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

Commodities

Practices

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.)