A van pulls up to the Connecticut Children’s Emergency Room entrance. Inside, you won’t find a sick patient or any medical supplies, but the contents are integral to community health: fruits and vegetables. In 2022, Hartford Food System launched a partnership with Connecticut Children’s to provide fresh produce to people in need who come to the emergency room. The staff screens every family using a simple, two question survey; to date, about 40% display “hunger vital signs”.
“We’ve established this voucher program, which allows families to receive fruits and vegetables in a nice little red bag,” says Billie Scruse, Executive Director of Hartford Food System. “Introducing them to fruits and vegetables because we shouldn’t take for granted that all families even eat fresh vegetables or fruit.”
For nearly a century, the Hartford Foundation has worked with local nonprofits to address the basic needs of the region’s residents: food, housing, health, and well-being.
“You can’t talk about anything here at the Hartford Foundation without discussing basic human needs,” says Senior Community Impact Officer Cierra Stancil.
In 2020, the onset of COVID disrupted the food security landscape and the Foundation responded. We quickly pivoted our grantmaking to reinforce residents’ food and housing security and provide flexible resources, allowing nonprofits to continue providing vital human services. Similarly, our donors responded with unmatched generosity, particularly with respect to basic needs.
What’s happened since the darkest days of the pandemic is remarkable. Data from the 2023 Community Wellbeing Index show that food security has long been a significant issue in our region, disproportionately affecting Black and Latinx residents. Temporary relief programs mitigated the hunger problem, but as those dollars disappeared, food insecurity spiked to levels exceeding the pre-pandemic baseline. Today, in Greater Hartford, more than one-third of Latinos and a quarter of Black residents are food insecure. That reality has inspired the Foundation to broaden its approach.
“Most of the Foundation’s investment in food security in the past has been directly in providing food to individuals,” says Stancil. ”The need to directly provide food will never go away, but if you simply focus on ensuring a person is fed for the day, it doesn’t change the circumstances under which that person becomes chronically hungry. That’s where systems level work is extremely important.”
Accordingly, the Foundation has embraced a more systemic view of food security. We are one of several funders of the Connecticut Food System Alliance (CFSA), which seeks to take a holistic approach to food and to ensure Greater Hartford input into the 2024 statewide food action plan. CFSA’s work aligns with the Foundation’s desired mid-term outcomes of increased food security of residents and increased accountability and responsiveness of state and local agencies and systems.
Several Foundation donors are supporting this effort.
“How can we help start to solve that? Just making an effort to put that at the forefront,” says Jenna Behan, whose family fund made a grant to the CFSA. “There is food in the state, but it’s not accessible to everyone. It’s figuring out how to prevent food deserts and enable people to not only get food, but relatively healthy food that can really sustain them.”
“We are always anxious to help out with the food insecurity issues,” says Elsie and El Harp, longtime Foundation donor advisors. “We hear stories about people who can’t put food on the table tonight: they may have to pay the rent or wait to pay for prescriptions, and we realize we need to do something.”
In the capital city, Hartford Food System, a longtime Foundation grantee, addresses food security in myriad ways. The nonprofit cultivates fruits and vegetables, supports urban growers through its social enterprise Hartford Harvest Farm Share and is involved in the effort to bring a full-service grocery store to the North End. Improving access to healthy food is priority one.
“Transportation is key,” says Scruse. “How do you get to the grocery store? Are you walking? Are you taking the bus? And when you do go, your money has to stretch.”
As the Foundation observes the landscape, evaluates the data and listens to and learns from community partners, one fact is clear: food is foundational.
Says Stancil, “We all need to have the right kind of interventions in these areas. When you talk about upward social mobility — children learning, people working — food security is the ground on which nearly everything else stands.”