Amye Webster knows the Aldine area well. HOPE Clinic, where she serves as grants manager and program adviser, has two health centers in the community that serve thousands of patients annually.
Yet Webster was stunned last month to learn about the need for food in northern Harris County. Slightly more than half of Aldine residents have moderate or high food insecurity, according to a Kinder Institute for Urban Research survey. In the neighboring Greenspoint/IAH area, the rate rises to 80%.
“It’s just an area that’s lacking far more than some other parts of Houston,” Webster said. “Those who have an investment in those areas, we all really should be looking at how we can work together to get resources and use them most effectively to make a dent in the problem.”
Webster joined about 180 local advocates and community leaders in late March for a summit aimed at inspiring fresh efforts to reduce food insecurity across Greater Houston. The Kinder Institute’s Center for Community and Public Health joined the Houston Food Bank in convening the event.
While numerous organizations are tackling the challenge, a simple prompt during the summit — What is one high-impact priority or strategic starting point for advancing food access in Greater Houston? — revealed key areas needing improvement.
In nearly 20 small-group discussions documented by Kinder Institute and Houston Food Bank staffers, these three themes emerged most often as the best opening steps for local leaders in a reinvigorated fight against food insecurity.
Create deeper cross-sector collaboration
Houston has no shortage of organizations working to improve food access: medical providers, food pantries, religious ministries, patient advocates, health nonprofits. Together, they dedicate countless hours to helping local residents and collect massive amounts of useful data.
But often, these entities aren’t sharing resources or information, leading to inefficiencies, summit participants said.
Rikki Wiggs, marketing manager for Healthconnect Texas, a nonprofit that works to integrate electronic medical records systems across the region, said many health care organizations have valuable, anonymized patient information that could help food providers target communities in most need.
“We might be able then to see some areas where there are consistencies or trends, and it might give us more insight so that we’re not waiting one or two years down the road but rather reacting in real time,” Wiggs said.
Other partnership opportunities include collaborating on grant submissions, creating more centralized locations for multiple social services, and sharing knowledge about how to best serve Houston’s racially, ethnically and culturally diverse communities, participants said.
Wiggs said assembling a strong group of regional leaders with a clear mission and road map for tackling food insecurity would help maximize resources.
“We’ve got the knowledge. We have community clinics that have a personal relationship with people,” Wiggs said. “We’re just missing the highways or roads to get people connected with access to the resources they need.”
Build out transportation infrastructure
Local organizations have added more mobile food pantries and personalized delivery options, but they’re often expensive and limited. Ultimately, to serve millions of food-insecure residents, providers still need people to come to them.
Participants said public transportation to grocery stores, food pantries, medical providers and other resources remains far too limited.
The issue is most acute, they said, outside of Houston’s urban core. Unincorporated Harris County and the region’s suburban counties have few public transit options, and many residents can’t afford a car, participants said.
“Transportation is one issue that’s really stark out (in northern Harris County),” Webster said. “The public bus system doesn’t cover it at all. It just feels like there’s less infrastructure in general, which means any time there’s an issue it’s more dire for folks who live in that area.”
In Harris County, transportation improvements would largely fall on Metro, which prioritized improvements to its existing operations over adding more bus lines in its latest budget. Any significant expansion of transit options would likely require a local tax increase.
Suburban and exurban communities are generally served by municipal governments or urban transit districts. They typically operate on relatively meager budgets that draw funding from local taxpayers or federal grants.
Improve community-specific engagement and initiatives
Participants said local organizations recognize the importance of gathering community input to ensure their work is useful and culturally relevant. Still, they frequently raised the need to improve relationships between health-oriented organizations and the residents they serve.
Some advocates emphasized the importance of entering communities from a place of understanding and humility and taking the time to learn about unique, diverse needs. In turn, they need the time and financial resources to tailor programs to specific groups of people.
HOPE Clinic officials said they have started several initiatives to personalize care in the Alief area, such as providing healthy food to patients with diabetes, paying for Uber rides to markets and crafting recipes for people of various ethnicities.
These programs have limits, however. HOPE Clinic can’t afford to enroll people with other medical issues in the healthy food prescription program, a collaboration with the Houston Food Bank called FoodRX. And when grant funds dried up, so did the free transportation.
“For us, (FoodRX) is one of the things I’m really proud of us having, because it means they have somewhat of a closed loop of care,” said Amna Hasan, HOPE Clinic’s quality improvement project coordinator.
Advocates noted that strong relationships with community members can help improve word-of-mouth referrals and information sharing between neighbors, creating a multiplier effect for public health.
