If you happen to stop by the corner of Macomb and Georgia
streets on a Saturday, you will see a bustling gathering of community
entrepreneurs trading everything from fresh greens to organic homemade soaps
and candles. Farmers’ markets, like the one in Tallahassee’s historic
Frenchtown, connect people with fresh, locally grown food and each other.
In “food deserts,” like parts of Tallahassee, where places
to purchase nutritious produce are scant and nearby food stores instead
emphasize packaged or fast foods, a farmers’ market would seem to present the
perfect solution to improve nutrition for local residents while also supporting
small to medium-sized local farmers.
What are the barriers in effect that are preventing some
populations of local residents from connecting with fresh local food? How can
markets like the Frenchtown Heritage Marketplace attract more business and put
more good food on the plates of local residents?
The key may be community empowerment in the planning and
decision-making process. This is the impetus for a study underway by FAMU’s
Institute of Public Health (FAMU IPH) in collaboration with the Frenchtown
Heritage Marketplace (FHM), Tallahassee housing and food agencies, and the
Tallahassee Food Network. The study is focused on understanding ways in which
the FHM can better connect with potential farmers’ market customers living in
public housing communities nearby.
Frenchtown Heritage Marketplace
The project emphasizes cultural awareness and empowerment of
the local community as it seeks to fill a void in research on perspectives of
public housing residents’ relationships with food and their receptivity to food
from farmers’ markets. The project, entitled, “Building the Consumer Base:
Supporting the Farmers’ Market Solution to Food Deserts,” is supported by a
$200,000 grant award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Unique to this research project is a collaborative
implementation strategy that includes an advisory board of community organizers
and local area experts in food, health, education, community engagement, and
cultural competency as well as members of the public housing community, who are
resident research assistants. The multi-stage ethnographic study includes
interviews, field tests, observations, and participant surveys to determine
effective engagement methods for increasing target population interaction with
the local farmers’ market.
The research objectives are: to reach 225 potential market
customers who reside in targeted public housing communities in Tallahassee, to
increase the customer volume to the FHM by 35 percent, and to hire and train
community members to conduct the research in collaboration with project staff
and FAMU IPH masters and doctoral students.
Illustrating the benefits of the farmers’ market
The public housing community neighbors were trained as teams
with the FAMU IPH graduate students and bonded as research partners. So far, the teams have conducted 42 research
interviews and assisted with Phase 2 of the study—data transfer and analysis.
The kick-off event for the field tests took place September
26 at the Springfield Community Center.
This highly interactive event included rotations among booths displaying
savory, healthier food preparation as well as educational discussions and games
that encouraged participants to express what they had learned. In one insightful game tagged “The Money
Saver,” neighbors were asked to determine where each of three shopping bags
filled with food were obtained by estimating which grocer gave more “bang for
the buck”: Winn-Dixie, Walmart or FHM. Residents consistently thought the bag
packed with the most food was from Walmart when it was actually from the
farmers’ market, showing they could get the most food there for the same amount
of money!
With the assistance and input of the community researchers,
findings from these and other engagement and education strategies, as well as
an evaluation of their efficacy and effectiveness, will be published in Spring
2016.
For more information about the Frenchtown Heritage Market,
visit www.Frenchtownheritage.org.
Ivette Lopez, Ph.D., is an associate professor of behavioral
science and health education at Florida A&M University’s Institute for
Public Health and serves as the principal investigator for the USDA-funded
study on food deserts.