❮ Projects page The Food Trust

Spatial Analysis Project:

Building on our 2016 Summer of Maps partnership, The Food Trust (TFT) proposes to review the impact and role of nutrition incentives in local economies and healthy food access. The Food Trust operates nutrition incentive programs in Philadelphia and Reading, which include Food Bucks, Heart Bucks and Food Bucks Rx. Each program provides individuals with “bucks” to be redeemed for fresh fruits and vegetables following participation in an education program, visit to a healthcare provider, or purchase at a Farmers Market or approved retailer through a nutrition assistance program, such as SNAP.

The analysis will consist of:

• Temporal and spatial analysis of nutrition incentive distribution and redemption
• Visualization of nutrition incentives’ contribution to the local economy and healthy food access
• Update of the 2016 project “Defining Saturation: Food Access in Philadelphia” by overlaying nutrition incentives with programming density

Data available:

• The project will utilize several datasets related to nutrition incentives, healthy food access and nutrition education programming across Philadelphia and Reading:
• Existing datasets with TFT programming locations, including the types of programs offered at each site and participating vendors and businesses if applicable
• Redemption locations and redemption numbers for Food Bucks, Food Rx, and Heart Bucks over the last 10 years
• Eligible locations for distribution of nutrition incentives and distribution numbers by location US census data including income, age, race and ethnicity
• Neighborhood Food Retail datasets from Opendataphilly.org

Maps and Reports that will be created:

We would like both static and dynamic maps that illustrate our programming presence, communities that we serve and economic impact of our nutrition incentive programs. The dynamic map should contain all produced layers so it can be explored later to inform future programming and used to conduct further analysis.

The static maps should be as follows:

• Display cumulative nutrition incentive distribution and redemption by program (n=4: all programs combined, Food Bucks only, Heart Bucks only, Food Bucks Rx) over time
• Display patterns of redemption of incentives
• Display communities’ key demographics, socio-economic and food access
• Display dosage of TFT nutrition education and food access programs

How the maps and reports will be used:

• We will utilize the methodology and approach to map incentives in other communities that we support (e.g. Camden)
• The analysis will inform food incentive program expansion and improvement
• The maps will be used to identify additional opportunities for coordination and outreach with community partners
• We will provide maps to stakeholders as part of reports and grants we produce on a regular basis