Voices for Food: Utilizing Food Policy Councils to Bridge the Gap Between Food Security and Healthy Food Choices

Community coaching is a a strategy that helps community leaders plan for and overcome challenges to community development. Interventions at the community level are most effective when they are conceived and led by locals. Community coaches can aid the local community in the development of FPCs in rural communities. FPCs have the potential to improve the nutritional quality of available food, and connect a diverse network of food system stakeholders from the public, private and nonprofit sectors, which includes local food pantries. Food pantry users are food insecure and avoid hunger by consuming low cost and shelf stable food items. Guided client choice is a system of distribution that can be employed in food pantries and supported by FPCs. Guided client-choice is a model of distribution in which pantry clients choose the foods they would like from the pantry based upon family size and is formatted based upon USDA MyPlate. Guided client choice has been shown to meet the needs of the pantry client base better than the traditional model of distribution often found in food pantries. Food pantries have the opportunity to meet the nutritional needs of the food insecure population.

Voices for Food is a multi-leveled socio-ecological, longitudinal, matched treatment and comparison study to develop food policy councils (FPCs), and improve food security and diet quality in rural communities. Voices for Food was conducted in 24 rural, high poverty counties in South Dakota, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, Nebraska and Ohio. Counties were assigned to a treatment (n=12) or comparison (n=12) group.

Intervention activities focus on three key components that impact food security: 1) community coaching by Extension Educators/field staff, 2) FPC development, and 3) development of a MyChoice (guided client choice) food pantry. Community coaching, along with the Voices for Food kit was only provided to treatment counties. Comparison communities only received the Voices for Food kit. Evaluation components focus on three levels of the intervention: 1) Community (FPCs), 2) Food Pantry Organization and Food Environment, and 3) Pantry Client & Families. Participants in this study were community stakeholders, food pantry directors, staff/volunteers and food pantry clients. Pantry food access/availability including pantry food quality and quantity, household food security and pantry client dietary intake are dependent variables.