The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) is expanding existing grants to five of its current program awardees to assess how food systems operate and adapt in times of stress.
, will apply the additional funds from FFAR to her grant-funded program to better understand how a common system shock like COVID-19 will produce differential impacts at the neighborhood level.
Dr. Freedman, is the Mary Ann Swetland Professor in Environmental Health Sciences and a professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ School of Medicine.
Her team is one of FFAR’s original five Tipping Points awardees. She and her team will model the effects of COVID-19 in neighborhoods that had high, medium, and low food security before March 2020. Their findings will be used to tailor food system solutions to major stressors like COVID-19 in diverse neighborhood contexts.
FFAR’s Tipping Points Grantees work with community organizations within five US cities to understand various aspects of the local food system and improve health and economic outcomes through quantitative modeling of that food system. Food system investments in urban communities often work on isolated factors to improve health, equity, and economic development. However, food systems are complicated networks that intersect with the environment, housing, education, the economy, and other factors. Understanding how these factors interact informs the best use of limited investments to improve health and economic outcomes in these communities.
Read the full story about these supplemental grants from FFAR .