Health Care Share: Fighting Food Insecurity with Local Farm Shares

Food insecurity affects 10% of Vermont families annually, up to 15% of families with children. Contributing factors to this include lack of transportation, low wages, lack of affordable housing, unemployment, and limited access to nutritious produce. For children, this issue is even more pronounced during the summer months, without access to free or reduced-price meals at school. Health Care Share is a 14-week farm share distributed to families who have been identified to have food insecurity by their healthcare provider in Vermont. This project’s goal was to promote provider and patient awareness regarding the application process by implementing reminders for providers during the application window, as well as increasing ease of patient education via a dotphrase to provide the patients with additional information to take home with them.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1582/thumbnail.jp