Image from the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project’s Twitter, @NWBronxFood.
On Monday and Wednesday mornings at St. Stephen’s United Methodist Church, located in the Bronx neighborhood of Marble Hill, Andria Cassidy and Deborah Johnson distribute boxes filled with food, recipes, and colorful infographics on diet and nutrition to people in their community. They are part of the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project, a food pantry that provides free, fresh, healthy food to low-income families in The Bronx and educates them on the impacts of maintaining a healthy diet.
The Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project combines food literacy, food access and healthy produce to create an integrated approach to combating food insecurity, said Andria Cassidy, Deputy Director of Riverdale Senior Services Center and overseer of the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project. The Project launched in January 2020, and is sponsored by Riverdale Senior Services Center and made up of a coalition of different local community organizations, according to The Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project’s website.
The Project’s coalition organizations include Kingsbridge Heights Community Center and Outer Seed Shadow, (OSS), which connects communities with artists to create community gardens. With the help of their coalition partners, the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project not only runs a food pantry in the Northwest Bronx but also provides access to healthy food.
While setting up the food pantry, Andria Cassidy, Deputy Director of Riverdale Senior Services Center and overseer of the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project, along with her staff, worked within the community they intended to serve, Cassidy said. In working with the community, a nurse that worked with the project saw that some people she observed carried around unhealthy foods with them; for example, some brought potato chips and soda with them for lunch, explained Cassidy.
As Cassidy and her team began to apply for grants to fund the project, they discussed their observations on unhealthy eating habits in the Northwest Bronx with their coalition members. When the project was approved for their grants, they made nutrition literacy, which is defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand nutrition information and skills needed in order to make appropriate nutrition decisions,” according to a study conducted by the U.S. Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, their main priority.
To create an integrated approach, the project would hire a nutritionist, someone who knows the community, is a part of it, someone like Deborah Johnson, who resides in The Bronx.
In hiring a nutritionist who lives in the community, Johnson was able to help the Project reflect the neighborhood around them and merge that into the pantry’s process. First, the project distributes boxes to its patrons.
“The boxes that come in are shelf-stable. Usually, what’s in them is some form of rice, beans, canned fruits, a canned vegetable, a couple of snacks, anything not going to spoil. Rice and beans are some of the major items that are in because they’re (something) they can get a lot of it,” Cassidy added. “Sometimes we might get a shipment of fresh produce.”
Then, when a patron visits the Project and picks up their food box to take home, they are also handed recipes, some of which Johnson has created, based around the foods provided in the take-home box. “We try to include foods that are found in the take-home box,” as well as food and recipes that are culturally relevant to the community of the Northwest Bronx, said Johnson. “We incorporate just a little mesh of what we see in the community. So it’s Black and Brown people living in this community.”
In the Bronx, 56.4 percent of the population is Hispanic, and 43.6 percent is Black, according to the 2019 U.S. Census Bureau’s website. By culturally relevant, Johnson means that she includes meals that are predominant in Black and Brown communities. Meals like callaloo, a Caribbean vegetable dish, and chickpea curry, she said.
Not only does Johnson create recipes to distribute along with food boxes, but she also has her own table at the food pantry, where she provides patrons with a second chance to collect recipes.
“They’re usually very healthy recipes,” said Johnson. The recipes Johnson provides often surround plant-based nutrition, her dietary focus. Johnson also tries to incorporate “some fun, new ideas on how you can go about eating plant-based food,” she said.
In addition to recipes, the Project also provides infographics to promote food education.
Photo provided by The Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project’s website.
In the Northwest Bronx, the lack of access to affordable, healthy food, amongst other factors, has caused the poor diet percentage in The Bronx to reach as high as 32.4 percent, according to a second study by the U.S. National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health. In addition to a community with a high poor diet percentage, the Bronx has an obesity rate of 66.9 percent.
Photo provided by The Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project’s website.
By providing infographics such as “What You Need to Know about Protein,” and “Food Affects Our Mood,” the project helps to educate people on their food choices. The Project also seeks to bring awareness to different dietary methods that can help reduce some unhealthy ways to consume food. For instance, said Johnson, if someone is struggling with hypertension, and they receive canned beans, they can wash the food off after the can has been opened to “get rid of some of the sodium” that they contain, she added.
Photo provided by The Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project’s website
In a further attempt to further educate the neighborhood the Project serves, they have set up a YouTube channel, which stemmed from the Stay-At-Home COVID-19 mandate and social distancing. The project had the initial goal of teaching in-person cooking classes. However, they had to “turn on a dime and figure out how to provide nutrition literacy to a larger population,” said Cassidy.
So, they equipped their Youtube channel with educational videos on the importance of sleep and tutorials on how to be healthy on a budget, and creative recipes for people to try at home, all featuring Johnson.
In aiming to further expand the project’s outreach in a time of COVID-19 restrictions, and after seeing the efforts of Johnson’s Youtube videos, the project’s coalition group OSS connected Johnson to Bronxnet, a local T.V. channel in The Bronx. After this connection was formed, Johnson was given a T.V. segment to expand efforts to reach a community confined to their homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When people tune into Johnson’s segment, they learn about nutrition education and see her cooking recipes and demonstrating meals. “So far, we’ve had great feedback,” Johnson said.
The feedback comes in the form of people approaching Johnson while she’s working, she said.
“Teenagers and folks in their early twenties are approaching the table like, ‘Hey. Can I give this to my grandmother? “People were taking back information and sharing it with other people,” Johnson added.
Feedback also comes in the form of emails. “Deborah has truly influenced the way I shop and the way I cook,” said Roberta Horowitz, a member of the Northwest Bronx community, in an email to Johnson. By following Johnson’s advice, Horowitz has also been influenced in the way she and her husband eat.
Although they are receiving positive in-person feedback and emails, the Project has not determined its outreach. Their last Youtube video, “Get a Good Night’s Sleep,” only received ten views.
“You just don’t know,” said Cassidy. “We’re trying to reach people in every single way. But you can’t get the feedback.”
“The challenge is really that most of it’s the virtual world. People might be watching a YouTube (video) or pick up an infographic, but you just don’t know who has,” she added.
Adding to an already challenging lack of feedback, as the COVID-19 pandemic has upturned life for people throughout New York City, it has significantly impacted communities who were already suffering. Unemployment rates have skyrocketed in The Bronx. In Jan. 2020, the unemployment rate was 4.9 percent; according to the New York State Department of Labor’s website, by Sept., unemployment had reached 18.8 percent.
With a higher unemployment rate, more people have begun to rely on the Northwest Bronx Food Justice Project as a way to receive food for their families. Before the pandemic hit, the Project served around 250 families per day at their food pantry, said Cassidy. Now, however, they serve around 700 families per day. Because the need for food has become so high, said Johnson or Cassidy, the project had to shift their food education efforts to food distribution.
The Project continues to provide recipes to the people they serve. However, they have not been tracking the effectiveness of the project's food education efforts in their community, said Johnson.
Although Johnson knows that tracking the response to their food education efforts is important, said Johnson, both she and the project have been thrown into an emergency situation of providing food. "We've all been trying to reimagine it (the Project) and try to get out there and get on the ground."
However, Johnson does want to track the response to the project. Tracking progress is "very important," said Johnson. It is essential to "have that aspect (of information), to have a time set on it, but also be able to really measure the impact," she added.
In the future, the project hopes to expand its reach to include in-person cooking classes, grocery store tours, and "to have a space that could accommodate food, a food hub, where people could come and get food in a dignified way," said Cassidy.
The project has other goals, said Cassidy. She'd like to hire a social worker to work within the community and create a way to help people sign up for government benefits, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). "I think growing the Project in that way within our community would be wonderful," said Cassidy.
The project intends to stay in the Northwest Bronx. However, they would always think about duplicating it in other areas of The Bronx, said Cassidy. She also believes that the project can be duplicated by other agencies around New York City, as well as other cities and towns.
To successfully duplicate the efforts of the project, it helps to be a member of the community you serve, as well as have a passion for helping people, said Johnson.
"You feel the passion about the people that you're seeing all the time. You definitely feel a sense of ownership. Like, this is mine, this is my town, these are my folks. If you are within that organization, within that community, it makes it a lot easier to make an impact."