Improving food access by building upon neighborhood-level food assets

Our Urban Food Equity team completes place-based policy, system, and environmental interventions to improve food access for San Diego County’s low-income residents by building upon existing neighborhood-level food assets including: small grocery stores, urban farms, farmers’ markets, and food pantries.

Interventions focus on building the capacity of an individual site to improve their healthy food offering and/or increase their reach to low-income San Diego County residents. Interventions include a range of activities including but not limited to:

• Technical assistance to farmers to become authorized to accept SNAP EBT for their low-income customers
• Fresh produce handling training and cold storage
• Culturally-relevant nutrition education and community engagement
• Trauma-informed client-choice models at emergency food distributions
• Community-centered promotion and marketing of local food resources
• Garden builds
• Resource development

Elle Mari, Director

[email protected]