REMARKS
Barriers to expanding fresh food access and initiatives to address them
0:35:25
·
4 min
Qiana Mickie from the Office of Urban Agriculture discusses various barriers to expanding fresh food access in underserved communities and initiatives to address these challenges.
- Key barriers include capacity constraints, limited funding, and lack of access to land for growing and distribution
- Initiatives to address these issues include:
- Increasing awareness of existing city, state, and federal programs that can support community efforts
- Identifying underutilized land for growing and education
- Implementing an agrivoltaics pilot to address capital needs and food security
- Reimagining the Farm to School program to connect urban gardens with school communities
- The office is working on creating economic opportunities for local farmers and growers to sell their produce to the city
Qiana Mickie
0:35:25
I'm happy to Sure.
0:35:28
Some of the challenges, in expanding access has been, 1, capacity.
0:35:35
Oftentimes, community stakeholders and partners are, stretched, capacity wise in funding.
0:35:42
I think one of the solutions that we continue to do in our office, since we can't, give grants out, we increase your awareness of existing programs, city, state, and federal that can support their ongoing work and, and support capacity such as the New York State Fresh Connect program, which offers funding towards, capacity for electronic equipment, as well as building out your own farmers market, community run farmers market, and actually paying for staff.
0:36:12
Other barriers that we hear folks have is, you know, access to land, land to, grow, as well as land to be able to distribute.
0:36:22
So again, that goes back to our priorities on not, one, identifying ways to build economic opportunities for, anyone in our stakeholder community from volunteers to commercial businesses and even emerging ones, but also identifying underutilized land in the city that could be activated for growing education and other, climate resilient space.
0:36:49
So these are just some of the barriers that, stakeholders continue to find themselves in that we feel is informing the priorities of the office, how we move forward.
0:36:58
One last thing I would mention too is one of the, innovative initiatives that, we I mentioned earlier is that agrivolutiaeic's pilot is to to help find a way for the city to have a way to address the needs of capital needs, as well as, food security.
0:37:17
And again, supporting hyper local, production.
0:37:22
Another initiative with reimagining farm to school in NYC, Reason why we started that work in conjunction with OFNS was we realized that they were community partners in our, in our community gardens.
0:37:36
Our urban gardens and growers, are vibrant active spaces that are growing, food and educating community, but historically haven't always had the direct connections with their school gardens and school communities.
0:37:51
The reimagining work has connected ag education in and in the classroom and also on the farm.
0:37:57
So students in their, walking distance from home or community knew that there were farmers.
0:38:02
They're growing food in their community, as well as creating, additional opportunities for food access from regional farmers.
0:38:10
Within that work, again, that training component also comes in.
0:38:14
The the funding that we've been able to leverage from the state and the federal around farm to school has given us the opportunity to support non profit organizations that support urban growing and food production directly to the farmers themselves and the sites themselves in their community, as well as, supporting, emerging farm businesses.
0:38:35
Because that is, again, part of what we realized that we need is to grow food here, but we also need to create economic opportunities for them to be able to sell into the city.
0:38:46
So these, this training gives them the chance to have a better understanding on increasing their local food into our system.
0:38:54
We see that while it's still in a pilot, we've seen some great success that is outlined in the progress report.
0:38:59
But what we continue to look forward to is making better, stronger connections to good food purchasing.
0:39:05
Because if we're talking about valued added procurement and valued added producers, it starts with historically disadvantaged farmers.
0:39:13
And what New Yorkers want to see is them be a part of the fabric of success in New York City.
0:39:19
And we need our hyper local farmers, growers, indoors and outdoors, as well as our regional partners to be small to mid scale businesses to be a part of that success.
0:39:29
So we believe that this initiative will only be able to scale in order to bring in further impact.
