The next Prevention Research Center for Healthy Neighborhoods (PRCHN) seminar will cover healthy food access intervention.
The seminar, titled “Evaluating a Food Environment Natural Experiment Designed to Improve Healthy Food Access & Diet,” will be held Wednesday, May 10, from noon to 1:15 p.m. in the ground-floor conference room of the BioEnterprise Building.
Darcy Freedman, associate director of PRCHN, and Morgan Taggart, director of agriculture at the St. Clair Superior Development Corp., will lead the discussion.
Freedman is principal investigator of the Future of Food in Your Neighborhood (foodNEST), a three-year study funded by the National Institutes of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Diseases. The quasi-experimental natural experiment is designed to evaluate the impact of a community-level food hub intervention aimed at improving both physical and social food environments within a community that previously lacked access to a variety of healthy food retailers (i.e., a food desert).
This presentation will focus on food hub implementation by St. Clair Superior Development Corp. and its partners in Cleveland. The event will present baseline findings about individual, interpersonal and community-level factors influencing healthy eating behaviors among residents in targeted communities in Cleveland (intervention community) and Columbus (comparison community).
Freedman is an associate professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences. Her research is focused on community-level food environment interventions.
Taggart is leading the development of a comprehensive neighborhood food initiative that seeks to integrate placemaking, economic development, public health and community engagement to ensure residents have access to healthy, affordable food.
All PRCHN seminars are free and open to the public.