With the help of the Adirondack Foundation, the nonprofits AdkAction and the Adirondack Health Institute have created what they hope will be the basis of a network to lessen food insecurity in the Adirondacks, create a more sustainable food chain in the area, and even help the environment, officials said in a recent interview.
The network is called the Adirondack Food System Network, said Nancy Gildersleeve in a prepared statement. She is an executive director at Adirondack Health Institute of Glens Falls.
“AHI is pleased to be serving as the backbone organization, the coordinating body that will provide support, facilitation, and guidance, for this much-needed...initiative,” she wrote.
The groups were already looking at food insecurity at the start of 2020, but the pandemic's disruption of the food chain between northern New York and the rest of the world meant fewer options for people and more expensive food. The pandemic sped up their work.
"What we're doing is rebuilding the notion of a regional food system," said Brittany Christenson, Executive Director of AdkAction.
The network is still being organized but has volunteers on a general steering committee and more people on five smaller committees. The people are drawn from nine counties: Clinton, Essex, Franklin, Fulton, Hamilton, St. Lawrence, Saratoga, Warren, and Washington.
Each of the subcommittees is looking at five areas in the food chain: production, consumption, distribution, processing, and food waste management. The aim is to build trust, community, coordination and efficiency through the region, they said.
"We really want to make sure we’ve got a vehicle to work across the region,” Gildersleeve said in an interview. As part of that, their website is designed to help vendors and consumers find resources and information [See here and here].
AdkAction’s mission is aimed generally at addressing unmet needs and promoting vibrant communities in the Adirondacks. Food insecurity and a stable economy are part of that. AHI’s goal is to help health care providers and community-based organizations to improve health care and healthy living, their website says.
The relationship between food and health is obvious, especially with fresh, unprocessed foods, grown locally, Christenson said. Gildersleeve said better food can reduce obesity and diabetes and promote better health generally.
Both organizations are nonprofits, but the grant funding in health care is much larger than what AdkAction would be able to access alone.
"There're a lot more resources in the healthcare industry than there are in the farming industry,” Christenson said.
She said the grants they hope to win will have double the effect: the community gets healthier food and the grant money comes into the local economy. It’s all aimed to increase the resiliency against further pandemics, against a changing climate and against another food disruption, Christenson said.
The new network aims to bring information into one location to make it accessible to farmers and other producers.
Christenson said there are a number of programs that have been running for years. She mentioned the Fresh Connect program which brings fresh food to high-need areas and Double-up Food Bucks, a program that encourages people to buy fresh foods with their SNAP EBT cards (SNAP is formerly food stamps). Plus, the number of farmers now willing to take SNAP benefits at farmer’s markets has increased, Christenson said. [Read more here.]
There are a lot of affordable food options, but if a person is already in economic trouble and food insecure, "navigating all of that can be quite time consuming,” Christenson said. "Now, together, we can all use the same set of facts."