Fresh Food Alternatives: Our Choice, Our Voice
What:
A Community Food Assessment (CFA) is a collaborative and participatory process that helps community members to address their community food needs by using their own resources in a systematic way to identify resources, needs and specific challenges or problems.
Who & When:
The Lord’s Acre Community Garden has received funding from the Community Foundation and AmeriCorps to spearhead a CFA Initiative in Fairview for a year starting in July 2011.
Why a CFA is important:
By engaging the Fairview community in an open dialogue we can begin to develop a more resilient localized food system that supports a healthier community, economy, and environment for individuals and families. Fairview is blessed with many food system assets and we want to learn from and build on those resources for growing and accessing local foods. But, there are also those in Fairview due to affordability, availability, accessibility, or lack of awareness that are not able to access local food system resources. What are the barriers people face in accessing or making use of healthy food? Once we understand where people truly are and where we want to go, we can begin to inspire, educate, build support for food system change in our community using people’s ideas, passions, talents, and creativity significantly increasing the access to, and use of, fresh, local foods for everyone in our community.
How we will do this:
A practical tool with practical applications the goal of the Fairview CFA is to collect information regarding the experiences of community members in accessing fresh, healthy, locally grown foods, as well as identify Fairview’s food related resources, services and systems to help identify the gaps and develop new and effective approaches to address those needs as identified by the community.
The Fairview CFA initiative will employ a variety of methods to hear from a diversity of community members (because community members are the experts on the local food system) including community forums, resident surveys, interviews, and focus groups as we try to discover the roadblocks to growing, purchasing, cooking and eating healthy food in Fairview in an effort to collectively develop new alternatives to the issues we uncover.
This initiative will culminate in a free report that will summarize the findings, provide a community driven action plan, and serve as a model for other communities interested in pursuing a similar path to a more resilient local food system.
How you can contribute:
There are a variety of ways to be involved with this initiative. Pantry clients, the working poor, the struggling middle class and even those with enough income to purchase quality food must all be part of the dialog. Each person’s unique perspective is vital to the success of the assessment. Encourage friends to respond to a survey, and participate yourself. Attend a community forum, or request to be a member of the Advisory Committee.
For more information please contact:
Cameron Farlow – Initiative Coordinator
cefarlow@gmail.com or 336-707-5412
Susan Sides – The Lords Acre Program Manager
susides@gmail.com or 828-628-3688
