food Farmacy which fills prescription diets in Chesapeake. Additional national data sets including those held by Feeding America, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Virginia Department of Health’s CACFP were suggested for further data collection. Hospitals and providers that maintain health management records were another potential source of decentralized data.

Participants called for one compiled, consistently updated, accessible dataset. It was noted that the hosting requirements may be extensive, but there are examples of ongoing efforts to address these concerns with changing and missing data [69].

Unmet need

Figure 4 shows the areas with unmet food needs added into the dataset during the workshop. Participants identified 20 areas of need totaling 52.91 km2. Of that need 28.83 km2 overlapped with and 24.09 km2 was outside the USDA data. With a few exceptions, participant input on food needs largely agreed with the USDA Food Access Research Atlas’ [67] low-income, low-access tracts. Nonetheless, after data correction, there were new areas identified by participants that the USDA layer omitted or are a consequence of spatial aggregation [40, 41].

Fig. 4figure 4

Food needs webmap Polygon attributes including priority rank and accessibility challenge are accessible in the LIFE storymap interface [58] (Adapted by authors from USDA Food Access Research Atlas [67] low-income/low-access Census tracts and participant inputs [58])

Table 3 shows accessibility challenges and priority rankings identified within areas of unmet need. Participants ranked 65 percent of the areas they identified with unmet need as high priority. Accessibility challenge associations indicated that contributors to unmet need were more complex than public transportation or safe walkways. Limited affordability and availability of healthy foods was the primary accessibility challenge attributed to 70 percent of the areas of unmet need.

Table 3 Areas of Unmet Need Rankings and Accessibility Challenges (Adapted by authors) [58]

Table 4 shows the healthy and unhealthy food source counts. Over 65 percent of food sources within areas of unmet need were unhealthy, which is 10 percent lower than the percentage of unhealthy food sources in the whole map and 11 percent lower than that in the USDA layers. While households may access healthy food sources outside identified areas of need, the comparatively reduced percentage of unhealthy food sources in areas of unmet need indicates that neighborhood level contributors are more complex than food source type distribution.

Table 4 Healthy and Unhealthy Food Source Count by Area Type (Adapted by authors) [58]

Participant’s qualitative inputs explored roles of connections between affordability, availability, transportation, walkability, and distribution. The availability of funds for food was linked to transportation limitations, the digital divide, and limited child-care options. Transportation may be needed to pick up SNAP and Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children benefits, which prevented some families from utilizing them even if they are eligible. Further, to be eligible for benefits, classes were required, which may also be difficult to attend with limited transportation. Similarly, involvement in Head Start programs at schools may be limited by transportation issues. Although food programs at schools were free to everyone in 2022, not everyone in need is taking advantage of them. Other economic concerns were associated with cost of healthy foods and utility of the federal assistance programs, which were limited by awareness and the number of food sources accepting SNAP. For example, the higher pricing of the remaining Harris Teeter grocery store in the St. Paul’s area of Norfolk is restrictive since the more affordable Save A Lot grocery store closed. Participants called for additional awareness raising.

Social and physical barriers associated with development density, seasonality, limited operating hours, and flooding were also related to transportation. Walkability is particularly problematic for the elderly, individuals with mobility challenges, and those with families including young children. Traffic volume, speed, and missing crosswalks make crossing roads on foot to access food unsafe as was the case along George Washington Hwy/US 17 in Portsmouth. Social tensions also prevented movement between some neighborhoods, such as the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk. Street flooding, which can be prolonged at times owing to the region’s low-lying location, can prevent access to food sources for many residents due to restricted walkability and altered bus routes around flooded roadways and sidewalks. Participants called for accessibility assessments.

Bus availability decreased in Portsmouth in recent years due to reduced revenues, causing difficulties, especially for households without cars. One participant reflected, “You have a lot of people in Portsmouth who do not own vehicles necessarily, so transportation is a barrier overall to get to certain places. […] There are some transportation issues that we run into – families, especially, large families.” This was not isolated to Portsmouth. Another participant stated, “Past that East Beach area [of Norfolk] a lot of residents there don’t have cars, so they must carry their groceries over the bridge back into the neighborhood.” Participants suggested car ownership as a means to identify reduced access based on density. Development density either in the form of public housing or downtown areas was also suggested to indicate food insecurity, though the impacts vary by income.

Agency based recommendations

Connectivity with health, public, and social services and the private sector on food security was instrumental in participant recommendations. Participants noted that capitalizing upon synergistic activities will be critical in expanding partnerships, particularly non-traditional ones. Participants recommended addressing systemic and generational issues with poverty to address healthy food access, incorporating non-traditional spaces into food distribution, incentivizing or regulating healthy food options in stores, increasing collaboration particularly with health providers, and improving educational opportunities for healthy food preferences, preparation, and access. To fully address poverty, participants stated that rents would need to be adjusted, which participants suggested would be better approached as a region instead of city by city. Improving partnerships with large employers, such as the Navy, could fill data gaps and improve wellbeing for enlisted service members that should have appeared in food security risk assessments but did not. More data sharing and referrals were thought to benefit hospitals and the outcomes of their patients. Increased access to food assessments from external partners could improve planning, especially for parallel initiatives.

City and regional interventions were called upon to adjust implementation of national programs and influence economic development and investment. While some participants suggested requiring, incentivizing, or penalizing stores that do not traditionally carry healthy food to do so, others reported that past efforts to do so failed due to costs in maintaining the food and limited demand. A participant stated, “There are ways to put incentives or to force, if you will, on Dollar Generals and things like that to buy—when you apply to build, that the city can impose, you have to have 500 square feet [46.5 m2] that’s dedicated to fresh fruit and vegetables. So, there are political ways to get those things into that environment and there are cities that have done this across the nation.” Concerns about food waste were also expressed. A participant stated, “There's enough food out there, it's just getting thrown.” This holistic food systems view required additional advocacy to get stores and restaurants as well as health officials to buy into. Nonprofit involvement was mentioned as a successful way to redistribute food in areas without grocery stores. It may also improve access to culturally appropriate foods based on relationships with minority communities. Participants also determined that individuals that track and realign resources, sometimes from their own funds, based on their awareness of individual and family need in their neighborhood, referred to as ‘community heroes’, are critical to food security and need to be documented. City regulations, regional planning initiatives, business, and personal relationships all feed into these recommendations.

Availability alone will not improve diets. Participants emphasized that change has to be holistic, calling for increased education in schools regarding food preference and cooking, adjustment of educational programs required to receive government issued food benefits to be less demeaning and more convenient, supplementation of fixed location government sponsored programs with mobile training units, reduced barriers to accessing benefits, and advocacy to increase the amount of food sources accepting benefits. From the school-based education lens, a participant suggested the following to improve food preference, “Teach kids in schools how to grow vegetables at home through gardens especially where less available in public schools. Tackle at the elementary school level to get ahead of obesity.” From the food assistance program lens, another participant explained, “We can put efforts in […] communities to do with SNAP education […] You can give me this money but if I don’t know how to shop well then I’m not going to use it well […] There’s that pervasive belief in a lot of our lower-secure communities that these programs are really hard to access.” To make food education more convenient, programming outside the school system was suggested through the Virginia Cooperative Extension at libraries, parks, virtual spaces, or community centers. Other participants believed these programs were too hard to access because typically an individual’s credit had to be destroyed before becoming eligible, which may require program redesign to surmount. Further, collaboration across service sectors was recommended for case management to help individuals navigate food access, resources, and support programs. Relationships with federal programs, local non-profits, school officials at several levels of government, and eligible residents are needed to support these changes.

Participants identified both need for and opportunities to build connectivity between various neighborhood, city, and regional food assistance providers. On the one hand, a participant shared about this work, stating, “We’re actually trying to work with the Foodbank now to see what we can do to help eliminate the barriers for some of these smaller food pantries […] because it’s not as easy as one would hope it would be. Sometimes they [the food pantries] don’t have things. You have to have a pest control review and all sorts of things that they may not have either the finances to do or the knowledge about.” Increased storage for healthy foods and improved healthy food options, beyond cans, was still thought to require additional nonprofit funding and space. Abandoned strip malls near schools were suggested for conversion into foodbanks where students can shop for and take-home meals. On the other hand, another participant shared “What I found is that the libraries are a great hub of information for all these neighborhoods because many of them […] walk to their library [which] were actually getting ready to kick off a food forest and food bank and community garden at one of the libraries in South Norfolk. […] Many of them are due to summer food feeding programs as well.” Fostering such collaborations can improve both resources and connectivity as well as communication. Regarding communication, campaigns were suggested including social media platforms, television and radio commercials. Sponsorships were suggested to fund such media campaigns and other education programming. Participants also suggested combining efforts with diversity training and other ongoing initiatives.

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