How Does Food Insecurity Affect Communities?

Community coalitions that include people with lived experience, businesses, non-profit and community-based organizations, and local or state governments, can effectively coordinate government and private sector efforts to connect people to resources that improve food security. Opportunities include:

• Attracting local or regional grocery stores. Food insecurity is often highest in communities without easy access to grocery stores. These can exist nearly anywhere, from urban and suburban locations to rural areas that require members to drive a significant distance to reach them. When coalitions work to attract local or regional grocery stores to the area or create new public transportation routes to existing grocery stores, they are also creating employment opportunities that improve financial stability and reduce food insecurity as a result.
• Supporting local stores to develop the needed infrastructure and culturally relevant nutritious food. Store owners may find it difficult to outfit their markets with the necessary equipment to expand and diversify their food products; however, with financial support, these stores can purchase refrigeration and storage units. This enables them to offer more whole foods such as fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables and other necessary items tailored to their communities.
• Working with federal, state, and local governments to support increased access to high-value foods. Enhancing awareness about existing nutritional support programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) can help with improving purchasing power, decreasing stress, reducing poverty and hunger, and improving access to high-value foods. Communities can work together to increase resources to improve food security.
• Encouraging community support, such as volunteering, donating money or food to community food pantries/banks, and buying food from local growers (via farmers markets or food suppliers).
   

Communities Growing Together

Another method for improving a community’s access to food including fresh fruits and vegetables is to start a community garden. They can be created in rural, suburban, and urban areas, wherever there is open space. If land is available, existing soil can be prepared and used. Building raised platforms and plant boxes and filling them with nutrient-rich dirt provides gardening space on hardscape surfaces like concrete or asphalt.

In addition to nutritious food, community gardens produce additional benefits for those working on the gardens. The increased social interaction reduces loneliness and isolation (a health-related social need), strengthens interpersonal relationships among community and even family members, and increases physical activity. Community gardens also bring more greenspace, encourage outdoor time, and present educational opportunities – especially for young people.
 

Making a Difference in Local Communities

Elevance Health, through its affiliated health plans, associates, and the Elevance Health Foundation, works to improve food security.

• Elevance Health Foundation supports organizations working to improve food security. Its $14 million grant to Feeding America’s Food as Medicine program increases access to nutritious foods through public food programs. The grant provides resources to assess people for food insecurity and connect to essential local community and federal resources such as SNAP.
• Elevance Health Foundation supports Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Indianapolis with a $2.45 million Equitable Food Access in Indianapolis initiative. The vision is for the neighborhood to create and drive a wide-ranging plan that could include guidance for people who need federal food assistance, the creation of a food hub with a kitchen to conduct cooking demonstrations, address the food desert in the area, and add a mobile food delivery truck to provide locally grown foods to residents in the neighborhood.
• More than 2,000 Elevance Health associates volunteered with their local organizations to package more than 730,000 pounds of food and serve nearly 540,000 meals.

Many of Elevance Health’s affiliated health plans offer Medicare Advantage members supplemental benefits that include an option to receive a monthly allowance to buy nutritious food.