Blog Archives

Request For Proposals notice for Food Is Medicine open

The Food is Medicine Initiative, announced in September 2022 by the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation, with inaugural supporter Kroger, at the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, seeks to provide the large-scale clinical evidence required to ensure patients receive medical prescriptions for healthy food to help prevent and manage chronic disease.

Our vision is to accelerate a future in which millions of patients receive the benefit of a more holistic approach to diet and health, healthcare professionals and practitioners know how food is medicine programs can help prevent and manage disease, and payors have sufficient, objective cost and effectiveness evidence for reimbursing food is medicine programs.

This national initiative will help identify, support, and implement the most viable “food is medicine strategies”

 

Initial Request for Proposals – Open September 19, 2023

The initiative’s first FIM Request for Proposals focuses on feasibility and implementation science: achieving high rates of enrollment and engagement, using input from the lived experiences of patient participants or practitioners to guide program design, and testing ways to achieve significant short-term changes in healthy eating behavior.

Funded studies will be short term rapid cycle studies (18 months or less) that address challenges in feasibility and implementation or test approaches to achieve short-term behavior change.

https://www.heart.org/en/professional/food-is-medicine-initiative

More information here

Full RFP (PDF)

 

 

A Darker Wilderness Book Talk by Erin Sharkey

Erin Sharkey will speak about her incredible book A Darker Wilderness at 6:00 PM on Tuesday May 23, 2023 in 403 Hayes Hall, UB South Campus.

“What are the politics of nature? Who owns it, where is it, what role does it play in our lives? Does it need to be tamed? Are we ourselves natural? In A Darker Wilderness, a constellation of luminary writers reflect on the significance of nature in their lived experience and on the role of nature in the lives of Black folks in the United States. Each of [the] essays [in the book] engages with a single archival object, whether directly or obliquely, exploring stories spanning hundreds of years and thousands of miles, traveling from roots to space and finding rich Blackness everywhere.”

About Erin Sharkey

Erin Sharkey is a writer, arts and abolition organizer, cultural worker, and film producer based in Minneapolis. She is the cofounder, with Junauda Petrus, of an experimental arts collective called Free Black Dirt and is the producer of film projects including Sweetness of Wild, an episodic web film project, and Small Business Revolution, which explored challenges and opportunities for Black-owned businesses in the Twin Cities in the summer of 2021. Sharkey has received fellowships and residencies from the Loft Mentor Series, VONA/Voices, the Givens Foundation, Coffee House Press, the Bell Museum of Natural History, and the Jerome Foundation. Sharkey was recently awarded the Black Seed Fellowship from Black Visions and the Headwaters Foundation. Erin is a cofounding coop member and steward of Rootsprings, a rest and respite retreat center in central MN. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University and teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Join UB Food Lab in welcoming Erin Sharkey to Buffalo to read and reflect on this remarkable project.

 

What do people need to know before they can transform municipal food policies?

New research by UB Food Lab member Carol E Ramos-Gerena in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2023.122.008

INTRODUCTION

Food policies shoWhat do people need to know before they can transform municipal food policies?uld be informed by those who they intend to serve, but policy-making processes remain exclusive to privileged voices, knowledge, and experiences. This article bridges food and policy scholarship with the critical literacy work of Paulo Freire to answer the question: how do we understand literacies tied to food policy? What does (or what could) it mean to be food policy literate? In a new JAFSCD article, Carol E. Ramos-Gerena proposes five principles for conceptualizing critical food policy literacy that support food system transformations.

KEY FINDINGS

The paper suggests that efforts to promote critical food policy literacy must facilitate communities to (a) “read the world,” (b) “read the word,” (c) be critically aware of food policy processes and systems, (d) learn contextually and through authentic practice, and (e) enable people to negotiate and transform the world (their context) collectively.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR POLICY, PRACTICE, AND RESEARCH

Possessing knowledge on engaging with food policy processes is not commensurate with actual engagement. Thus, structural barriers to community participation must also be addressed. Food system planners and educators, particularly at the municipal level, should support locally-based citizen food organizations to engage in food policy. This support must go beyond assessing communities’ food policy literacy. Instead, it must intend to bridge the gap to ensure critical readiness for food policy engagement.

For questions and suggestions, contact us at foodsystems@ap.buffalo.edu.

Event | Food Equity by Design | April 27, 2022

Speaker: Samina Raja, PhD
Wed, April 27, 2022 | 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EST via ZOOM

17th Annual reshaping ROCHESTER series, Community Design Center, Rochester, NY

Dr. Samina Raja will deliver a virtual lecture at the 17th reSHAPING ROCHESTER series. This year the series focuses on what it means for a city to be “ideal,” and asks if/how a community could become ideal. Dr. Raja will focus her remarks on the ideal of food equity in cities.

Cities around the United States are rebuilding their community food infrastructure. Community gardens, urban farms, farmers’ markets, rooftop gardens, and fresh food cooperatives are transforming food landscapes. How does this resurgent interest in communities’ food infrastructure center questions of equity and justice, if at all? Who controls food landscapes in cities? What role can planning and design play in creating a more just and equitable community food infrastructure? Drawing on community-centered research completed in US cities, Dr. Samina Raja will explore these questions in her talk as part of the Reshaping Rochester series.

Register here

Food Lab team member to speak at Climate Solutions Summit

The 2022 Climate Solutions Summit, which focuses on the Genesee-Finger Lakes Region of New York state, will include sessions on agriculture and food systems policy. The Summit aims to build skills in climate action, advocacy, organizing and leadership. At the summit, Nathaniel Mich from the University at Buffalo Food Systems Planning and Health Communities Lab will share his perspective on the role of planning and policy in building equitable, healthful and sustainable food systems and healthy communities.  The panel will be held on April 23, 2022 at 10:30 am via Zoom.

Attendees must register here. https://www.climategfl.org/summit 

Unpacking the pathways between access to healthy food and urban food systems using a novel community-based system dynamics modeling approach

By Sydney Jones

Access to healthy food is shaped by complex relationships with urban food systems that require a deeper understanding of many moving parts. One aspect of urban food systems that remains misunderstood is the wide range of contributors to healthy food availability, beyond the common reference to consumer demand.

In a recent study published in PLOS One, Dr. Yeeli Mui and colleagues present the application of a novel approach, called community-based system dynamics, to unpack the causal links and feedback relationships that influence access to healthy foods in an urban food environment. The study unpacks the experiences of community members in the 7th District of Central West Baltimore, Maryland, where there is limited availability of fresh fruits, vegetables, and other healthful foods. In partnership with a local urban farming organization and an expert consultant in group model building from the Social System Design Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, Dr. Mui convened a group model building workshop with diverse local food system stakeholders to engage in a multi-step process of mapping participants’ perspectives related to healthy food access in Central West Baltimore. Collectively, workshop participants highlighted many opportunities to improve the urban food system (see figure). One prominent theme, “economic opportunity,” draws attention to links to incarceration, which disproportionately burdens communities of color, and disrupts ties with mentors and stable family structures needed to provide young people with life skills, life goals, and awareness about one’s own health. Findings from this research draw on critical lived experiences to provide a new framework on the array of social, economic, and environmental mechanisms driving healthy food access, as well as potential levers to advance urban food systems.

Read the full article here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216985

Nominate a Regional Plan that Addresses Food Systems by March 15

Calling all food system planners, policy makers, scholars, and practitioners!

Is your community engaging in regional-level planning that impacts food systems in the United States?  If so, your plan could be featured in the Growing Food Connections policy database!

The Local and Regional Government Policy Database, which is maintained by the Growing Food Connections team, is a searchable collection of about 200 local government policies that impact community food systems. This database provides policymakers, government staff, and community advocates interested in food policy with concrete examples of adopted/implemented local and regional public policies that address a range of food systems issues: rural and urban food production, farmland protection, transfer of development rights, food aggregation and distribution infrastructure, food policy councils, healthy food access, and more. Local and regional governments interested in developing or implementing food systems policies turn to this database as an important resource.

This month (March) we are scanning the country to identify regional plans that impact food systems. These plans can be regional-scale transportation plans, regional-scale sustainability plans, or really, any sort of regional plans that aim to strengthen a region’s food system.

Do you know of a regional plan that should be showcased? Nominations are being accepted until March 15, 2019. We are especially interested in regional plans within the United States, published between 2012 and 2018.  A select number of regional plans will be showcased as a feature story on the Growing Food Connections website (and also drawn to the attention of researchers, practitioners, and students).

Nominating your regional plan is easy! Send a pdf copy or weblink to foodsystems@ap.buffalo.edu by Friday, March 15, 2019. Sooner is better!

Growing Food Connections is a federally-seeded project led by Dr. Samina Raja at the UB Food Lab, in partnership with Cultivating Healthy Places, Ohio State University, American Farmland Trust, and the American Planning Association. GFC is an action-research project integrates research, education, and planning and policy to strengthen community food systems. The Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, a research group led by Dr. Samina Raja, housed in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, is dedicated to research that critically examines the role of local government policy in facilitating equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities.  The Food Lab’s research unfolds in collaboration with other research groups within and outside UB, as well as in partnership with community and planning organizations and local governments in the United States and globally.   

Food systems planning experts say it’s time to reflect on local governments’ efforts

BUFFALO, N.Y. — On Wednesday, October 18, 2018, the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, the world’s only peer-reviewed journal focused specifically on food and farming-related community development, released a special issue on local government engagement in food systems planning.

The special issue was co-edited by Samina Raja, professor of urban and regional planning in the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, along with Jill Clark, associate professor in The Ohio State University John Glenn College of Public Affairs; Kimberly Hodgson, founder and principal consultant of Cultivating Healthy Places; and Julia Freedgood, assistant vice president of programs for the American Farmland Trust.

The special issue was sponsored by Growing Food Connections, a national initiative that engages in research, education, and policy to strengthen community food systems. The 11 manuscripts in the issue were selected for publication following an open call for submissions developed by the guest editors, in partnership with the journal.

Collectively, the articles in this special issue illustrate new frontiers in, and challenges to, the governance of food systems by:

  • analyzing how local government policies and plans are being developed to strengthen food systems;
  • probing the progress and obstacles in implementing policies;
  • analyzing how local governments are monitoring and evaluating their policies.

The experiences of several local governments are represented, including those from multiple communities in California; Buffalo and New York City, New York; Cass County, North Dakota; Clay County and Minneapolis, Minnesota; Baltimore, Maryland; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Seattle, Washington. Also included are multiple municipalities in British Columbia, as well as Toronto, Ontario.

The journal is open access, which will allow governments and policymakers from around the world to learn from other communities’ successes and failures. That’s key, says Ohio State’s Clark.

“We are excited to work with JAFSCD on this special issue. Many of our authors, and all of the editors, are community-based researchers. Therefore, it is critical that the local governments and partners presented here, in addition to communities across the globe, have free access to these research articles,” she said.

To access the full special issue, please visit: https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org/index.php/fsj/issue/view/32.

Portions of this article were quoted from David J. Hill, News Content Manager at the University at Buffalo News Center.  To read his full article on the JAFSCD special issue, please visit: http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2018/10/041.html.

 

Samina Raja to speak to the role of local governance in urban food systems and nutrition

On Friday June 22, 2018 Dr. Samina Raja will speak at the ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability World Congress, an annual meeting of local and regional governments that are advancing sustainable urban development worldwide. The ICLEI World Congress connects government leaders with peers and strategic partners, and provides a platform for discussions that will inform and enhance their work. This year’s event is held in Montreal, Canada. 

Raja will speak this Friday from 12:30 – 2pm on a panel organised by the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) in a session titled, ‘Improving #urbannutrition: the role of good nutrition governance.’ The objective of the session is to highlight the nutrition challenges in urban areas, in the broader context of urban food systems, and make a case for a focus on urban nutrition governance, including a multi-stakeholder approach to developing policy and implementation. 

Learn more about the World Congress here.

New Policy Brief | Refugees and Food Experiences: New Research from Buffalo, NY

Refugees and Food Experiences: New Research from Buffalo, NY translates research findings from the journal article Planning the City of Good (and New) Neighbours: Refugees; Experiences of the Food Environment in Buffalo, New York, originally published in the journal Built Environment. The research documents how refugees resettled from Burma navigate a new food environment in Buffalo, New York, one of the top 10 refugee resettlement cities in the US. Refugees report challenges in acquiring culturally preferred, affordable, and safe foods, and share ways in which they adapt to a new food environment. The brief includes three key recommendations for local governments: to amplify the voices of refugees in planning and policy processes; increase access to land for food production; and promote civic-public collaboration among local government and refugee resettlement organizations.