Grant program aims to reduce food insecurity citywide

By Madison Grant
Contributing Writer

In 2022, 61,000 adults and 20,000 children live in households without reliable access to food in New Orleans, according to the 2022 New Orleans Community Health Improvement plan. These numbers have placed New Orleans as the No. 2 ranked city in America for food insecurity.

Many local community organizations are working to fill the gaps in access to healthy food for families eligible for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), a federal assistance program that works to combat food insecurity. Among those organizations is the Sankofa Community Development Corporation, which announced on Sept. 1 that it’s new SNAP enrollment assistance project.

“Sankofa’s programs strive to combat systematic barriers that cause social and health disparities,” said Rashida Ferdinand, the founder and CEO of Sankofa, in a statement. “Our goal is to ensure that people who need it most in Greater New Orleans will have reliable access to a sufficient quantity of affordable and nutritious food.”

The enrollment project is funded by a grant from the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana Foundation to assist 100 eligible seniors and families facing food insecurity by providing personal assistance signing up for SNAP.

“This grant will help us deploy Community Health Ambassadors to give personal assistance and walk people through enrollment,” Ferdinand said in a statement.

The application process for SNAP can be inaccessible to some due to lack of internet access, transportation and the complexity of the application process.

“Ensuring that eligible seniors and families can access benefits helps those most vulnerable and creates a pathway to increased food access and improved overall community health,” said Michael Tipton, president of the Blue Cross Foundation, in a statement.

SNAP not only alleviates the financial burden that grocery shopping can place on families but also increases shopper access to fresh, local produce at farmers markets such as the Crescent City Farmers Market, which hosts local farmers on a weekly basis throughout New Orleans and accepts SNAP benefits as payment. Through its Market Match program, CCFM matches SNAP purchases up to $60 per transaction on produce.

“We have found over the years that many SNAP shoppers report that Market Match is what brought them to the farmers markets for the first time to shop,” said Cordelia Heaney, executive director of Market Umbrella, the organization that owns and operates the Crescent City Farmers Market.

“Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed yesterday said it is why they shop at the markets. Eighty-five percent said that because of Market Match the amount of fruits and vegetables they eat increased, and 52 percent report consuming an increased variety of produce,” Heaney said.

The SNAP enrollment will direct more residents to existing resources such as the Crescent City Farmers Market Match program, Ferdinand said. The peer-led SNAP education provided by Community Health Ambassadors will also work to resolve participants’ transportation barriers by providing program services at community sites on a rotating basis and solve participants’ technology and literacy access through use of Community Health Ambassador’s laptops and hotspots.

“We want to ensure people that need it the most and are food insecure have access to healthy nutritious food, our goal is to enroll 100 people, but we will surpass that,” Ferdinand said.

This article originally published in the September 5, 2022 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.