An Open Invitation to Engage in CHIP Food Security Work

Good afternoon Buncombe County Food Security Leaders, 

Over the past two years there has been a convening of organizations under the CHIP umbrella leading efforts to eliminate food insecurity within our communities.  We are nearing the end of this CHIP 3-year cycle and, for the first time, our CHIP process is intentionally addressing how to ensure work around current CHIP priorities can continue regardless of what is prioritized for this next cycle.  

A part of this shift, the YMCA of Western North Carolina and ABIPA in partnership with MAHEC and Buncombe County have been tasked with championing efforts moving forward to address diabetes, with the YMCA taking lead on the convening of the Food Security group. With CHIP priorities potentially shifting (deemed CHIP 2.0) this has presented the opportunity to also reconfigure our Food Security Workgroup moving forward while honoring and building upon previous efforts where it makes sense. 

In conversation with several partners, we thought it best to first take a step back from large group meetings to formulate a small Thought Group of community champions to help drive strategic goals, priorities, and structure for our work moving forward. This group began to meet in July and has met several times since to help draft the strategic framework before calling a large, community meeting to present this vision.

After these conversations, we are now ready to re-convene and share what our Thought Group has created as a template moving forward. We will be hosting a work session on January 8th from 9-11 am at MAHEC in the “Blue Ridge B” room within their education building. And yes, there have been several previous dates that have been canceled due to weather and other factors.  

Prior to the meeting we will also be hosting a quick networking and coffee session starting at 8:30am. This will serve as an opportunity to ask any questions from the documents from past work and get settled for our time as a collective group. 

Please RSVP by January 4th to Cory Jackson to ensure that we have an accurate head count. 

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out.

To set the stage for our time next week, HERE are some important documents pertaining to the CHIP work within Food Security over the past few years. We will use this as a starting point for our discussions but we wanted to ensure that everyone had a chance to review prior the meeting. The main page breaks down the history of the work and at the bottom you will find another link connecting to supporting documents. 

As always, if you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out. 

This is an open invite for anyone who is currently working within food security related work in Buncombe County, please feel free to share with your partners as you see fit but please limit the number of representatives from each agency to 2

Cory Jackson

Director of Nutrition Services

Food Security Workgroup Progress and Hunger Month

In August we caught you up to date on what is happening as the Food Security Workgroup took a brief pause to consider what our work looks like as we move to reconvene with the YMCA serving as the convener and facilitator.  A Food Security Thought Group has been meeting regularly over the past few months to create a framework to re-launch the larger community group in the next couple of months. By leveraging the work that has already been completed, the hope is to draft a sustainable structure that allows for continued community collaboration for years to come. Be on the lookout for a community food forum date soon!

In the meantime, September was National Hunger Awareness Month and many of our organizations were working to raise awareness of hunger in Buncombe County and the region and what we are doing to address this critical issue as well as the resources to support this work.  Bruce Ganger, ED of Bounty and Soul wrote weekly opinion pieces during September that were featured in the Black Mountain News and the Asheville Citizen Times. You can find the pieces from Week 1, Week 2, Week 3  and Week 4 here.  And local food writer, Cathy Cleary spoke with many of our partners about the value of collaboration in addressing food security and published Collaboration is key but challenging for organizations fighting food insecurity in the Mountain Xpress.

CHIP Food Security 2.0 - August 2018

August 2018

Over the past two years there has been a convening of organizations under the CHIP umbrella leading efforts to eliminate food insecurity within our communities.  We are nearing the end of this CHIP 3-year cycle and, for the first time, our CHIP process is intentionally addressing how to ensure work around current CHIP priorities can continue regardless of what is prioritized for this next cycle.  

A part of this shift, the YMCA of Western North Carolina and ABIPA in partnership with MAHEC and Buncombe County are lead agencies for Diabetes in efforts moving forward with the YMCA taking lead on the convening of the Food Security group.

With CHIP priorities potentially shifting (deemed CHIP 2.0) this has presented the opportunity to also reconfigure our Food Security Workgroup moving forward while honoring and building upon previous efforts where it makes sense. 

In conversation with several partners, we thought it best to first take a step back from large group meetings to formulate a small Thought Group of community champions to help drive strategic goals, priorities, and structure for our work moving forward. This group began to meet in July and will meet three times to help draft the strategic framework before calling a large, community meeting to present this vision. Once this community meeting takes place the Thought Group will meet one more time to incorporate any feedback received before officially dissolving into a large community group moving forward.

In the meantime, our Food Security Collaborative has been engaged in providing input into this reset process to ensure the work to date is honored and built upon.  They have provided a summary of the work for the Thought Partner group, highlighting key work products.  In addition, a noteworthy highlight for the Collaborative is the report and recommendations from Leadership Asheville on potential models for collaboration that can help inform our food security work moving forward.  This record was also shared with the Thought Partner Group.

Additional noteworthy items for Food Security include a group being convened to consider how to best share information about food security assets and resources with service providers.  This work originated as MAHEC clinical staff is beginning to work with the YMCA mobile market and nutrition program.  The desire was to be able to connect patients with the resources that best meet their needs and not just providing connections to the YMCA resources.  This group has met twice and is exploring an easy to use online map.

Double Up Food Bucks continues to be a successful program.  A few highlights include:

• Individuals served: A total of 352 low income individuals receiving SNAP benefits compared to our stated objective of serving at least 150 low income individuals receiving SNAP benefits

• Produce $ spent: A total of $10,380 DUFB matching funds for produce purchases compared with our $10,960 stated objective in this area. We fully anticipate exceeding that goal within the next 2-3 months. 

• DUFB transactions: 2,845 DUFB transactions have been made, including those transactions in which DUFB were both spent and earned (goal was just 550 produce purchases with DUFB matching dollars) with an average of $21.45 of Double Up Food Bucks per DUFB expenditure transaction. This is with West Village Market only beginning the program in October of 2017. 

• Lessons learned: We have learned that the Point of Sale system is the number one barrier for this program operating smoothly. When the West Village Market launched in October they did not have their systems running smoothly, and the store owner believes that may have turned off some initial DUFB customers. The French Broad Food Co-op has struggled with convincing their POS software company to make changes to their system to allow the DUFB process to be fully automated. This means that they are still relying on paper coupons to award and recoup DUFB matching dollars, despite the high volume of customers there.

• Surprising win: The BC DHHS robo-call system can be an extremely effective way to reach many thousands of SNAP recipients in our targeted geographic area to alert them about the program. We timed this call so that it would be when both stores had ample time to smooth their DUFB transactional systems and when both stores are carrying enough locally grown produce to make the trip to the store to access DUFB worth it for new customers. Both stores are reporting a large increase in the number of DUFB related calls, visits, and applications being processed since the robo-call went out. 

• Next Steps: Requesting a USDA Waiver for Patchwork Urban Farms to become a third DUFB site in Buncombe County and in talks with Hopey and Company on S. French Broad to become a fourth. Also working closely with MountainWise for almost a year now to develop a transitional strategy to be able to hand over the Lead Agent role for the DUFB to them in the fall of 2018.