Collaborating for a Hunger Free Alexandria

March 10, 2020

According to Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap there are over 860,000 Virginians who are food insecure. The US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for a healthy, active life.

In the City of Alexandria, one in five Alexandrians face food hardship. Food hardship is defined as irregular access to affordable, healthy meals. Children are disproportionately affected. At 15%, Alexandria has the highest child poverty rate in Northern Virginia and 61% of children in Alexandria Public Schools are eligible for free or reduced-price meals. This snapshot demonstrates that hunger is a health and social justice issue that needs addressing in Alexandria and the rest of the Commonwealth. As a state, we will be unable to reach our goals for economic prosperity if all members of the Commonwealth cannot reach their full health potential due to hunger and food insecurity.

Food insecurity negatively impacts physical and mental health. It can lead to numerous health problems and have a significant impact on the short and long-term development of children. For example, food insecure children are more likely to struggle in school and other social settings. Food insecurity can also lead to or heighten the severity of high blood pressure, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and obesity. Food insecure households are more likely to have higher healthcare costs, or refrain from seeking the care they need due to financial reasons. This perpetuates the cycles of poverty, food insecurity, and negative health outcomes.

The Action Plan for a Healthy Virginia challenges communities across the Commonwealth to actively lead and advocate for healthy communities. At Hunger Free Alexandria (HFA), we believe that the most important part of what we do is bringing people together to discuss hunger and food equity in Alexandria.

HFA is a community-based coalition of more than 20 food providers, faith-based communities, schools, social service organizations, and advocates for ending hunger. HFA was created to address the issue of food access and in doing so build a stronger Alexandria, which was identified as an important need in the Partnership for a Healthier Alexandria 2014 analysis and report on hunger, “Toward an End to Hunger in Alexandria,” that examined the emergency food system, access to and utilization of government food assistance programs, and the role of the private sector in food access within Alexandria.

HFA’s mission is to coordinate community efforts to raise awareness of food insecurity and to increase reliable access to nutritious, culturally appropriate food in Alexandria. We convene our partners bi-monthly to discuss needs, gaps, and redundancies. Hunger is a complex social justice and public health issue. In order to address hunger, people and organizations from all sectors must collaborate, so the diversity of our partners’ backgrounds and areas of expertise is crucial. For example, one organization does not have the capacity to eradicate hunger alone, just as one organization does not understand or represent all the unique communities that live within the City of Alexandria.

Together, we are working to implement the Action Plan for a Healthy Virginia by:

serving as a hub for collection and dissemination of resources and updates and distributes City of Alexandria Food Assistance Resource Schedule.
raising awareness about hunger in the city by planning activities for World Hunger Day (October 16th–which we have rebranded as Alexandria Food Day). On Alexandria Food Day 2019 we collected over 6,000 pounds of food and hosted a community discussion focusing on food equity in Alexandria.
advocating to the city government for policy changes and initiatives to help address hunger and food insecurity. For example, in 2019, HFA advocated for the establishment of an Alexandria City Food Warehouse, which is now food storage space for the largest food distribution organization in the city, ALIVE!
facilitating the creation of new food assistance services, and raising and distributing grant money through the Hunger Free fund.

Over the years, we have learned that strong collaborations depend on new ideas and voices. HFA’s goals for 2020 are to increase access to quality fresh produce and increase membership in Alexandria. There is always room to expand and include new types of partners in the fight against hunger, especially as we hope to include more voices of community members directly impacted by food insecurity. Many organizations that serve or distribute food to food insecure households called for the prioritization of increasing access to produce. We heard them loud and clear and are currently working on putting a strategic plan in place to accomplish this goal in 2020.

All communities in the Commonwealth can benefit from identifying who is currently involved in your food “landscape” (e.g. who is providing groceries or meals to people, what retailers or farms donate food to these providers, who gleans at farmers markets, your local government’s SNAP coordinator, etc.) and bringing these players together to discuss successes, areas of improvement, and gaps in service in the community. Partnerships can only expand from there, and no willing voice should be excluded from the conversation.

The power of bringing people together can never be undervalued, and HFA is hoping to capitalize on collaboration in order to create a food secure city. We encourage you to join us.

Ally Barbaro

AmeriCorps VISTA Hunger Free Alexandria

Think about the last time you went to a park. What did you do? What did you see? How did you feel on your way home? You probably did some walking or exercise, saw faces both familiar and new, and left feeling better in mind and body.

The Action Plan for a Healthy Virginia encourages Virginians to engage in regular physical activity. Parks can be a great location to support this goal, as well as multiple other health benefits. Whether it be improved mental health; reduced social isolation and exclusion, chronic disease, and obesity; or indirect benefits of reduced heat islands and stormwater runoff (Gies 2006), parks are an invaluable community asset.

At the Trust for Public Land (TPL), we believe that everyone deserves a park because of the individual and community benefits described above. Similarly, we believe that health, as the World Health Organization says, is a human right. And yet, like health, quality parks are not equitably distributed in America.

Across the U.S., over 100 million residents don’t have a park within a 10 minute walk. TPL, in partnership with NRPA and ULI, leads the 10 Minute Walk Campaign to get America’s mayors to commit to providing high-quality parks to all their residents. Four cities in Virginia—Alexandria, Fairfax, Richmond, and Roanoke—have signed onto the campaign.

Just living close to a park is shown to reduce childhood obesity (Wolch 2011). To create a healthier Virginia its critical that other local communities commit to increasing access to parks.

But having access to a park is only the beginning. The quality of parks matters too.

At TPL and in organizations across the country, parks leaders are constantly seeking ways to ensure parks are an asset to the community. Arts and culture can play a critical role in achieving this goal. Whether it is using arts to communicate the needs of residents for a new park or hosting a free performance celebrating identity and diversity in a decades-old park, arts and culture is a valuable tool that everyone—even if you don’t consider yourself an artist—can identify with.

Creative Parks, Healthy Communities (CPHC), is an initiative of TPL and the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), to help health officials marry the benefits that arts and parks have on community health. The benefits of place-based arts and culture are many and, you may notice, similar to parks. They redress collective trauma, improve social isolation and exclusion, address mental health, and reduce certain chronic diseases (Sonke et. al. 2019). Greater than the sum of their parts, though, arts and culture in parks and public space have the combined power to sustain community capacity, social cohesion, and equitable community development.

What does this all look like in action?

Take one example in Wenatchee, WA: Kiwanis-Methow Park. The community surrounding this small and, until recently, blighted park is predominantly Latino immigrants who, based on a health impact analysis, were disproportionately experiencing mental health issues, lower civic participation, and social isolation. Despite these challenges, spend a day in Wenatchee and you’re left feeling inspired. There’s a sturdy and vibrant cultural tissue connecting the Latino community that surrounds Kiwanis-Methow Park. Mariachi groups, papel picado artists, and the best Mexcian food in the state are all here and serve to promote regular contact with community members.

Given this abundance of arts and culture in Wenatchee, TPL partnered with artists and community organizers to engage community in ways that were familiar and could establish trust between stakeholders, such as holding meetings at Mariachi Festivals and hosting a “Health Wenatchee” festival where community members could visit the park and receive free health resources, meanwhile providing rich and honest input on the park project.

Through years of extensive engagement, the results are remarkable and the park beautiful. There are 4,700 residents who live within a 10 minute walk of a high quality park. Wenatchee residents fought hard to fund a kiosko, or pavilion, in the heart of Kiwanis-Methow Park. “The kiosko will be a place where the community gathers, a central point for our pachangas (parties),” says Teresa Bendito, a young parks advocate who co-founded the grassroots organization Parque Padrinos.

This capacity building around the park has supported advocacy in other dimensions of community life. In 2018, The Trust for Public Land and Parque Padrinos partnered with the Latino Community Fund of Washington (LCF) to increase voter turnout in South Wenatchee. With training and stipends from LCF, Padrinos knocked on 3,500 doors and made 4,200 phone calls to Latino voters in Wenatchee. When the ballots were tallied, Latino voter turnout increased from 10 to 30 percent. Compared to the last two midterm elections, voting by Latinos under the age of 35 increased by more than 200 percent!

As illustrated in the Kiwanis-Methow Park example, what starts as a park renovation can become a social movement. When the process of creating public art engages people in the neighborhood in a sensitive and genuine manner, it can be profoundly transformative and improve the health of a community.

At TPL, we believe the most empowering public art comes from envisioning by the community itself. There are invaluable voices in your community that can shape not just how many parks are accessible, but symbolize your community identity as resilient, creative, and healthy. So the next time you are thinking about how to promote physical activity in your community, consider how you might create better parks; parks that inspire and engage.

You can learn more about your municipalities parks on ParkServe. Have more questions? Perhaps they are answered on Parkology? Reach out to geneva.vest@tpl.org for more.

Geneva Vest
Program Coordinator of Creative Placemaking
The Trust for Public Land

Works Cited

Gies, Erica. (2006). The Health Benefits of Parks. The Trust for Public Land.

Sonke, J., Golden, T., Francois, S., Hand, J., Chandra, A., Clemmons, L., Fakunle, D., Jackson, M.R., Magsamen, S., Rubin, V., Sams, K., Springs, S. (2019). Creating Healthy Communities through Cross-Sector Collaboration [White paper]. University of Florida Center for Arts in Medicine / ArtPlace America

Wolch, J., Jerrett, M., Reynolds, K., Mcconnell, R., Chang, R., Dahmann, N., … Berhane, K. (2011). Childhood obesity and proximity to urban parks and recreational resources: A longitudinal cohort study. Health & Place, 17(1), 207–214. doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2010.10.001