Time: June 2020 - October 2020
Role: Product designer / researcher / manager / API scraper
Tools: Miro, Design Thinking, Google Sheets, Python, Google Maps API

Introduction

I had officially been in the Bay area for almost 2 years. When the coronavirus pandemic first happened, as I adapted to remote work, I tried working on myself as an individual and as a professional. I yearned to take on a challenge and take more initiative and responsibility in working on something I was personally interested in.

Enter YCore. As a social impact fellowship, it brings together nonprofits in the Bay Area with young professionals (most of the time outside of the nonprofit space) to tackle an existing problem the nonprofit has but doesn’t necessarily have the resources or capacity to go about it or wants more perspective from an external third-party.

Pre-pandemic, I wasn’t necessarily the best about cooking. My main motivation for cooking was to save money, and while that is still a reason now, the work-from-home situation gave me the time to explore cooking, and it resparked my joy for grocery shopping and appreciation for food and nutrition. I was drawn to the project with Fresh Approach, a nonprofit focused on creating an equitable food system in areas that have been historically denied access to fresh and healthy foods.

East Palo Alto and Fresh Approach

Fresh Approach has a series of interconnected programming that empowers individuals and families in less privileged communities to make more conscious and sustainable lifestyle choices, including East Palo Alto, a city largely overshadowed and neglected by the tech boom of Silicon Valley. In fact, it’s classified as a “food desert”, which in an urban/sub-urban area is defined by the USDA as an area in which a significant number of residents (at least 33%) are low-income and live more than a mile away from a supermarket or large grocery store. These areas are of concern due to disproportionately high health concerns and disease associated with poor eating habits. To combat the system that created these food-insecure communities, the the food-as-medicine movement focuses on nutrition as a prevention and management of chronic diseases, rather than reliance on prescriptions and drugs.

With the abundance of wealthy corporations and individuals, it’s hard to think of anywhere in Silicon Valley that would even fall under this category, especially with how abundant one-stop shop chain supermarkets have flourished in America since World War II (ie. Walmart, Kroger, Aldi, Target, etc). Yet here we are with East Palo Alto, a 2.5 square mile area, that didn’t have a supermarket until Mi Pueblo Foods (now Cardenas) in 2009. As a food-insecure community,

East Palo Alto is a city dominated by people of color and immigrants, which the US Census Bureau reported in 2019 as roughly 62% Hispanic or LatinX, 12% black or African American, and 11% Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. And with how much Covid-19 disproportionately affects LatinX, Pacific Islander, and Black communities, serving these communities is even more important. With guidelines in place (washing stations, ropes around the vendors, enforced rule of only vendors being able to touch the produce), the open-air market was statistically safer to be in than a grocery store for these communities.

The Project

Our project was focused on Fresh Approach’s East Palo Alto Farmers’ Market. I illustrated a team logo for our group of three.

At the start, our scope was incredibly broad and open-ended: get more people to attend the farmers market, particularly those of African or Pacific Islander descent since they make up a significant portion of the non-Hispanic population.

Easier said than done. Fresh Approach has had long-standing ties with the Hispanic and LatinX population but has historically struggled to establish connections beyond, which can be attributed to a mix of factors including cultural differences, language barrier, and general lack of resources across all programming. While we were a group of young POC professionals, we were 1) not of those target demographics, 2) have no historical, cultural, personal, nor professional ties to East Palo Alto. Furthermore, the market has only 3 farmer stands and takes place on Wednesday morning to afternoon for a seasonal period between roughly April and November.

But what was interesting was that Fresh Approach has much more extensive matching programs for its programs. For East Palo Alto specifically, they not only supported those with CalFresh/SNAP/EBT, which are usually the standards for food assistance programs, but also anyone federally classified as low-income, goes to Ravenswood Family Health Center, veterans, or are registered with WIC, Medi-Cal, SSI, or SSDI. What this meant was qualified individuals can get up to $40 worth of fresh produce in exchange for $20 in cash. If more eligible residents participated, there was an expected positive return on investment to the local economy since it would be mutually beneficial to both the residents, farmers, and local economy.

Research

We tried to scratch the surface of the problem. We saw the value the organization seemed to bring to the community, but we wondered whether the community felt the same. We also didn’t fully grasp the challenges of the project in connecting to the community. So we started with interview quetions to narrow down our scope and understand our audience as well as the farmers’ market.

Stakeholder Surveys

We interviewed a total of 16 people over phone call, video call, or in person at the market. We received all types of perspectives: 3 were part of the Fresh Approach team, 3 from existing partner organizations, 3 from the farmers, and 7 from market attendees.

We found five main themes in our interviews:

• Awareness about the market as well as Fresh Approach’s programs and incentives
• Cost of organic food tends to be pricier than that of grocery stores
• Accessibility to the market during the specified time and location
• Cultural barriers in which cultural groups tend to have their own communities and resources
• Availability of groceries at the market

While it’d be easy to give suggestions such as choose a time/day of the week that’s more favorable or bring more farmers into the market to increase options, they aren’t very actionable items since there are a lot of different groups involved, such as city/county regulations, other Fresh Approach programming in the Bay area, and farmers’ already-booked market schedule.

We narrowed our focus to the awareness aspect, with the goal of increasing outreach. We also found that while there has been a movement toward online resources, communities like East Palo Alto continue to rely on traditional forms of media, as simple as local banners and signage and word-of-mouth. While we could try to target individuals, we believed as outsiders, we should leverage local insider knowledge to be successful in our outreach endeavors by building grander partnerships with community leaders, local organizations, and local media within the East Palo Alto community.

We synthesized our data, came up with a plan of action, list of pending questions, and presented it to the program managers. Here’s a snippet of what we presented:

Design and Action Plan

In tackling community awareness of the market, we wanted to create a better process in how Fresh Approach’s Food Access staff did their outreach. Our problem statement now was: Create a more systematic approach to community relations and partnerships in East Palo Alto to scale in a more sustainable manner and connect more to the EPA community as a whole.

We took Fresh Approach’s running list of organizations, half of which needed some sort of reconnection (ie. due to the point of contact no longer working at the organization). I used Google Maps’ Place Search and Place Details API endpoints to pull data through keywords such as ‘non-profit organization’ and ‘clinic’. See the Github repo.

From the Python script, we collected 318 organizations and also had additional organizations we found from doing research. We started to clean up the sheet, as many of the Google Maps results lacked information or seemed out of date, and narrowed our focus to 111 organizations. We wanted organizations that had a mission focused on health, aligning with Fresh Approach’s business value, and these included:

• Organizations Fresh Approach had reached to before
• Community / nonprofit organizations, city / government services, schools, and local publications

We asked the Fresh Approach staff if they had an existing email in which Fresh Approach and these organizations could have a central point of communication, especially after the end of the project. They scavenged an email they had used years before for the market but had been untouched in the last couple years. Through this email, we cold-emailed the 86 of the 111 organizations, with strong expectation that we’d only hear back from a handful. We also leveraged connections from some people in the community Fresh Approach had regularly worked with to see if we could get a lead.

Outreach responses were most successful in setting up call conversations than trying to establish a partnership over email alone. These conversations were scheduled throughout the week during the work day over the course of roughly a month. We created a Google Sheet to organize contact information and note of our discussions over the calls.

As we were establishing connections, the Outreach department in Fresh Approach reached out to us about a coupon distribution program they were working on. As recipients of a 3 year federal grant to promote CalFresh EBT at farmers’ markets in San Mateo, Fresh Approach decided (in parallel to our project) to strengthen their community relations by offering free $3 Farmers’ Market coupons to San Mateo organizations to distribute in their network. Although East Palo Alto was just one of many cities in San Mateo County, it was the perfect timing and opportunity as we were able to offer these coupons as an additonal incentive during our outreach.

Final Handoff

We successfully connected to 23 organizations.

As part of the handoff, we:

• Connected to one of East Palo Alto’s community Facebook groups
• Organized the email inbox through tags
• Added social media icons/links to the email signature
• Provided an email template we used to email our partners
• Suggested a partnership toolkit zip file with updated information to send annually to partners, including
  • flyer
  • social media flyer
  • program brochure
  • vendor guideline (for anyone interested in selling at the market)
  • coupon distribution instructions and examples
• Compiled the partnership Google Sheet with key contact information into tabs of priority of successful, prospective, removed, others
• Developed a process on how to use the list and partnership toolkit to sustain relationships with community organizations

Here’s our presentation handoff (some slides removed for brevity):

Post Project Results

This project has been a project of so much discovery. Personally, I found a newfound appreciation for nonprofits as they take on a challenge that can’t be managed at the federal / government level. Before, I would always see farmers’ markets as bougie and overpriced, and while still many do carry the artisanal brand, I realized farmers’ markets were meant to be a way to connect in the local community, before we depended on superstores and one-stop shops.

During the project, I actually found a farmers’ market near me that had very affordable produce, and it’s replaced most of my grocery shopping for fruits and vegetables. Being from Southern California, I have been disappointed about Mexican food in the Bay, but I found fairly affordable Mexican food in East Palo Alto - any time I’ve been getting my quesabirria cravings, I’ve been going to Tacos Toluco. I learned that the black community liked their okras and black-eyed peas and that the Tongan community used root vegetables as a staple. I discovered Tokemoana and was introduced to Polynesian food (Ota, Pulumasima, Lu Sipi, Otai) - the people there are so kind and helpful, and the food is absolutely phenomenal.

As for the project itself, I have met with Food Access Program Manager a handful of times after the project ended in 2020 as well as when the market restarted in 2021. While we haven’t gathered enough data to quantify the project’s success, they have mentioned they’ve seen more foot traffic coming into the market. When I personally visited the market in 2021, I saw that they had expanded their booths to include 2 local specialty vendors (honey and pita/hummus) and an eco-friendly organization that started a reusable bag incentive program for the market. I continue going to the EPA market on a semi-regular basis to support the farmers (it’s not the closest proximity to me and the day/time can be difficult), and I opted into their compost program in which I collect my food scraps for their community garden.

I love supporting the local community and interacting with people I normally do not get to interact with. I’m excited to continue supporting Fresh Approach and to watch an organization I care about grow and continue doing great things!