B5.01 - Oral Session: The Food Secure Community Framework: Building Equity Through Community Power

Brief Abstract Summary: Racism drives food insecurity and health inequities, yet traditional interventions focus narrowly on individual behaviors, missing structural barriers. The Food Secure Community Framework (FSCF) shifts power to impacted communities through five strategies: collective impact, data informed by lived experience, community dialogue, civic leadership, and system redesign. Piloted in Lackey (York County), VA, FSCF used household interviews (41 households, 106 individuals) to assess food access and health, revealing that health conditions, spending patterns, and store visit frequency shape food behaviors. Community dialogues turned data into action, prioritizing mobile markets, community gardens, and equitable zoning. FSCF offers a replicable model for redesigning food systems, advancing equity through community ownership, and guiding public health policies for lasting systemic change.

Detailed abstract description: The Food Secure Community Framework (FSCF) was created to shift power to communities most impacted by food insecurity by integrating structural, institutional, and grassroots action. Grounded in the 10 Essential Public Health Services (EPHS), the FSCF advances food justice through five interconnected strategies: using data informed by lived experience to guide decisions, fostering collective impact through cross-sector partnerships, promoting community dialogue to build trust and shared understanding, elevating civic agency and leadership by centering marginalized voices in decision-making, and driving system and structure redesign to reform policies and resource flows for lasting fairness.

The FSCF was piloted in Lackey, Virginia, a historically marginalized area facing high food insecurity and transportation barriers. Using a modified Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER) methodology, 41 household interviews (representing 106 people) were conducted to assess food attitudes and behaviors, shopping preferences and practices, household health, and community resources needed. Findings were shared in participatory community dialogues, where residents co-identified priorities and solutions. Key results included significant access barriers, such as limited grocery availability and an average food commute of 17.5 minutes. Nearly one-third of households reported pandemic-related disruptions to food access, and 31.7% cited transportation barriers as a primary challenge. High rates of chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension were observed. Through community dialogues, residents identified deeper systemic issues, including historical disinvestment, lack of culturally relevant services, and structural racism in food policy. These dialogues led to a community-driven action plan emphasizing mobile markets or food coops, community gardens, culturally tailored education, and advocacy for equitable zoning and resource allocation.

The Food Secure Community Framework (FSCF) combines household-level data with civic leadership to transform food systems from extractive models, where communities are passive recipients, into generative, community-owned systems of health promotion. Unlike traditional participatory research, the FSCF explicitly transfers power and decision-making to residents, delivering immediate improvements in food access while addressing root causes such as transportation inequities, discriminatory zoning, and institutional bias. By integrating data, dialogue, and civic leadership, the FSCF provides a replicable, evidence-informed roadmap for redesigning food systems through community ownership and structural reform. With potential for national replication, it moves beyond surface-level interventions to create lasting systemic change and lays the foundation for equitable prevention, early detection, and treatment efforts across diverse public health contexts.