Have you ever wondered how your fellow business leaders, non-profits, elected officials, or engaged community members use the MAP Dashboard to make informed decisions? Throughout the year the Community Spotlight will highlight how members of the Southern Arizona community utilize the MAP. These stories will provide insights on how to get the most out of the MAP and we also hope they will inspire you to use the site in new ways.
Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona
Community Food Bank and the MAP Dashboard
Recognized in 2018 as the “Food Bank of the Year” by the Feeding America national network of peer food banks for both our hunger-relief services and our commitment to addressing the root-causes of hunger and poverty, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona annually serves over 200,000 food-insecure individuals in five southern Arizona counties.
In addition to free food assistance, the Community Food Bank provides nutrition and culinary arts education, training, and workforce development; garden and farming assistance and resources to scores of community and school gardens; oversight of a low-income cooperative urban farm and farmer's market; financial literacy training and microloans to low-income food and wellness entrepreneurs; daily meals from our commercial kitchen to homebound seniors and homeless people; technical assistance, tens of millions of pounds of donated food, and capacity-building grants to our network of 400 agency partners; facilitation of the acquisition and transportation of tens of millions of pounds of fresh produce from Mexican farms into 30 U.S. markets; civic engagement and community leadership training, as well as grassroots community organizing facilitation to neighborhood groups; and local & state public policy advocacy.
The Community Food Bank partners closely with many University of Arizona researchers from across many UA departments. The MAP Dashboard serves as a go-to repository of such community-participant research, enabling community members to have access to their information and to act upon that information as they see fit. In addition, because the Community Food Bank seeks to address the root-causes of hunger and poverty, data from the MAP Dashboard is often overlaid with direct research data that the Community Food Bank collects, revealing holistic patterns in inequitable and ineffective community socioeconomic policies, protocols, and practices that can be reimagined, reinvented, and reformed not only by the diverse stakeholders and constituents of anchor institutions like the food bank but also through improved collaborative community governance co-created with shared-power across socioeconomic sectors, from the grassroots to the grass-tops.
How Do You Use the MAP?
Does your organization use the MAP Dashboard? If so, we'd love to hear from you. Please fill out the form below and we will be in contact.
