Adaptive, stakeholder driven approach to reducing food insecurity and waste at Hispanic Serving Institution University of New Mexico campuses

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Commodities

Practices

• Sustainable Communities: food loss and waste recovery/reduction, food sovereignty

The branch and main campuses of the University of New Mexico educate students from diverse backgrounds as a Hispanic Serving Institution, 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.  

1.       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.

2. 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.)