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

Project Overview

FLW24-010
Project Type: Community Foods Project
Funds awarded in 2024: $500,702.00
Projected End Date: 08/31/2027
Grant Recipient: University of New Mexico
Region: National
State: New Mexico
Project Leader:
Dr. Eva Stricker
University of New Mexico

Commodities

No commodities identified

Practices

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

    Proposal abstract:

    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.

    Project objectives from proposal:

    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.

     

    1. 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.)
    Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or SARE.