Progress 06/01/23 to 05/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience:The target audience for Long Beach Food Fairs are residents of low-income communities in the City of Long Beach where walking-distance access to fresh, healthy food is either limited or nonexistent. All four established Food Fair locations are located within the SB 535 Disadvantaged Communities of zip codes 90805 and 90810. Both areas also rate as "highest need" according to LA County's Justice Equity Need Index (JENI). The majority of the households reached are attendees of existing food distribution events at Admiral Kidd Park in West Long Beach and Light & Life Christian Fellowship in North Long Beach, as well as the The Growing Experience Urban Farm, which serves the Carmelitos housing project in North Long Beach. The events are held four times per month and we have held 30 Food Fairs to date, reaching an average of 55 households per event. Changes/Problems:The Long Beach Food Fairs project has encountered no major problems or delays. The only minor challenge we have faced was lower than expected attendance at The Growing Experience location, but we have been able to turn that around by distributing door hangers within the surrounding community and will continue to increase awareness and attendance by working with LACDA, which owns and manages the property What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?So far, this project has provided training and mentorship to 15 aspiring chefs and student assistants through Feel Good Kitchen. Participating aspiring chefs and assistants have received recipe development and food preparation instruction and guidance from kitchen owner Dina Feldman as well as from participating chefs from Pizzaza, Smilin' Knives and other catering professionals. Additionally, farm managers Linsday Smith and Leif Kemp have provided guidance in harvesting fresh produce to supplement the rescued produce featured in their recipes. The project continues to recruit participants and will provide training and mentoring to additional people as it continues. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Two of our monthly Food Fair locations coincide with existing food distribution events that are extremely well attended, so our cooking demos reached a built-in audience and expanded the offerings at those events by incorporating education in healthy food preparation and reducing food waste. Both Admiral Kidd Park and Light And Life regularly draw 100 to 150 attendees, and these are people who take that information back to share in their households. We initially faced a challenge in our third location at The Growing Experience Urban Farm, where we hold Food Fairs twice per month. Our understanding when booking that location with the farm management was that it would coincide with an existing pay-what-you-can farm stand that served the local low-income Carmelitos housing community, which features 713 units of family and senior housing. We soon learned that the farm stand was not being conducted in any organized manner nor being publicized to the adjacent housing community. We responded by designing and printing door hangers about the Food Fairs and distributingdirectly to each residence. We were pleased to see an immediate increase in attendance at our events, from fewer than 10 people on average to over 30. We are now working directly with Los Angeles County Development Authority (LACDA), which owns and manages the property, to disseminate this information directly to residents on a regular basis, thereby continuing to increase Food Fair attendance at The Growing Experience. We have also requested that Long Beach Fresh add information about Food Fair events as well as Grow2Zero's existing weekly food distribution to their popular local food map tool here: https://story.mapme.com/LBFood. They have assured us it will be added in the next website update. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?As mentioned above, we intend to work more closely with LACDA to increase attendance at The Growing Experience Food Fair events so that it meets or exceeds attendance at our other two locations. We will also work with Long Beach Fresh to create a printable flyer that lists other food distribution events in Long Beach that will be shared at all Long Beach Food Fair events.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Long Beach Food Fairs was created to prevent food waste and encourage healthy eating through both meal preparation/distribution and community education. Grow2Zero has run a weekly food distribution/delivery service consisting of primarily rescued food for several years and have frequently found ourselves with surplus produce due to an unequal distribution of certain items from our food rescue agency partner. Partnering with local chefs to transform that surplus into healthy meals and then sharing them with the community alongside a cooking demo presented the perfect solution to this problem. Additionally, this program gets more healthy, prepared foods into family households in low-income Long Beach neighborhoods with severely limited access to fresh produce and healthy dining options. Finally, the program inspires healthier and more environmentally conscious choices by showing participants how to prepare simple, healthy meals that don't produce an excess of food scraps. This project has served our intended audience from the very beginning, as our Food Fair locations are all within economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. All four locations are within the SB 535 Disadvantaged Communities of zip codes 90805 and 90810. Both areas also rate as "highest need" according to LA County's Justice Equity Need Index (JENI). We have held 26 Food Fairs to date, reaching an average of 60 households per event. The majority of the households reached are attendees of existing food distribution events at Admiral Kidd Park in West Long Beach and Light & Life Christian Fellowship in North Long Beach, as well as the Carmelitos housing project in North Long Beach. To kick off the project, we captured a 30-day average baseline for the amount of food that was not utilized in Grow2Zero's weekly food distribution and delivery. We weighed all food received, distributed and discarded and determined that approx. 4% of the total food received was discarded because it wasn't considered suitable for distribution (2142 lbs). We exceeded our goal of increasing total usage rate of produce and other food items received by Grow2Zero FARMS from Food Forward and Food Finders by 20 percent, as participating chefs have taken an average of 100 lbs of food per week, supplemented by freshly harvested produce from our urban farm, and used it to prepare a healthy recipe each week. Participating chefs have prepared an average of 55 16 oz. units of prepared healthy food each week (ranging from 34 to 87 units, depending on produce available). The food has been distributed at Light & Life Christian Fellowship (90805), Admiral Kidd Park (90810), Grow2Zero FARMS (90805) and The Growing Experience Urban Farm (90805), which are all located in low-income neighborhoods. We have exceeded our goal of reaching 50 families per week and have been reaching an average of 55 households. We did adjust the schedule from one Food Fair per week to four Food Fairs per month because it was easier to create promotional materials with consistent days/locations (e.g. 1st Saturday if the month at location X, 2nd Saturday of the month at location Y, etc.), We have also had to cancel one Food Fair due to heavy rain. To date, we have held 30 Food Fairs and are on track to hold approx. 96 events after two years.Chefs consistently incorporate and instruct attendees on how to use typically discarded produce parts into recipes, including beet greens, carrot tops, broccoli and cauliflower cores/stems. As far as the goal to collect recipe ideas from existing participants in Grow2Zero's weekly food distribution is concerned, the wording of the question to this effect included in our initial survey turned out to be too broad to collect meaningful data so we didn't end up with actual recipes to use, but rather a long list of ingredients and types of food desired by participants. We have, however, started incorporating recipe ideas collected from Food Fair attendees starting in July and have demonstrated four so far. We are pleased to have exceeded our goal of increasing awareness of andattendance at existing Long Beach-based weekly and monthly food distributions by 15 to 20 percent. Attendance at Admiral Kidd Park has gone from an average of 107 households per month in 2023 ro 190 households per month in 2024, an increase of 77 percent since Food Fairs began in that location in January of 2024. And the Saturday pay-what-you-can farmstand at The Growing Experience went from virtually nonexistent attendance to over 30people per week after we distributed flyers to the local community about Long Beach Food Fairs. Attendance at the Light & Life Christian Fellowship food distribution was already at capacity and has remained consistent since we added Food Fairs to the offerings. We have also requested that Long Beach Fresh add information about Food Fair events as well as Grow2Zero's existing weekly food distribution to their popular local food map tool here (??https://story.mapme.com/LBFood). They have assured us it will be added in the next website update.

Publications