By Paula Balbontin | Program & Development Manager
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:
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