Food policy council wins grant to turn hunger stories into policy advocacy

NORTHAMPTON — Food insecurity, language barriers and a lack of transportation access are buzzwords that might feel abstract, especially given how often the terms are thrown around.

But to give these pervasive struggles names and faces, a Northampton nonprofit founded at the height of the pandemic has received $20,000 to produce the stories of local people struggling to provide for themselves — and spin those stories into advocacy for improved public policies.

Since 2022, the Hampshire County Food Policy Council, a resident-led coalition supported by the Collaborative for Educational Services, has been compiling local stories about the impacts of food insecurity and the systemic factors that contribute to hunger. The focus of this new effort will be to expand this grassroots work and use it for advocacy.

“This next phase of the project is about moving from storytelling for community building and connection, and moving toward using storytelling for advocacy: getting people involved in trying to change the policies and the systems that shape our food system that are often negatively impacting people in our community,” said Kristen Whitmore, transformational operations coordinator with the council.

That’s where the $20,000 Community Power Grant from Project Bread, the state’s leading food security organization, comes in.

Adriana Mendes-Sheldon, director of community partnerships at Project Bread, said the funding will help the council identify “deep structural disparities” experienced by people facing food insecurity. 

“Food insecurity is not just about food … true transformation happens when power is redistributed and communities most impacted by food insecurity are part of shaping the solutions,” she said.

The grant will help the council invest in grassroots leadership and advocacy with the goal of building long-term capacity for organizing and having a sustainable impact that goes beyond charity and toward systemic change, Mendes-Sheldon said.

Council history

The idea behind the food policy council came about in 2017 after a food access assessment from Healthy Hampshire, conducted in partnership with Cooley Dickinson Health Care, identified the establishment of an inclusive food policy council as a top priority. 

The goal was to set up an organization that would give people experiencing food insecurity and others involved in the county’s food system a chance to weigh in on decisions around food insecurity — a voice that many felt they didn’t have at the time.

The initial partners for the program included Cooley Dickinson Health Care, the Collaborative for Educational Services/Healthy Hampshire, Hilltown Community Health Center and Hilltown Community Development.

The partners, under the leadership of Cooley Dickinson, secured a $555,555 grant in 2020 from the state Health Policy Commission’s Moving Massachusetts Upstream Investment Program. Council leaders asked people who have a stake in the county’s food system to join in their work and share their stories.

Alexandra Mello has been with the policy council since the storytelling process began, and has served as community liaison and storytelling project coordinator. Currently, she and her co-storytellers are being trained in methods laid out by Marshall Ganz, a professor from the Harvard Kennedy School who explores the power and perception of the “story of self” across cultures.

One goal of the work is to prepare people to advocate for themselves while building connections with lawmakers. Mello explained that the job of the organization’s storytellers is to instill confidence in people to tell their stories. 

“It’s pretty intimidating for people to go to the State House and meet with representatives, even if it’s just their staff,” Mello said. “You don’t know quite know what to say. You don’t know how to be received.”

The next big day of advocacy comes on March 26, when the storytellers will head to Beacon Hill to bring awareness to food insecurity during Healthy Incentives Program (HIP) lobby day. The group aims to stand up for the program which provides SNAP households with a dollar-for-dollar match — up to $40-$80 monthly — to purchase fresh, local fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets and stands.

Mello also said the funding boost from Project Bread will make their work possible.

“This is time-intensive work,” she said. “It’s not just, ‘let’s just meet for an hour and tell me your story and then we go run with it.’ So the funding is what allows us to happen.”

Kia Aoki, strategy and network coordinator with Hampshire County Food Policy Council, shared her take on the impact these stories have.

“I think when people come and hear the stories and see what’s actually happening to people in communities, it changes their thinking about who these people are, and it’s just a better representation of their humanity,” said Aoki. 

She continued, “A lot of times people in public housing or lower-income people, their humanity gets lost in the narrative around who they are. And I think this really brought to life the humanity and the dignity that these people have and how hard they work … and it doesn’t matter how deeply you try to do the best thing — you’re still kind of scapegoated.”

As a Spanish-speaking Latina, Rossana Salazar has used her language skills to help Spanish speakers voice their experiences.

“We have families that have issues around language access or transportation,” she said. “These are some vulnerable communities, and when we are part of the learning process to acquire new information, people could be or feel more strong to participate in these types of sessions, or go to the state to make videos about how this work is impacting their lives.”

Volunteer Roslyn Malkin of Chesterfield has written six stories on the struggles of people in the Hilltown communities around her. In addition to giving the disenfranchised a microphone, the process of storytelling has led her to reflect on herself and her own story.

“I think, although on a personal level, it’s helping me to grow,” she said. “I don’t know exactly where or how I’m growing, but I can just feel the growth.”

She continued: “It feels really important to me, if I’m going to interview other people and ask them to tell their stories, that I be on the other side and know how to tell my story as well. And I think that helps us in terms of how to be better interviewers, how to sit with people differently, how to listen better … I’m already finding myself challenged to think about how I present myself to people — to friends, to family, to people I meet, the people I might want to interview.”