March 26, 2007

Center for Sustainable Communities to Help Philabundance Optimize Food Distribution

Poverty and hunger aren’t issues that are happening “elsewhere.” Families are struggling to feed their children right in your own neighborhoods.

According to Philabundance, a Philadelphia based, hunger-relief organization, almost every neighborhood in the Delaware Valley will, at some point, have neighbors who are at risk of not having enough food to feed their family. Hunger is a silent but common problem and those who need help first must meet the challenge of finding out where to get it,. According to the Center for Sustainable Communities (CSC) at Temple University Ambler, more than 630,000 people live at or below the poverty level in Philadelphia County alone, putting them at serious risk for hunger.

In order to help get necessary food where it is most needed, the Center is partnering with Philabundance — an organization that provides food to families in need — in a joint study to optimize its hunger relief operation.

“The Philadelphia Community Food Access study will assess the spatial relationship between hunger and the availability of hunger relief services in the Delaware Valley,” said Md Mahbubur R. Meenar, CSC Senior Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Design Specialist and the principal investigator on the project. “The purpose of this study is to identify areas of need without any reasonable access to services and those areas without enough service capacity to address the present levels of need for households in low income neighborhoods.”

US Department of Agriculture studies have shown that 80 percent of the nation’s food insecure population have never availed themselves of food cupboard and pantry services, and the majority of those don’t even realize there are food cupboards in their community.

“This study aims to find out, address, and analyze this contradiction in the Philadelphia area. About one fifth of the population in the City of Philadelphia is living in poverty,” Meenar said. “Philadelphia inner city neighborhoods face the issue of insufficient and inefficient distribution of services provided by local organizations and food cupboards.”

According to Meenar, the Philadelphia Community Food Access study will determine what percentage of the hunger relief target population lives beyond a reasonable distance from access to any existing food cupboard — about a half mile; how far from a food cupboard are will most clients currently willing or able to come from; how successfully each cupboard is meeting the needs of its immediate service area; and which neighborhoods display the highest concentrations of unmet service needs.
Philabundance was founded in 1984 to help fight hunger in the Delaware Valley. Concentrating its original efforts on perishable foods, Philabundance developed a food distribution system that includes direct delivery to larger agencies and cluster delivery to local groups of smaller In 2005, Philabundance combined forces with the Philadelphia Food Bank, which had experience with non-perishable foods, to provide a “Full Plate of Services” to member agencies.

Center for Sustainable Communities Partners with Philabundance
According to Bill Clark, Executive Director of Philabundance, the goal of the joint project with the Center is to “effectively identify how we will provide efficient and effective relief services to those in need who are live throughout the whole of the Delaware Valley.” Philabundance provides food for approximately 100,000 individuals every week at a cost of less than 25 cents per meal.

“Philabundance purchases and collects donated food and distributes it via a network of more than 600 neighborhood agencies that, in turn, distribute it to people and families in need. The agencies include food kitchens, food cupboards, emergency shelters — all grass roots organizations,” Clark said. “It became obvious to us that the geographic distribution of hunger and poverty in our area did not directly correlate with the geographic locations of those agencies. Some areas in need had very little support, while in some there were numerous relief agencies.”

Through the study, Clark said, Philabundance plans to map the distribution of people in need and compare it with the current hunger response network, identify gaps in service, and “prioritize addressing those gaps.”
“For a project like this, we needed a center with Geographic Information Systems capabilities,” he said. “Temple’s Center for Sustainable Communities provides the technical and academic background we needed combined with expertise in the social sciences that Temple has as a whole.”

The Center’s research team will be conducting GIS analysis to find the service gaps for households in the low income neighborhoods of Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley. Researchers will develop a “GIS data inventory of base layers,” including geographic, physical, and socio-economic data; analyze populations and economic data; determine the addresses of both food cupboards and food cupboard clients; create a spatial analysis of food cupboard coverage for each types of study boundary; and analyze the difference in the spatial distribution pattern of food cupboards in the city and the suburbs.

“Almost every aspect of food distribution has a geographic dimension by its very nature. It is clear that in the interests of increasing efficiency for Philabundance, displaying concepts like service areas, pickup and delivery locations, routes, and communities visually is a powerful tool— all of Philabundance’s daily operations are inherently map-able,” Meenar said. “The study will establish the relationship between hunger and the spatial distribution of the flow of hunger relief.”

Working on the project with Meenar is Community and Regional Planning graduate student Lan Jiang. In addition to assisting on the project for five months, it will also be the basis for her master’s thesis.

“The Philabundance project incorporates many of the things that matter most to me. I think this project will provide me with new ideas and approaches to city planning, which is a means to address social problems,” Jiang said. “Working with a non-profit hunger relief group, I feel that city planning could be extremely helpful in solving social problems; these types of problems are really symptoms of larger societal issues. It is also the first time that I will be working with a public organization in general — working collaboratively with other groups, administering as an intermediary, and responding to the needs of a client — which are very useful skills in my career.”

The project, Jiang said, “is the perfect laboratory for studying GIS techniques in spatial pattern analysis.”
“Philadelphia, being a major metropolitan city along the northeast corridor is not without its problems and, as such, provides many opportunities to test what I have learned from my class and to implement what I think as a planner,” she said. “I think having a GIS background is an extremely powerful skill for the planning field, both in theoretical and technological aspects. Using GIS-based analysis, I can learn much more about the spatial relationship between population density and economic data, the transit network and spatial modeling, and ranking of the hunger population. GIS is an excellent tool to handle a variety of issues that face planners in the field today.”

“Through this project Philabundance would like to become a data resource that other social service organizations use to track the various types of services they provide throughout the community. Until now, detailed mapping of service areas really weren’t available because the organizations operate from a grassroots level,” said Clark “I know a lot of my colleagues will find this analysis worthwhile; it has applications for the distribution of health services, child care, elder care, job training services and a host of other community based social services.”

For more information on the Center for Sustainable Communities and Philabundance project, call 267-468-8108. For more information on Philabundance, call 215-339-0900 or visit www.philabundance.org.