Project Description
In the U.S., food insecurity (FI), or the inconsistent access to food of the quantity or quality needed to fuel a healthy life, is an important source of socioeconomic and racial inequality in youth outcomes. Decades of research finds that FI undermines youths’ physical, socioemotional, and cognitive development, and their academic outcomes as a result. Food insecurity is unequally suffered in the U.S.: while 15% of all households with children experienced FI in 2020, nearly one third of low-income households with children did so, with even higher rates in rural areas and among communities of color. Federal food assistance programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps), do reduce food insecurity among those who receive it, but as these rates of food insecurity make clear, socioeconomic and racial inequality in food security persists.
In many areas, schools and nonprofits partner to provide additional nutrition to students through local “Backpack” food programs. “Backpack” programs offer an additional source of food assistance for low-income families that could optimally complement federal programs. First, because backpack programs typically operate in schools, they have a ready point of information about and access to assistance for youth and their families. Second, because these programs provide food directly to families, they do not rely on grocery stores that can hamper the effectiveness of SNAP benefits in food deserts.
This project will work with a backpack program that provides fresh food, including fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy, with accompanying recipes to be cooked and consumed by the whole family. The program faces challenges to becoming a scalable model for school-based food assistance due to under-utilization.
Project Goals
This project will explore two key issues that prevent the target backpack program from serving as a scalable model due to under-utilization, substantial administrative and systemic hurdles that place the burden of participating on families. Utilizing both an intervention and qualitative studies, this project aims to
- Reduce known administrative burdens and support participation through tools to increase take-up.
- Investigate systemic barriers to engagement that hinder participation.