New York Affiliate Builds from 2005 APHA Annual Meeting to Help NYC Develop Public Health Tool

The Session "Community Food Assessments: Tool for Public Health & Community Empowerment," presented by the Food & Nutrition Section at APHA’s December Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, provided excellent examples of how participatory community food assessments (CFAs) can empower communities to take action for their health. (For more information on CFAs, check this link:
http://www.foodsecurity.org/cfa_home.html).

Returning from that panel where I was moderator, our affiliate in NYC, Public Health Association of New York City (PHANYC), convened a Nutrition Working Group meeting in January, hosted by my co-affiliate liaison Beth Dixon at NYU. The Working Group is part of our affiliate’s broad public health outreach effort, “Agenda For a Healthy New York”. Our Working Group has proven an active participant in PHANYC’s public health leadership, having conducted a Forum and produced a report, “Nutrition & Physical Activity in New York City: Defining A Common Policy Agenda” in Spring 2005 to help educate candidates before city-wide elections this past fall.

At the January meeting, I reported to the group about my session and that a CFA was in the early planning stages in NYC under the leadership of the Bronx District Public Health Office. Yet, having attended the preliminary meeting in the Bronx, I observed that the interested groups there were largely unfamiliar with the participatory model for conducting CFAs, and no one there had been able to attend the session on CFAs at APHA in Philadelphia.

With this understanding, our Working Group became quite energized around planning an educational forum on participatory community food assessments to educate community-based groups across NYC. With the help of our Working Group members, and PHANYC Executive Director Amy Schwartz, plans came together for “Community Food Assessments 101: A Forum of The Agenda for a Healthy New York” on Monday, April 3 as part of National Public Health Week. The theme for this year’s week, Designing Healthy Communities, Raising Healthy Kids, seems a fitting home for our Forum designed to educate attendees on the power of CFAs as a tool to create community-wide change that engages community members in problem solving via sustainable solutions! It included presentations from the December APHA panel, as well as other, more local CFA success stories.

The goal of our Forum was to help educate NYC groups in the participatory CFA model, and we invited the collaboration of other local organizations who have an interest in this: the New York City Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, World Hunger Year, City Harvest and an emerging food systems group. Discussions are under way to explore mechanisms to enable such groups to, over time, provide technical assistance to neighborhood organizations who would like to conduct CFAs but need education and tools to do so!

"This is an excellent example of how our APHA Food & Nutrition section can be helpful at the affiliate level, linking new research to the members of our states and communities who need the resources, best practices, etc." observes Food & Nutrition Section Chair Elect, Patricia Risica, DrPH, RD, from Brown University. Patti has led a new effort within the Section to work more closely with affiliates. That vision has been widely embraced, and APHA is looking to see how other sections can be a conduit to better dissemination of innovation in public health to communities in need.

Our PHANYC Working Group expressed a high motivation to take on an educational and policy advocating role around CFAs in the city. This began with the Forum and will continue via other educational support of the Bronx effort, and, over time, PHANYC could help promote legislation in NYC to use the Bronx model in Community Board #1 (once piloted and tested) for replication of that CFA process at the Community Board Level in other parts of NYC (there are 59 Community Boards in NYC!). Watch this space in the next issue for an update on PHANYC and other affiliates' exciting work.

Lynn Fredericks
FamilyCook Productions
familycookprod1@mac.com