via The Maniblog by Claire Manibog
Our team (Peyton, Claire & Deborah) is working with the Healthy Bodegas Initiative, a project launched in 2006 by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The initiative aims to make healthy foods more readily available in bodegas around the city and focuses its work in target neighborhoods in Harlem, the Bronx and Brooklyn. We’re working with the initiative in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood in Brooklyn where 80% of food stores are bodegas. To see a map of the neighborhood marking the ratio of supermarkets to bodegas, check out this insightful report (pdf).
The initiative engages bodegas for a seven-month period, where bodega owners get guidance from outreach coordinators on how to stock healthy foods, change the layout of their stores if needed (e.g., water at eye level, move veggies at the front of the store and chips at the back), and engage with the community through activities like cooking demonstrations in partnership with grassroots organizations like the Bed-Stuy Food Council. Although their work has made great strides, it’s unclear how bodega owners can continue to maintain their good work once they’re no longer directly engaged with the initiative.
So far, we’ve found that the key obstacle is communication, as simple as it sounds. Bodega owners don’t know that customers want healthier food and customers don’t feel like they can ask for it. But once customers speak up, most store owners are very open to providing new products, from soymilk to local produce. In fact, the bodega owners we interviewed actually reported gains in profit when they shifted to healthier foods. Plus, healthy food isn’t hard to get, nor is it necessarily expensive. Some farmers even make it especially easy for bodega owners to get fresh produce: Red Jacket Orchards from Geneva, NY, drives down to the city and goes from bodega to bodega, offering healthy, locally-produced fruits and vegetables at a fair price.
So we have this win-win situation, yet there are still obstacles in getting customers and bodega owners to communicate. With this in mind, our group is now tasked with a design challenge: what can we provide the initiative – whether a product, an event, a strategy, a toolkit and/or other tools – that can help the Healthy Bodegas Initiative achieve sustainability?
Meet the stakeholders and see the rest of the Issues + Challenges presentation.
We’ve got some ideas going… more updates to come.
Patricia Llanos (left) is Outreach Coordinator for the Healthy Bodegas Initiative in Bed-Stuy. Melissa Danielle (right) represents the Bed-Stuy Food Council.
Fu’az mans the cash register at L&H, a bodega partnering with the Healthy Bodegas Initiative in Bed-Stuy.
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