From the windows of their apartments, the residents of North Shore Towers can see the Weis market across the Susquehanna River. In fact, as the crow flies, it’s less than a mile away. But for many of the residents living there, it might as well be a hundred. Matt Griffin, the Director of Health & Nutrition for the Food Bank of the Southern Tier explains that the proximity of a grocery store can have little bearing on a person’s ability to access nutritious, fresh food. This is especially true for the seniors and people with disabilities living at North Shore Towers in Binghamton, NY. “Many of them don’t have transportation or the ability to walk to the store,” Griffin says. “Even taking public transportation isn’t always an option, since it can be difficult for them to ride the bus while carrying groceries.”
Understanding these unique challenges was important to Griffin and his team at the Food Bank of the Southern Tier, so they decided to make a visit to North Shore Towers. While there, they realized the extent of the need for their services. “We learned that because of limited mobility, the residents would rely on getting food from a nearby convenience store and would end up paying very high prices,” Griffin says. This meant they were spending more money for less nutritious food. After their visit in the summer of 2019, the Food Bank decided to partner with the Visiting Nurse Service at North Shore Towers to address food insecurity for 60 of their high-need residents. The Visiting Nurse Service had recently applied for and won an Innovation Fund Program grant from Care Compass Network and wanted to use some of these funds to address their residents’ food insecurity. As part of their goal to decrease hospitalizations and ER utilization, they decided to focus on two of the main social determinants of health: the quantity of the food their residents have access to and the nutritional value of those foods.
Together, the visiting nurses, the Food Bank, Binghamton Housing Authority, and CCN developed a plan to target the most at-risk residents and provide them with a monthly array of fresh fruits and vegetables, lean meats, low-fat dairy, and whole grains right at their building. Their goal was to help residents on Medicaid live a healthier lifestyle through their daily nutrition. By evaluating their patients’ financial and medical needs, visiting nurses identified the residents that would benefit most from the mobile food bank and reached out to let them know of the new program.
After that, each month, volunteers would unload over 1500lbs of food onto tables on the first floor of North Shore Towers. Residents would come down from their apartments and have the chance to shop around the table for the items they wanted, creating a grocery store experience where they could socialize and build community with their neighbors. This grocery store approach helped the visiting nurses work towards many of the goals they’d established for the CCN innovation grant. They used this monthly shopping day as an opportunity to check in with their patients and provide education on medication compliance and nutrition. It quickly became clear that in addition to providing food, the mobile distribution was also allowing them to address other determinants of health including social integration, community engagement, and wellness education.
In the first year of their program, they distributed 18,900lbs of food to North Shore Towers residents, mostly using the shop-around-the-table method. In addition to this monthly distribution, the Food Bank of the Southern Tier also provided “Welcome Boxes” for residents who had been hospitalized or missed the distribution for other reasons. These boxes contained shelf-stable foods that would be waiting for them when they returned home.
Once the pandemic began, the team had to get creative in how they distributed the food. With a 20% increase in requests for food assistance across the Food Bank’s 300+ locations, making sure community members had access to healthy foods was vital. For the past two years, the North Shore Towers staff and nurses have pivoted to delivering food to apartments to keep everyone safe while still giving them access to the nutrition they need. When the Binghamton Housing Authority realized there were still gaps in food coverage, they decided to create a small grocery store near their executive office to provide residents with staples like yogurt and bread at a low cost.
Unfortunately, due to the increased COVID demands on the visiting nurses and staff, in April 2022 North Shore Towers had to pause their mobile food distribution. However, Griffin and the Binghamton Housing Authority are hopeful they will one day be able to resume the program that has helped North Shore residents access healthy food and gain a new understanding of how nutrition contributes to their health.
Written by Sarah A. Bull