Thinking outside the food box

Pandemic’s turmoil spurs new directions in building a better food system to address hunger, food insecurity

Food insecurity was already a significant, growing problem in Iowa before the pandemic, and as restaurants reopen and masks come off, families who are hungry in Central Iowa are still as much at risk of being left without adequate support. 

Aubrey Alvarez, executive director of Eat Greater Des Moines, says she doesn’t want the momentum and innovation that was generated during the pandemic to end. Working with numerous nonprofit organizations and businesses, Eat Greater Des Moines has in many ways been a catalyst in shifting the paradigm in addressing food insecurity.

In early June, dozens of volunteers from nonprofit organizations across Greater Des Moines made a final distribution at the Des Moines Public Schools’ warehouses to pick up food boxes for their clients. For the past year, the Farmers to Families Food Box program had provided a systematic way for nonprofits to directly provide boxes of emergency food supplies to their clients, many of whom didn’t have ready access to traditional food pantry programs.

As that program ends, the lack of sustainability in existing food assistance programs becomes even more evident. The outpouring of support shown for that program has encouraged leaders like Alvarez to think outside the box about how Iowa communities can innovate new models for helping families gain access to fresh, healthful food.  

“I think because it was such an emergency, people were empowered to be more creative and jump in,” she said. “So that’s really where I think we’ve seen some of these opportunities in partnerships and new places for food to go. That started throughout the pandemic, but hopefully they don’t stop at the end of it, because they’ve really been a huge asset for a lot of people.” 

Local efforts in Central Iowa coincide with a federal initiative aimed at retooling the emergency food distribution system to make it more competitive, resilient and healthier, while advancing national equity and climate goals. 

On June 4, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced plans to invest up to $1 billion in The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) to support and expand the emergency food network. The investment, half of which would come from American Rescue Plan funding, seeks to build on lessons learned during the pandemic to invest in infrastructure that enables partner organizations to more effectively reach underserved communities. 

“Now is the time to apply lessons learned from food assistance activities early in the pandemic to improve how USDA purchases food and supports on-the-ground organizations with TEFAP,” Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a press release announcing the investment. “We will put special emphasis on reaching rural, remote and underserved communities, local and regional food systems, and socially disadvantaged farmers.”

In a June 18 letter to Vilsack, a coalition of producer groups and nonprofit community organizations, among them the Des Moines Area Religious Council, urged the USDA to ensure that fresh produce distribution is available to all entities participating in USDA feeding programs, and also to “create a streamlined vetting process for new nonprofits and other entities wishing to participate, many of which have longstanding and trusting relationships with the communities they serve.”

Alvarez said that Eat Greater Des Moines wants to explore innovative approaches with current and potential new food assistance partners — among them “pop-up” produce stands in small communities without grocery stores, community refrigerators with fresh produce strategically placed in neighborhoods that are food deserts, and food rescue initiatives with grocery and convenience stores. 

“We’re talking about putting more food in more places for people, and that doesn’t have to be only for people who are needy,” Alvarez said. “It’s more putting more fresh, good food where people are making it easier to access.” 

She cited the example of the pop-up produce stand program that Hunger Free Dallas County provided last summer for small communities in Dallas County. 

“We’re not there to make money on it, it’s just a way to improve access to fruits and vegetables [for] communities like De Soto,” Alvarez said. Although residents were not asked to pay during the pandemic, many who could do so made donations because they were so happy to have a place to be able to buy fresh produce without traveling miles to get it. 

Efforts around “food rescue” also represent a substantial opportunity in Iowa, and not just for low-income residents, Alvarez said. 

While the existing food pantry networks work well for the clients they serve, a big challenge is that many families who were helped during the pandemic through the Farmers to Families program aren’t part of that network. 

“What has really been nice through the last year is we were able to just get food to leaders in the community and groups that already had trusted relationships with [different] populations,” Alvarez said. “That worked out well for everybody because you didn’t have to have people going to extra spots. Ultimately, that’s what we’d love to see more of — having more of these places where people are already going and getting some support, and adding food to that. That just makes it that much easier for everyone.” 

Alvarez, who has a degree in health and wellness management from the University of Northern Iowa and a Master of Public Administration degree from Drake University, has worked in various health and wellness positions, but this is her first time working in depth with food assistance networks. 

“I think what has been most beneficial coming into this job is not having food system experience,” she said. “So I’m always asking, ‘’Well, why can’t we do that?’ ”  

Nonprofits take new steps to address food insecurity 

EveryStep has been a partner of Eat Greater Des Moines for a number of years in addressing food access, said Amber Schelling, a family support specialist with EveryStep. 

Schelling manages two care support programs with EveryStep — First Five, a healthy mental development initiative for children from birth to 5 years old, and Nine to Thrive, a program to assist expecting mothers. 

“Both of my programs work with individuals who have young children or who are expecting young children,” she said. “Our referrals come from medical providers who do well-child visits for kiddos birth to 5. We really focus on developmental surveillance and screening to make sure that the kiddos are developing on track and have a supportive home environment in order to develop and grow and be successful.” 

EveryStep works with families facing a number of barriers — from limited finances and lack of health insurance to transportation or employment issues. “If there are barriers, we walk through all of these different concerns with families to help alleviate those needs and concerns,” Schelling said. “One of those concerns is food insecurity, which is how we got connected to the program with Aubrey.” 

EveryStep got involved with the Farmers to Families program last fall, and arranged to have staff members pick up boxes each Wednesday for families they identified as needing additional food. By the end of April the nonprofit was serving 455 of its clients a week by delivering 116 boxes each week. 

Now that the Farmers to Families program has ended, EveryStep has referred clients to other programs for which they were eligible, but a lot of gaps remain, said Annie Wood, family outreach director for EveryStep.  

“We work with clients from all different walks of life, all different backgrounds, all different experiences, and some families that we work with aren’t eligible for state programs for whatever reason, but you aren’t eligible for other resources for whatever reason,” Wood said. “So we can’t just connect everyone to some type of cookie-cutter solution, so we have to continue to be creative and for those individuals that aren’t eligible for food assistance or WIC,” she said, referring to the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. 

Even for families that are able to access other food assistance programs, it may not be enough to last them the entire month, Wood said. “We were able to kind of carry families to the end of the month until their next allotment of assistance was available. So [the food boxes] really filled a lot of gaps for a lot of families … because their incomes just didn’t stretch the whole month and so that was a nice option to have.”

One potential avenue that EveryStep is in the early stages of considering is to become a qualified food pantry site, Schelling said.  

“We haven’t taken that conversation too far yet as we were trying to see what the next steps were as funding is realigned from the Farmers to Families program,” she said.

The pandemic significantly stalled that discussion, but EveryStep remains open to the idea, Wood added. “We have a site where we [conduct] parenting groups that we had identified as a good location, but when the pandemic hit we ceased all visits and classes,” she said. 

Clients in poverty live in ‘food deserts’  

As a relatively new nonprofit organization, ArtForce Iowa has changed significantly as it recognized the barriers that its young clients face, said Christine Her, who came in as executive director in 2017. 

“At the beginning, the whole organization was [focused on] ‘Let’s just help young people be amazing artists,’ ” she said. “Now, we realize that we can’t help young people be their best selves or the best artists if they’re hungry, or they’re worried about where they’re going to sleep tonight, or if they’re worried about having clean clothes. So now we want young people to be amazing artists, but we have to make sure that their basic needs are being met before they can get to be amazing artists.

“That’s how we started working with Aubrey [Alvarez] and said, ‘Hey, food insecurity impacts our community, and we want to make sure that young people and families have access to nutritious foods, because when we talk about thriving communities, it also means that they must have their basic needs met.’ ”  

All of ArtForce Iowa’s clients are living “well below the poverty line,” and many are living in placement in shelters, meaning they might miss a meal at the shelter if they came to an ArtForce program. So ArtForce began providing meals for all the youths participating in the art programs, Her said. “I jokingly tell everyone I’m executive director but I’m also executive chef.”

In providing meals, ArtForce staff learned that many clients also lacked access to good food at home, so for the past couple of years they’ve allowed the kids to take items home from the pantry. However, that ended when in-person programming shut down for the pandemic, which made the Farmers to Families program a tremendous gap-filler. 

“We’re working with young people who are also in ‘food deserts’ in ZIP codes where they don’t have access to [grocery stores] and the bus lines take a long time to get them there,” Her said. “And a lot of them are also young people who come from refugee families where parents are working two or three jobs, and the parents don’t speak English so they can’t fill out the form to go to the pantry. They just need extra support.”

Now that the Farmers to Families program has ended, ArtForce is looking at what it can do to reallocate its budget to help its clients and their families who still face food insecurity. One strategy that Her is considering is to buy produce from immigrant families who grow fruits and vegetables during the summer months for the farmers markets. “So one of my goals is to re-look at our budget and buy in bulk from the immigrant communities.”