Real change has to come from within, and helping bring better food and food awareness to neighborhoods in need—the goal of New York City LISC’s Communities for Healthy Food initiative—is a fundamentally grassroots endeavor. An article in Next City highlights how neighbors in Brooklyn and the Bronx, with LISC’s support, are working to improve their communities’ diets and health, mitigate food insecurity and strengthen social ties and entrepreneurship, all at the same time.
The excerpt below is from:
"Building Healthier Communities With Homegrown Foodies"
by Patrick Rogers, Next City
Yvette King’s recent visit to the Golden Harvest Client Choice Food Pantry in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn was short, but, literally, fruitful.
The 48-year-old mother of two already had oranges, apples, and plantains in her grocery cart when a pantry volunteer encouraged her to take some canned peaches and pineapples.
“We like both of those,” said King cheerfully as she added the cans to the cart. King filled it with green peppers and squash, canned salmon, peanut butter, bran flakes and non-fat yogurt before steering to the checkout with enough groceries for a week, she reckoned. “Oh yeah, that’s a wrap,” she said.
Golden Harvest is just one component of Communities for Healthy Food NYC, a pioneering approach to combatting high rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related health conditions in targeted high-poverty neighborhoods. It does this by bringing better foods and food awareness to residents like King. The initiative is a partnership between the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) New York City and community development corporations with deep roots in their neighborhoods—two in Brooklyn, one in the Bronx, and another in Harlem.
While Communities for Healthy Food’s immediate goal is to foster healthier eating in parts of the city that need it the most, the ultimate aim is something more ambitious, says Rick Luftglass, executive director of the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, which provided $1.6 million in funding to kick-start the effort with the New York office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation in 2013.
“We’re talking about food in the larger, more holistic sense—issues like access and affordability, health disparities, and employment,” said Luftglass. “We’re addressing it with a laser-like focus that we feel can actually move the needle on improving people’s lives.” Continued[+]...
Supporter(s):
Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund