BackgroundInadequate access to healthful foods has been identified as a significant barrier to healthful dietary behaviors among individuals who live in low-income communities. The purpose of this study was to gather low-income community members’ opinions about their food purchasing choices and their perceptions of the most effective ways to increase access to healthful foods in their communities.MethodsSpanish and English focus groups were conducted in low-income, ethnically-diverse communities. Participants were asked about their knowledge, factors influencing their food purchasing decisions, and their perceptions regarding solutions to increase access to healthful foods.ResultsA total of 148 people participated in 13 focus groups. The majority of participants were female and ethnically diverse (63% Hispanic, 17% African American, 16% Caucasian, and 4% “other”). More than 75% of the participants reported making less than $1999 USD per month. Participants reported high levels of knowledge and preference for healthful foods. The most important barriers influencing healthful shopping behaviors included high price of healthful food, inadequate geographical access to healthful food, poor quality of available healthful food, and lack of overall quality of the proximate retail stores. Suggested solutions to inadequate access included placement of new chain supermarkets in their communities. Strategies implemented in convenience stores were not seen as effective. Farmers’ markets, with specific stipulations, and community gardens were regarded as beneficial supplementary solutions.ConclusionThe results from the focus groups provide important input from a needs assessment perspective from the community, identify gaps in access, and offer potential effective solutions to provide direction for the future.
Place-based health efforts account for the role of the community environment in shaping decisions and circumstances that affect population well-being. Such efforts, rooted as they are in the theory that health is socially determined, mobilize resources for health promotion that are not typically used, and offer a more informed and robust way of promoting health outcomes within a community. Common criticisms of place-based work include the difficulty of replication, since engagement is so specific to a place, and limited sustainability of the work, in the absence of continued institutional structures, both within the community and supporting structures outside the community, to keep these initiatives resilient. This paper describes a place-based initiative, GO! Austin/VAMOS! Austin (GAVA), which was designed to harness the strengths of place-based work—namely, its specificity to place and community. From the start, the project was designed to balance this specificity with a focus on developing and utilizing a standardized set of evidence-informed implementation and evaluation approaches and tools that were flexible enough to be modified for specific settings. This was accompanied by an emphasis on leadership and capacity building within resident leaders, which provided for informed intervention and demand building capacity, but also for longevity as partners, philanthropic, and otherwise, moved in and out of the work.
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