Our goals for the convening were clear:
- Increase collective awareness of organizations and initiatives working in this space
- Discuss gaps and opportunities
- Start to imagine collaborative projects that could be launched with Caruth funding
In the end, we met those goals and achieved one more:
- Participants made new connections and generally agreed that they needed to partner more.
- They articulated the many assets that need to be leveraged in this effort (e.g. land, workforce, etc.), and pointed out the key challenges (e.g. competing priorities and the size of the problem, etc.). They debated the often taken-for-granted assumption that the Southern Sector needs a commercial grocery store.
- Five concrete intervention areas emerged from the discussion- leveraging non-traditional distribution sites; creating new retail solutions; making healthy food delicious and appealing; connecting food assets and solving the logistics issue; and advocacy. CFT has followed up to organize design teams that will work together to craft these ideas into funding proposals that are system-focused, informed by data, and vetted by the community.
One unanticipated goal achieved was greater funder alignment. Several people from the City of Dallas attended the meeting. Afterward, we followed up with Heather Lepeska (Business Development Manager, City of Dallas Office of Economic Development) and Laila Alequresh (Chief Innovation Officer, City of Dallas) to learn more about the funding the City had just awarded through the Healthy Food Dallas Initiative’s Community-Based Solutions Program along with their plans to distribute additional funds in the fall. It became clear that we are working toward the same goals and should not duplicate effort or make grantees apply twice. We agreed on an integrated strategy that will merge our funding and timelines, and leverage a new innovation crowdsourcing tool that the City’s Innovation Office is piloting to gather food solution ideas directly from the community. We are excited to be a part of a collaboration that includes Big Tex and the City of Dallas!
Sarah Cotton Nelson, CFT’s Chief of Philanthropy, recently penned a blog post on listening that sums up the “why” of this entire effort: through listening to the experts who make change happen everyday, we envision possibilities that could not have been dreamed up in isolation. Implementation of this strategy will present its own challenges, but we are committed to walking alongside this dynamic group of innovators until we achieve our audacious goal of ensuring that every Dallas resident has access to healthy, affordable food 365 days a year (and corndogs in October).
June 6: The W.W. Caruth Jr. Fund at Communities Foundation of Texas along with the State Fair ofTexas host a convening of nonprofit organizations interested in addressing food insecurity in the Southern Sector of Dallas.
bcWORKSHOP map links:
To continue using the map layers created by bcWORKSHOP to ask your own questions and to understand what assets exist in the Southern Dallas Healthy Food Ecosystem: CLICK HERE
To submit more information to the webmap: CLICK HERE
