Grow Resilience: Food Access & Local Ag in Houston

Currently, inflation is increasing food prices at the fastest pace in over 40 years, disproportionately burdening Houston's small to midsized local food producers and magnifying the threat of hunger and malnutrition in our city.

In response, Urban Harvest is striving to create a more Holistic Approach to programming, which strategically aligns all of our initiatives to create a supportive web of resilience, bolstering our local food economy and deepening our connections between Houston's community of local gardeners, schools, farmers, and neighborhoods. As we prepare for the upcoming year, we seek to reach more Houstonians and increase the density of our impact on all the communities we serve.

In times of change, we join arms with our community to listen and move forward. Between September and December, Urban Harvest achieved the following results

1) In October 100 Mobile Market shoppers shared their experiences with us through our Mobile Market Annual Survey. In 2023, this evidence will inform our Mobile Market expansion. (Link to results below)

2) In the Summer of 2022, Malaika Bergner, a fellow from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research's Community Bridges Program developed Urban Harvest's first Baseline Analysis that compared the diversity (in terms of ethnicity) among community members. With this DEI Baseline, Urban Harvest is taking action to make sure each priority community is represented.

3) On Saturday, October 29, Urban Harvest celebrated its Annual Fall Festival at Houston’s signature Saturday Farmers Market. As part of our activities to celebrate the glorious drop in temperatures and mark the unofficial beginning of the Holiday season in our city, we piloted its first Coffee & Chat session with first-time donors of our organization.

Our Goal. To dive deeper into donors’ experience with Urban Harvest and focus on identifying new ways in which we can better communicate our mission to those who support it through donations and ticket purchases. Our Coffee & Chat event was one of many opportunities that Urban Harvest offers for community members to share their feedback with our team and inform our future with evidence.

Results from our Coffee & Chat provided critical insights into the level of knowledge of our market patrons with our organization. Most participants agreed that until this session, they didn’t know the depth of our mission, programs, and reach in Houston. As regular farmers market shoppers, they all agreed that more outreach and awareness of Urban Harvest needs to be included as part of the Saturday Farmers Market’s setup.

One of our donors, a Dietitian and Nutritionist with years of experience supporting her daughter’s school garden emphasized the opportunity to take advantage of people coming into the market and promote Urban Harvest’s work when patrons walk from the parking lot to the market. Connected to this idea of increasing awareness of Urban Harvest as the organization running the Saturday Farmers Market, another donor complemented that the message of “Who runs the market” is “too subtle” and “thought that Urban Harvest was just the organization supporting the market, not running it”.

Other ideas to make information about Urban Harvest’s more accessible during market days included big QR codes that can be displayed for patrons to learn more about Urban Harvest, notecards that include a quick rundown of where the money goes, and big Infographics – like those from the Houston Food Bank – that can show our impact in a visually-attractive way.

Survey data collected at the Saturday Farmers Market on March 2022 showed that 25% of farmers market patrons don’t know who runs the Saturday Farmers Market. The results from our feedback session validate previous data and will be used by Urban Harvest to improve our outreach goals.

We are grateful for each of our donors who joined our first Coffee & Chat session!

Links:

• 2022 Mobile Market Survey Results
• DEI Metrics Urban Harvest
• Results from our 2022 Donor Focus Group

In September 2021, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UT Health) published new research on the impact of schools as “crucial settings for interventions that alter the food environment and promote healthful behaviors within their communities” (Source: Impact of a School-Based Gardening, Cooking, Nutrition Intervention on Diet Intake and Quality: The TX Sprouts Randomized Controlled Trial). This study created several opportunities for organizations such as Urban Harvest to explore new mechanisms for increasing healthy food access and improving the diets not only of children but their whole families as a result.

One of Urban Harvest's most important accomplishments in 2022 has been the launch of the first Mobile Farmers Market site at one of our school partners - Lantrip Elementary School - in an effort to build evidence around holistic approaches to tackle the existing food insecurity in Houston, Texas. 

Between April and June, this market had an average sales amount of $650 per market which is higher than any other market site. Once a month, Urban Harvest invested in marketing and outreach material including flyers that are promoting volunteer opportunities at the school garden, access to our classes at no cost, and location to nearby farmers' markets and farm stands operating our nutrition incentive program, Double Up Houston. Once a month, the Mobile Farmers Market engages the school community in opportunities to eat and support our local food system by purchasing fruits, vegetables, and other food staples at cost.

Today, our Mobile Farmers Market at Lantrip Elementary is providing Urban Harvest and our partner organizations with a successful case study to evaluate the impact of our holistic approach in schools and we are in the process of securing funding to bring the Mobile Market to a second school.

At Urban Harvest, we believe that by providing a diverse set of opportunities for individuals and families to engage with our programs, we are increasing the chances that they will develop healthy eating habits. To track this, one of Urban Harvest’s metrics across programs is our “Cross-pollination Rate”  which measures the engagement of our beneficiaries across programs.  For example, how our class participants participate in volunteering opportunities or visit our farmers' markets. In specific for our Mobile Market shoppers, our text-messaging strategy has been a successful strategy to gather interest from our shoppers to learn about Urban Harvest and our goal is to continue increasing the connection between our Mobile Market shoppers and other Urban Harvest services including Double Up sites, access to our classes, volunteering opportunities and more.

How does Urban Harvest measures the Cross-Pollination Rate? Today, Mobile Market shoppers are invited to complete our Contact Form to receive reminders about our market sites and invitations to join our community listening sessions and annual engagement surveys. As part of this survey, we gather information about how shoppers have engaged with us in the past and how they would like to engage in the future.

With support from GlobalGiving, our programs are working together towards building a sustainable “Farm-to-School” movement and improving the health of socially-vulnerable children and families.

Links:

• Pollination not only occurs in nature but also at Urban Harvest