Progress report for FLW24-010
Project Information
The branch and main campuses of the University of New Mexico and other education institutions such as public high schools and community colleges educate students from diverse backgrounds, and students are located in communities that reflect diverse demographics; However, a major challenge for higher education is the disproportionate number of students who experience food insecurity. At the same time, recent studies have identified that food waste is a major component of waste generated from the Student Union Building on main campus. Thus, there is a critical need to 1) decrease student food insecurity and food waste and 2) empower students to plan, implement, and evaluate interventions in their community that can meet their communities’ basic needs while reducing food waste and loss. Additionally, while identifying solutions that work well in one context is important, it is also crucial to understand how to scale up successful strategies. We propose to provide stipends to small cohorts of students at each of five UNM campuses with a community mentor who can help them navigate the quantitative skills, stakeholder communication strategies, and creative experiences of planning, implementing, and evaluating a project to address food insecurity and waste in their community or campus. In the second year, the campus cohorts will meet together to decide which activity they want to scale up to all campuses. Students and researchers will evaluate the results of the case studies and scaled up project and correlate successes in reducing food insecurity and waste with county and campus demographics to build hypotheses for potential mechanisms of successes. Students will also have opportunities for professional development and networking by attending conferences, creating reports and other educational materials, and contributing to peer-reviewed publications resulting from these efforts. Thus, the dominant outreach and education is focused on undergraduate students, but they in turn may choose to engage in projects and events geared towards producers, processors, consumers, and other relevant community members. We will evaluate success of this effort by 1) improvements in student food security from the state educational institution basic needs survey and from reductions in food waste during annual student-led inventories, and 2) from the WSARE outreach survey to gauge knowledge and skills learned. Overall, we hope to document a 5% decrease in student food insecurity, 5% decrease in food waste, and engage with up to 120 students who will a) gain knowledge and experience around equity in the food system and effective methods for reducing food waste and loss, b) demonstrate growth in desirable professional skills, and c) combine quantitative skills and creativity to share the best practices learned with relevant regional audiences of producers, processors, consumers, and researchers. We hope that this group of students will inspire other organizations and grassroots coalitions to instigate their own adaptive, stakeholder driven projects in their communities to reduce food insecurity and food waste/loss.
To address the interrelated issues of student food insecurity and food waste, this project will focus on two objectives that leverage the power of students as both being part of their communities as well as being individuals who are dedicated to seeking knowledge and skills to better themselves and their communities.
- Decrease average student food insecurity by 5% with 5% less food waste/loss by the end of the project.
The food insecurity reduction goal is based on moving from the overall rate of 58% to to 53%, the level of white students (Cargas et al. 2023). Because this level is already documented in a student population, we know that rate of 53% is attainable. Because we are working across student campuses with a diversity
of demographics, we will ensure that we reach our 5% goal with equity in mind; that is, not simply decreasing the overall rate by substantially decreasing the rate of a single demographic group.
This goal strongly aligns with the UNM Basic Needs Project by empowering grassroots identification, prioritization, and implementation of appropriate activities that serve the students’ communities, either on or off campus (as relevant). While each semester’s student cohort will likely focus only a narrow scope of the food system that is most relevant and prioritized by their community, by meeting together regularly and contributing to the final reports, educational materials, and publications, they will be able to communicate about how each of their focus areas contributes to a comprehensive view of the food system including farm/ranch production, consumer access, and nutrition issues.
Because this is a grassroots project, we do not know what opportunities students will select to combine food waste/loss reduction with food security interventions. However, local organizations have models for several strategies that align with the goals of the Food Loss and Waste Training and Technical Assistant Grants. For example, Food is Free Albuquerque is a non-profit organization focused on gleaning existing private food resources and directing them to people experiencing food insecurity. The Agri-Cultura Cooperative Network is a non-profit cooperative that aggregates produce from numerous small farms and trains people in food preparation and preservation. Three Sisters Kitchen, a non-profit education and food business development organization, is partnering with local restaurants to perform food waste audits and provide chefs with technical assistance on procurement, technologies, and preservation to reduce food waste. Keep Albuquerque Beautiful, a program of the City of Albuquerque Solid Waste Department has recently begun a community education campaign for food waste reduction. By connecting students with mentors from programs like these, the students will be able to hit the ground running even with short, semester-long time scales because they can leverage existing efforts.
- Support up to 120 “food waste and reduction champions” entering the workforce following their experience with this project with self-identified improvement of knowledge about concepts related to security and waste in the food system, and professional skills.
Undergraduate students from different backgrounds, majors, and interests who are interested in food system work and work in the student cohorts will enter the workforce with experience in community engagement, aware of the gaps in the food system, and empowered to plan and implement interventions that benefit their community. We will instill in them that “champion” is both a noun (reflecting what they accomplish in their project), and a verb (reflecting that they will have the tools to continue to do this type of work in the future).
The students working in small cohorts (4 students with a mentor) at each campus each semester will gain invaluable organizing and coalition-building skills in connecting partners, identifying gaps and opportunities, and evaluating and adaptively iterating on results. These champions will be able to enter the workforce with the skills to facilitate the self-reliance of communities to meet their own food needs.
Food system knowledge gained will include:
- Which interventions affect equity in food security
- Which interventions target different tiers of the EPA Wasted Food Scale
- Which interventions differentially affect categories of food waste (meat, dairy, grains, produce, and other)
Workforce skills gained will include:
- Program management including being accountable to a group and supervising mentor
- Backwards design of a project (outcome, assessment, activities and answering “who, what, where, when, why” to implement an activity)
- Assessment of conditions using a SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunity, threat) analysis
- Graphical literacy (interpreting existing quantitative results and/or generating graphs/tables/figures)
- Communications with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds (including considering privacy/confidentiality in data stewardship, collecting qualitative feedback, and producing educational information such as flyers for a workshop, a video, a magazine article, etc.)
Cooperators
Research
All aspects of planning, implementing, and evaluating projects have be conducted by undergraduate students from the UNM main and Taos and Valencia campuses, students from Santa Fe Community College (which was selected because UNM Los Alamos was undergoing a major curriculum/program revision and wasn’t able to participate in the 2024/2025 school year), and Taos High school with oversight from community mentors from the local food system and coordination and research oversight from PI and Key person at UNM main campus.
Food waste:
For food waste audits, we based our protocol on the methods from the EPA. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-08/documents/r5_fd_wste_guidebk_020615.pdf
And revised the method to include tracking by
- origin (indicated by city and zip codes)
- the composition of the diverted surplus food based on the following five categories: Meat, dairy, grains, produce, and other
UNM Main campus conduct a food waste audit at the La Posada Dining Hall Mar 11, 2025. They focused on post-consumer food waste, with bins set up just before the tray return. They recruited eight additional students to help, and two UNM staff members attended in addition to the Aramark staff person overseeing the event.
Our collaboration with the UNM Taos campus ended up splitting the group of six participants into the two students enrolled at UNM Taos in spring 2025, and four Taos High School Students. The two UNM Taos students have been collecting produce and expired products from the “Thrive” office (food pantry and other basic needs support services) and other locations such as Penasco food bank, and the UNM-Taos Culinary department to feed to their farm animals. Between 2/11/25 and 3/24/25, they weighed the products collected, but they were not able to collect or track meat or dairy.
The Taos High school students conducted a one-day food waste audit on March 5 2025 by collecting all of the garbage bags from the school at the end of the day. They recruited six additional student volunteers.
Santa Fe Community College students tracked the amount of produce from their aquaponics system that has been diverted from composting to giving out at the campus food pantry or delivered to a local school.
UNM Valencia students have planned their food waste audit for April 16 and plan to sort through garbage bags from the trash cans near the campus café. After they weigh the categories, they are planning to use the meat/dairy to feed a colony of feral cats on their campus and provide the produce/grains to local farmers.
UNM Gallup has not yet finalized a student cohort.
Food insecurity:
Map the meal Gap (https://map.feedingamerica.org/) has county-level estimates of food insecurity but the data is ~2y behind and thus in the duration of this project we only expect to see 2024 data, the very first projects implemented potentially reflected in county data.
We are seeking IRB approval for surveying students in the target audience for our projects to conduct before and after surveys.
Student professional preparation
We selected four students from UNM Main campus and mentor S. Horowicz who works at the local company Three Sisters Kitchen who has multiple projects building awareness about food waste with local government and nonprofit entities.
- Goff, Z. Delay, C. Uckele, and B. Stinehagen (who left the program after 3 months) have met and developed working agreements, practices writing professional emails, toured facilities such as the Lobo Pantry, and had meetings with UNM staff to understand what is the landscape for food waste/insecurity work. They have spent much of the time coordinating among the major institutional bureaucracy with the dining hall contract being run by a commercial entity (Aramark), a sustainability office, and a food pantry all having different staff and missions. Given that the post-consumer waste in the dining hall was relatively low, they are currently considering how to pursue diverting either departmental catering leftovers, or Student Union Building vendor leftovers (such as bagels, cookies, etc. from Einstein Bagels or Starbucks) to the Lobo Food Pantry.
We selected two students from UNM Taos and the mentor K. Whitman who is the instructor of agroecology and sustainable living classes.
- Pikcilingis and A. Brown are planning to create a guide for small-scale farmers and ranchers based on their experiences to reach out to institutions such as food pantries and schools to build relationships for pick-up to feed animals. They plan to share the results in the UNM Taos newsletter and share widely with producers around the state using listservs and making it free to print and share.
We selected four students from Taos High School and mentor M. Tindell who is their instructor of their garden and sustainable design class. Names are not included because they are under 18. They hosted two all-school assemblies to educate their classmates about the importance of diverting food waste and recyclable wastes away from the landfill prior to conducting their food waste audit. Based on the requirements that the schools that receive free and reduced lunch can not then donate food to people, their project idea is to purchase processing and preservation supplies so that food waste could be fed to the chickens that they are getting for the garden and the eggs will be provided to students.
We selected three students from Santa Fe Community College and mentor S. Gomez who is their instructor in aquaponics design.
Oleynikova, N. Downey, and D. Garcia Nunez decided to make a mini-documentary to show how efficiently grown the aquaponics produce is, to share how portions of it are donated and available at the on-campus food pantry, and to demonstrate storage and cooking techniques to educate people who do receive the produce from the food pantry to use it before it goes bad. They are also designing storage and recipe cards to be given out with the produce. They leveraged one student’s existing expertise in filmmaking and identified on-campus facilities for demonstrating cooking and storage.
We selected four students from UNM Valencia campus and two co-mentors, T. Duncan-Teller and P. Filipczac.
Archuleta, N. Shiplet, L. Rael, and S. Carroll plan to reach out to their family elders to learn about traditional, culturally relevant tips and tricks for food preservation, and they will present the handouts with the information at the UNM Valencia Earth Day event Apr. 22.
For UNM Gallup, we have identified that faculty and staff have very little capacity to provide mentorship this year, but identified that the local food pantry has a robust volunteer program and can train students in multiple skills such as inventory, customer service, food safety, etc. as well as build relationships which we hope may eventually result in the local pantry providing food to the basic needs office at UNM Gallup. Dr. Stricker will travel to Gallup in April to spend multiple days to recruit students to the project at the end of the semester and over the summer to catch that campus up.
Networking
All students, mentors, and relevant faculty/support staff participated in a zoom “All Hands Meeting” in December 2024 to hear the approaches that other groups were taking. All students and mentors will meet in person in April/May either at the UNM Main Sustainability Expo on Apr. 24, 2025 where they will take turns tabling to present their project ideas to attendees of the public event and exploring the other booths.
- School/institution
- Home
- Prevent Wasted Food
- Donate or Upcycle
- Feed Animals
So far, only UNM Taos and Santa Fe Community College have enacted recovery methods, while other campuses have conducted baseline monitoring to understand what are the major needs and opportunities.
Of the two projects that have documented recovery, UNM Taos has collected waste that was inedible following opportunity for reducing food insecurity at food pantries and instead feeding animals, and Santa Fe Community College has aimed at educating consumers of Food Pantry produce to prevent wasted food through spoilage or not knowing how to cook it to make it palatable.
So far, we have a single set of data for each location and thus all is baseline.
|
zip code |
Grains (lbs) |
Produce (lbs) |
Dairy (lbs) |
Meat (lbs) |
Other (lbs |
Total (lbs) |
Outcome |
|
|
UNM Main |
87131 |
18.65 |
13 |
7.35 |
6.9 |
1.35 |
47.25 |
Compost |
|
UNM Taos |
87557 |
20 |
165.5 |
15 |
Livestock |
|||
|
Taos High School |
87571 |
58 |
41 |
62.2 |
0 |
2.6 |
164 |
Livestock |
|
Santa Fe Community College |
87509 |
356.4 |
346.4 |
Pantry, schools |
A few notes and observations from the UNM main campus audit:
Time: 11am – 2pm
Total Customer Count: 480
Total Food Waste per Person: 1.58 ounces
- The “other” category consisted primarily of items that were not easily identifiable or were too difficult to sort, such as soup broth and brownie.
- Some plates were scraped into a single container based on the majority of food present (Taco Tuesday makes sorting a little difficult!)
- We observed some UNM Food employees with an above-average amount of food waste; could be a result of limited time on their break
- Reaction from La Posada customers was overwhelmingly positive with a few expressing interest in future participation
Notes from the Taos High School food waste audit:
This event happened to fall on Ash Wednesday, and due to the high proportion of the population that is Catholic, there was no meat served during that lunch period.
One innovation that seems to be emerging is how fun and creativity can help destigmatize food waste. For example, the Taos High School Students made pins for everyone and t-shirts for the students who helped sort the garbage with an image of the planet earth in a garbage can. The UNM Valencia campus student group came up with the idea to dress up as "trash pandas" (aka racoons) during their sorting event to encourage people to come talk to them and engage in the process.
From UNM Taos and the Taos High School waste audit, waste has been fed to pigs, checkens, and goats from local farmers.
From Santa Fe Community College, aquaponic products that had been composted are now going to the food pantry and being transported to local schools.
- Grains
- Produce
We have categorized a total of 768lbs of food waste.
|
Grains |
Produce |
Dairy |
Meat |
Other |
|
|
Average percentage |
21.2 |
58.8 |
13.4 |
3.6 |
3.0 |
|
Standard deviation |
19.2 |
38.2 |
17.9 |
7.3 |
3.2 |
Overall, produce is the most abundant component of food waste we have identified, but that is skewed by Santa Fe Community College only focusing on produce. For post-consumer or post-pantry waste, grains and dairy seems to be most wasted.
On UNM Main Campus, our team and/or students have coordinated conversations with the UNM Sustainabilities office, the Associated Students of UNM (undergraduate government), the UNM Food Services office, Aramark, Recycling/Facilities Management, City of Albuquerque sustainability efforts, and others. The coordinating efforts across so many offices and disciplines is challenging but we have already identified potentially duplicative activities around efforts to repackage leftover food for the Lobo Food Pantry and thus we can work together rather than in parallel.
Many stakeholders are already connected through monthly Basic Needs Consortium meetings (e.g. UNM Taos “Thrive” Center, and UNM Gallup “Basic Needs Coordinators”) and with our all-hands meetings we continue to share ideas and outcomes from related activities.
We have also started or deepened relationships with local food pantries including Roadrunner Food Bank and Gallup’s Community Pantry and are exploring how students can learn from and with the food pantry staff and volunteers.
Fall 2024 (Sep 1-Dec 31). The student cohorts will be tasked with quantifying baseline conditions of food insecurity and food waste/loss at each institution and surrounding zip code.
The project did not begin until Oct. 1 but the agreement was not signed by the funder until 12/11/24 and thus no index could be set up internally to submit costs to; as a consequence, travel and stipend disbursement was inhibited which slowed down progress to only what could be done remotely. However, by Dec. 31, we had identified four of the five mentors and selected a complete student cohort for main campus, and partial cohorts for Taos and SFCC and representatives from all campuses including students, mentors, and faculty/staff met at the first All Hands Meeting by zoom to do introductions and brainstorm ideas. We did not quantify baseline conditions because we had not selected the scope of the project and the large institutions have too many possible venues for waste than could be quantified effectively.
Spring 2025. The student cohorts will be tasked with interpreting the results of the baseline conditions and garnering grassroots ideas/solutions from students, staff, contractors, stakeholders and then implementing the ideas across different institutions.
Student cohorts are collecting baseline food waste conditions and creating grassroots ideas to implement. All students will share their ideas with each other at the all-hands meeting at the UNM Sustainability Expo in April 2025 and we will also recruit students for the fall 2025 cohort.
Education
We provided the following syllabus to each mentor and met monthly with mentors to provide training and guidance to work with students.
Syllabus
The branch and main campuses of the University of New Mexico and Santa Fe Community College educate students from diverse backgrounds, and students are located in communities that reflect diverse demographics; However, a major challenge for higher education is the disproportionate number of students who experience food insecurity. At the same time, recent studies have identified that food waste is a major component of waste generated from the Student Union Building on main campus.
Thus, there is a critical need to
1) decrease student food insecurity and food waste and
2) empower students to plan, implement, and evaluate interventions in their community that can meet their communities’ basic needs while reducing food waste and loss.
We will provide stipends to small cohorts of students at campuses who will work with a community mentor and UNM professors who can help them navigate the quantitative skills, stakeholder communication strategies, and creative experiences of planning, implementing, and evaluating a project to address food insecurity and waste in their community or campus.
Students will also have opportunities for professional development and networking by attending conferences, creating reports and other educational materials, and contributing to peer-reviewed publications resulting from these efforts.
We hope that that this group of students will inspire other organizations and grassroots coalitions to instigate their own adaptive, stakeholder driven projects in their communities to reduce food insecurity and food waste/loss.
Overall project objectives:
- Decrease average student food insecurity by 5% with 5% less food waste/loss by the end of the project (2027).
There are many existing UNM projects or resources that students can plug in to:
LoboEats app expansion; Strategy to recover retail to go to pantry or other avenues (fact finding stage). Refrigeration (for example); Food recovery from dining hall – how to package into individual servings?; Cooking classes for preserving fresh products
There may be community partnerships that could be interesting to pursue
E.g. Roadrunner food bank, Food is Free ABQ (map of food plants on campus)
- Support “food waste and reduction champions” that work on smaller projects over 1-2 semester.
These student champions will a) gain knowledge and experience around equity in the food system and effective methods for reducing food waste and loss, b) demonstrate growth in desirable professional skills, and c) combine quantitative skills and creativity to share the best practices learned with relevant regional audiences of producers, processors, consumers, and researchers.
Activities to meet the objectives:
This is a draft plan and may be adjusted!
|
Week / Date |
Pre-meeting assignment |
Topic/activity during meeting |
|
1. Jan 15, 24 |
None |
Introductions |
|
2. Jan 31 |
a. Explore https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/basic.needs/viz/NewMexicoBasicNeedsInsecurity/BasicNeedsInsecurity and write down 2 key takeaways b. Explore food waste info and write down 2 key takeaways |
Understand the context for future work |
|
3. feb 7 |
a. write down the words that are crucially important to you when you engage in group work: http://advance.unm.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/VALUES-AND-NEEDS-LIST-Feb-2022.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjpxtTh5pWJAxW2JTQIHfC_O20QFnoECCUQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0Uzjo1eS0N3yvlaBkyWnLM |
Begin working agreements; tour the cafeteria and garden |
|
4. feb 14 |
a. watch https://youtu.be/U4IU-y9-J8Q |
Discuss principles of goal setting and backward design Finalize working agreements, brainstorm ideas |
|
5. feb 21 - EVA |
a. read https://ucollege.unm.edu/advisement/etiquette.html and draft an example email to someone about your project idea. |
Discuss topic(s) to address Professional outreach – email, phone, brainstorm inventory |
|
6. |
|
Make plan to address topics |
|
7. |
|
Make plan for baseline monitoring |
|
8. |
|
Baseline monitoring Lbs, zip code, etc. |
|
9. |
|
Evaluate baseline monitoring |
|
10. |
|
All hands meeting |
|
11. |
|
Implement activity |
|
12. |
|
Implement activity |
|
13. |
|
Friends and family zoom |
|
14. |
|
Assess impact |
|
15. |
|
Assess impact |
|
16. |
|
Celebrate! |
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
The main outreach events have been the food waste audit events.
At Taos High School, the audit was after school let out for the day, so other than the student volunteers, there were not other people who engaged in the event. However, they held assemblies the day before the inventory and talked to the approximately 800 students about their intention to inventory the waste and divert the items that they sorted to feed animals and move the recyclable materials to a local recycling organization. They made buttons to give out to people to raise awareness, and the students who volunteered for the event got t-shirts.
At UNM main campus, the volunteers were set up in front of the dish return from 11am-2pm and the dining hall documented 480 people entering during that time. The student volunteers noted that the “peer pressure” of standing by the waste resulted in people eating what was left on their plate as they walked up or throwing food away in the garbage can near by, so there is anecdotal evidence that the peer pressure was helping students be aware that food waste was a poor societal outcome. The student volunteers suggested that the next time, they wanted more notice (we had ~7 days from when we got approval from the vendor) so they could prepare outreach material to give to students to help them reduce their food waste. The information that the vendor received from this event will be used to refine recipes and portion sizes.
Project Outcomes
Our student groups have identified that there are many methods for transferring food waste from the landfill to better outcomes (composting) but it is more challenging to ensure that the systems ensure increased access by food insecure people (either directly providing food to people, or providing food to animals which then provide to people).
Post-consumer waste: The UNM main campus students identified possibilities for diverting waste to hungry people are things like catering events that then either provide communication to students that food remains, or packaging and providing to a food pantry. For vendors with strict “freshness” guidelines for things like breads and pastries, “day old” products could be provided to a food pantry or dispersed community fridge/lockers.
The Taos High School Students have identified a work-around to feed waste from the dining hall to chickens whose eggs can then be provided to students and their families.
Storage waste: Both Santa Fe Community College and Valenica campus student groups have focused on training consumers, especially who receive produce from the food pantry, to store and prepare foods to maximize longevity and ensure that provided food is eaten. The Santa Fe Community College has provided simple recipes for hardy greens which may not be a traditional food in the households of low income, predominantly Hispanic and immigrant communities that are receiving the produce from the Aquaponics program. The Valencia campus students are focusing on foods that have existing cultural relevance, such as flour, tomatoes, avocados, etc. and promoting at-home methods to prolong freshness or process (dry/cook/etc.) to extend the shelf life.
All students have identified that there are institutional/bureaucratic barriers that they must navigate. Some of the barriers are intended for food safety (for example, a short window is permissible for leaving food out after a catering event), while others are for ensuring that facilities people do not have to deal with additional cleaning or maintenance (for example, an idea of promoting diverting waste food to local farmers by hosting an event with a goat on campus and talking to people about what food wastes are healthy and not healthy for the livestock).
The Taos High School students have identified that the rules regarding food for low- and reduced cost lunch are so strict that uneaten, unopened products can not be provided to a food pantry. They have discussed how that may be an area for policy to address to balance the potential for bad actors to game the system with the possibility of directing more food toward food insecure people.