Feed Louisville — A Journey into Food Justice
On Saturday, February 17, a group of about 70 people came together to tackle the concept of food insecurity in Louisville at the PNC Gigabit Experience Center. Civic Data Alliance, together with Louisville Metro’s Office of Performance Improvement and Innovation, represented by Innovation Project Manager, Matthew Gotth-Olsen, invited multiple organizations to describe their technological needs for those gathered, while event partners focused on awareness around food justice and food insecurity issues. While we started the morning together, people broke off into different groups to focus on different aspects of the theme.
CDA Members Alexandra Kanik, Robert Kahne, and Chris Harrell worked with the University of Louisville to map out food sources in Louisville using both federal data and data from Dare to Care to map their distributions points. These resources are a vital part of making data around food insecurity more readable and workable for those wanting to focus on specific neighborhoods and communities. By creating, cleaning, and mapping food source data, the team was able to provide the community a means for visualizing the geographic distribution of food sources in Jefferson County. By making this data publicly available, and using this data for research at the University of Louisville, tools will be created that will provide all community members with the information needed to be at the center of community decision making. Specifically, at UofL, the Center for Environmental Policy and Management (CEPM) has a grant from the EPA which will use food source data to create an app that projects the impacts of redeveloping brownfield sites. Once developed, the app will be available to communities across the country to empower individuals with information regarding brownfield redevelopment; using data and research to increase community engagement. As part of the development of the app, CEPM is using the Russell neighborhood in Louisville to test the app. CEPM is engaged with the City of Louisville, community groups, and residents of the Russell neighborhood to ensure the information meets the needs of communities. The food source data cleaned is just one part of making CEPM’s research into reality. Going forward having this data available to researchers, community members, and other stakeholders, is essential for equitable development.
CDA Member Virginia Gotth-Olsen, along with Humana/Compassionate Louisville volunteer Al Klein, worked with Good to Grow Green, a high school student-led organization focused on bringing awareness around food insecurity and nutrient education to classrooms in our local schools. They worked on a business model for a start-up to promote their idea to investors and audiences alike.
CDA Co-Captain Pat Smith worked with IDEAS xLab members and a group of students from Eastern Kentucky on ways bring to awareness about food insecurity to their communities. Their innovative workshop featured not just cultural and historical implications of food insecurity, but also involved some creative ways to get the word out about food justice.
The main focus of the day, though, was a group working with New Roots, Inc, a non-profit organization that believes “fresh food is a basic human right” and runs Fresh Stop Markets in Louisville. After analysis of how we could help New Roots within our skill ranges, we broke up into three areas of focus:
- eCommerce — the current eCommerce situation is large, bulky, and messy. The key to this project is to create a site that can be used by New Roots if every tech person walked away from it, so the final solution was to build out an eCommerce platform with WordPress.
- Data Collection — the current data collection format is difficult to manage, overwhelming, and decentralized. After much discussion, the solution is to create a form to collect all data from the farmers in one place rather than chain emails and Google Docs.
- Marketing/Web Presence — after much discussion, the realization that we came to is that New Roots’ current marketing plan and web presence doesn’t seem to highlight the most important features of their organization. The solution, therefore, is to rework the content on their website to pull out the most critical components of their initiatives and feature them to reach a wider audience.
All of these projects seem to fall under the basic heading of needing a less complex, more focused site for New Roots on the WordPress platform. This will definitely be an ongoing project and we are in the process of scheduling a followup event specifically focusing on New Roots’ needs.
The issue of food insecurity, and it’s solution in food justice, affects far more than we are aware. A few hours on one day won’t solve the whole problem, but it helps us take steps toward solutions by collaborating with groups already doing work in the area of food justice.
By sitting down with grassroots organizations such as New Roots, we learn quickly that simply gathering data isn’t enough to combat oppressions such as food insecurity. We can all know a problem exists, and the data only serves to reinforce that knowledge. The true work exists in how we use data and skills to approach these issues. In almost every case, there are organizations and people on the ground, often grassroots, doing this work day in and out; as a tech community, it behooves us to connect with these organizations, offering our skills, technologies, and abilities, to help promote their work, rather than recreating it. Networking, being aware of such initiatives happening in your communities, focusing the direction of your organization to be in those circles is vital to truly having an impact.
