Award Abstract # 2125200
SCC-PG Food Environment Equity Dashboard NYC (FEED-NYC)

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: RESEARCH FOUNDATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Initial Amendment Date: August 12, 2021
Latest Amendment Date: November 18, 2022
Award Number: 2125200
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Michal Ziv-El
mzivel@nsf.gov
 (703)292-4926
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: October 1, 2021
End Date: March 31, 2023 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $150,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $150,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2021 = $150,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Nevin Cohen (Principal Investigator)
    Nevin.Cohen@sph.cuny.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: RFCUNY d/b/a CUNY Grad School of Public Health & Health Policy
55 W 125TH ST FL 7
NEW YORK
NY  US  10027-4536
(646)364-9771
Sponsor Congressional District: 13
Primary Place of Performance: RFCUNY d/b/a CUNY Grad School of Public Health & Health Policy
55 W. 125 Street, 7th FL
New York
NY  US  10027-4516
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
13
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): FWY1FX3THXC5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): S&CC: Smart & Connected Commun
Primary Program Source: 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 042Z
Program Element Code(s): 033Y00
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

Urban food systems have not kept pace with other municipal functions deploying smart technologies to improve service access, manage infrastructure, and increase public participation. Food systems data are often incomplete, scattered across agencies, and insufficiently disaggregated to identify racial, ethnic, or spatial disparities. This project prototypes a Food Environment Equity Dashboard (FEED-NYC), a data, information, knowledge, and communications platform, to demonstrate the potential for community-designed smart city technologies to address food systems inequities. The dashboard will organize, analyze, and visualize public and community-generated food systems equity data for New York City, focusing on the persistent problem of high rates of food insecurity. The project aims to explore the technical aspects of an equity-focused data dashboard and the social processes involved in its creation and use. The project team will illustrate how the dashboard can serve as a tool for government to improve program management and for community stakeholders to participate more effectively in advancing socially just food policy. The project?s broader impact will be to show how solutions for smart and connected cities deployed by multi-sector partnerships can address equity and social justice at different scales, in different communities, and in other domains like housing, education, or transportation.

The project involves an interdisciplinary, multi-sector, urban food systems teem in co-designing and prototyping FEED-NYC. This involves design thinking workshops to identify relevant data; assessment of data collection, analysis, and visualization methods; creation of the dashboard prototype; and preparation of three cases illustrating how government officials, NGOs, and other stakeholders can use the dashboard to reduce food insecurity. The prototype assessment explores the technical aspects of an equity-focused data dashboard and the social processes involved in creating and using it, including whether and to what extent data collection and analysis, and visualizations of sociotechnical systems like the food system, function as heuristics to shape strategies and perceived solutions to food insecurity, or perpetuate existing conditions. It explores novel methods of data collection and visualization such as crowd sourcing and big data and develops use cases illustrating the potential social and political effects of an equity-focused data dashboard. The project aims to build a smart and connected community of practice among team members who are from disciplines and sectors that has the capacity to model solutions for smart and connected cities that address social injustice and tackle racial and other inequities at different scales, communities, and urban systems.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

The Food Environment Equity Dashboard for New York City (FEED-NYC) engaged a wide range of stakeholders, including members of advocacy groups, community organizations, government agencies, and academic institutions to identify important aspects of the food environment that, if visualized using public and novel sources of data in tandem, would help advocates, service providers, and policymakers further strengthen their efforts to reduce and prevent food insecurity and support New Yorkers in need. The stakeholders and research team identified critical questions about New York City?s food environment, potential data to answer those questions, and ways this information could be visualized most effectively. We then developed interactive data dashboards to visualize three aspects of food insecurity: (1) disparate participation in federal nutrition programs like school food and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); (2) variable access to emergency/charitable food in different communities; and (3) differences in food costs across neighborhoods throughout New York City.

We used several novel data sources in the project: anonymized GPS data gathered from mobile devices; publicly available grocery price information scraped from the internet; analysis of Google reviews of supermarkets; and data collected from a mobile app used by clients of a large network of emergency food pantries. When these data were combined with more conventional, publicly available data sources from various government agencies, we were able to uncover important insights about food insecurity and inequities in NYC. For example:

  • Even though school food is free for all public school students in New York City regardless of household income, participation in the school breakfast and lunch programs varies significantly across the city and among schools within the same neighborhoods, even when controlling for school-level rates of student poverty.
  • Despite the presence of emergency food pantries throughout New York City, data on food pantry use shows that many individuals travel outside of their home neighborhoods to get emergency food, even when there are one or more pantries in closer proximity to their homes. 
  • Prices of identical food items varied significantly at stores across a large chain of independent supermarkets located throughout New York City. In some neighborhoods with high rates of food insecurity, both rent burdens and food prices were high. This illustrates the challenges people face when shopping on a limited budget, and the importance of focusing attention on neighborhood scale cost of living instead of commonly used metrics of food access, such as physical proximity to supermarkets.

By developing different methods of using data to illustrate inequities in the city's food environment, city officials and community organizations can broaden their understanding of the needs of their constituents and clients and consider new ways to improve the experience of New Yorkers facing or at risk of food insecurity. In addition, by making data more easily accessible and interpretable to a wider group of stakeholders, this process, and the prototype dashboard, demonstrated the potential for participatory approaches to data collection, visualization, and analysis to encourage greater engagement of the public in shaping food policy.  The project team has begun working with groups outside of New York City to improve understanding of food environment inequities in other communities.

Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/feed-nyc/home

 


Last Modified: 05/02/2023
Modified by: Nevin Cohen

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