Research Your Community is a new mapping tool available on the Healthy Food Access Portal that can help individuals and organizations better understand the communities in which they are working in to improve access to healthy food.

The tool can also be a valuable resource for your advocacy and fundraising efforts. The grocery landscape is ever changing, and data is one of many ways to paint a picture of a community’s need for healthy food access interventions. This webinar will train users about how to effectively leverage this new tool.

Healthy food marketing efforts have integrated approaches used by the grocery industry with academic research to create promising and feasible practices that make the healthy choice the easy choice.

Hear from experts about how these efforts, commonly referred to as in-store marketing strategies, are changing consumer behavior in grocery stores and supermarkets.

This webinar features the latest evidence from the field, and explore how new research is changing how the public purchases nutritious food. Healthy food marketing efforts are generating healthy outcomes for retailers and for consumers.

New research in a joint report by PolicyLink and The Food Trust, Access to Healthy Food and Why It Matters: A Review of the Research, underscores healthy food access as the foundation necessary for reaping the positive benefits associated with healthy food. The research reveals that improving healthy food access in low-income communities and communities of color continues to be an urgent need with nearly 30 million people living in low-income areas with limited access to supermarkets. The webinar features report authors along with a local government official. Speakers discuss how findings from the new report can be used to expand healthy food access in communities across the country.

This report examines programs designed to influence individual food choices; presents a summary of evidence-based strategies that encourage healthy shopping and eating habits; and offers recommendations for further research. Given the growth of diet-related diseases as a public health risk in the United States, particularly among poor and minority populations as well as children, many are focused on slowing and reversing this trend. This report, funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, seeks to highlight some of the barriers to healthy eating as well as effective intervention strategies to address them.  The Reinvestment Fund summarizes the findings of existing research on healthy food interventions, with a particular focus on intervention strategies that seek to influence an individual’s personal food environment. TRF then highlights programs, or components of programs, that TRF believes have promise.

The Douglas County Commission established the DCFPC in 2009 with the goal of strengthening the local food system for farmers, consumers and buyers in the greater Douglas County area. Between 2009 and 2012, the DCFPC worked with key stakeholders to consider strategies to strengthen the local food system. One priority was to investigate the potential for a food hub as a means to accelerate, strengthen and expand the local food system. In October 2013, the DCFPC selected SCALE to lead this examination.

Limited retail access to healthy foods affects the dietary patterns and health outcomes of many Americans.  In this webinar, speakers discuss how new research and evaluation practices are helping to generate innovative solutions that stimulate change in local communities.