By Keith Whitcomb Jr. Staff Writer
BARRE, Vt. — The Vermont Foodbank has launched a new program to find ways of addressing food insecurity.
The Food Security Innovation Lab is a two-year program that’s just getting started, said Carrie Stahler, government and public affairs officer at the Vermont Foodbank. Private donations from foundations and individuals have raised about $1.5 million for the program. The Vermont Foodbank plans to spend $3 million on the lab.
What the lab will do is research experimental ways of addressing food insecurity. The Foodbank has hired Tatiana Abatemarco, visiting faculty of food studies at Bennington College, to lead the project.
“I’m excited to apply my experience working in sustainable food systems to help the Vermont Foodbank tackle the root causes of hunger in our communities,” Abatemarco stated in a news release.
According to Stahler, Abatemarco will research ideas that have been brought up in the past but never tested and identify a few for pilot programs.
Stahler said the Foodbank will then “use these pilots to work through some long-standing barriers that have essentially kept people at the status quo here in Vermont, and we really want to use this project to try and find solutions that will be able to move Vermont forward in addressing food insecurity in the long-term.”
The Foodbank isn’t telling Abatemarco what to look into; it wants to see what she comes up with. That said, it knows already what some of the recurring issues with food insecurity are.
“I think there are a few well-known barriers to food security in Vermont,” said Stahler. “Some of them are financial insecurity, transportation; housing issues intersect strongly with food insecurity. If people aren’t housed they may not have an address to receive (3SquaresVT) benefits, things like that.”
Using mobile apps like DoorDash to deliver food to people from food shelves is the kind of thing the Foodbank believes the lab will be looking into, but the research might well go in a different direction.
“That’s why we’re saying we don’t want to commit to anything because there is a wealth of these options out there and the ones that require a larger, more concerted pilot project will probably be the ones that we try,” Stahler said.
The pilot programs won’t necessarily be directly tied to food delivery.
“In the past, ending hunger meant making sure food was accessible and affordable,” stated John Sayles, chief executive officer of Vermont Foodbank. “We realized as an organization that it really is equity and solving for ending racial oppression and changing structures and systems in our society that’s going to be a long-term solution to hunger.”
Vermont Foodbank is part of the Feeding America network, which shares ideas and best-practices with those in the food bank arena.
“We are not being prescriptive about what the pilots are, and we are not presuming to know the solutions that the Lab is going to land on,” stated Cassie Lindsay, director of strategic giving at Vermont Foodbank. “We have a lot of great ideas. They bubble up and percolate but sometimes don’t have a place to land on our team — now they will.”
keith.whitcomb @rutlandherald.com
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