Community Mapping : Mapping Multi-Level Interventions

Our Work: The Food Trust PEACH team

Learning Objectives

You will:

1. Learn why and how we developed community resource maps

2. Learn how we executed the project

3. Review a sample of results

Objective 1. Learn why and how we developed community resource maps

FY15

FY16

Question: How can we best reach those we serve?

Our question: Defining a community

• How can we best reach those we serve? – Current approach

• Identify community to deliver services to based on SNAP eligible residents in a geographic area

• Choose community sites within the area identified by census data

– Community Mapping approach • Identify community to deliver services to based on

SNAP eligible residents in geographic area

• Choose community sites based on where community members report going for a variety of reasons

• Choose a relatively small area to reach the same residents to reinforce programming concepts

• Goal – Identify places community members frequent in order

to saturate a community with services

• Methodology: Participatory Asset Mapping

– Definition: A process where community members collectively create asset maps by identifying and providing the information about their own community’s assets on a map.

Our process: Setting up the project

Our process: Setting up the project

• Outcomes • Anticipated outcomes

– Find potential locations for programming – Build partnerships – Increase educators familiarity with

community members and resources

• Unanticipated outcomes – Class recruitment – Branding and increased familiarity of agency

Objective 2. Learn how we executed the project

Our process: Execution

• Meetings with managerial staff to determine basic target communities

• Individual meetings with educators about how they define their community to finalize target communities

• Develop tool, initial maps and protocol

– Differences between FY15 and FY16 tool

• Added Qs to FY16

– If and how often participants go to current programming sites and if they received nutrition education at any sites

– Food Security Questions

Our process: Setting up the project

Our process: Setting up the project

• Interviewing protocol – Who can interview

• Nutrition educator within specified region

– Who to interview • Participant eligibility • How many

– Where? • Variety of sites

– When? – How?

• Verbal, Incentives

• Materials provided to staff

Execution from Educator Perspective

• 1st Educator training to launch project – Trained on protocol and tool

• Went out and conducted interviews

• Interviews

1. Face-to-face

2. Ask individual permission

3. Introduce self, TFT, interview

4. Verify location eligibility

5. Proceeded with interview

6. Incentive distribution

Our process: Execution

• 2nd Educator training on data entry and to review and share field experience

• Finished interviewing • Educators entered participant data into Excel

• ArcGIS software was used to map the interview responses

– Nutrition Education Sites as of Summer 2015 were included for context

– FY16 difference: paper vs web map

Objective 3. Review a sample of results

Our process: Results

• Total surveys completed: 103

• Location records: 1801

• Average Location Responses per participant (out of 45 possible): 17.49

• Unique maps produced for each community: 10

• Categories: Home, Work, School, Food, Health, Social, Public Transit

• Aggregate: All locations, Highest Count locations

• Materials provided to educators –Data summary table –Demographic comparison between those

interviewed & American Community Survey data –Distance comparison

• Target community vs Overall responses: how far were responses from center of the community

• Example: Allentown Large Scale Grocery Shopping

• Maps of responses by each category and aggregate responses

Our process: Allentown Results

• High count locations: Allentown Our process: Results

Kensington, Sheppard: Locations with high participant response counts by individual categories

Table 4.

Participant Count: 10 143

Kensington, Sheppard: Distance of responses from centroid compared to all responses

Our process: Results

• Explore your community exercise – Are responses close to current programming sites? – Take a virtual walk through your community

• Use Google earth view and Google street view

– Take a real walk in your community – How does this affect my programming?

•Process of exploring Allentown

–Plotted FY15 locations, current TFT sites, other agency sites, sites voiced by participants

Our process: Results

Takeaways from Educator perspective • Successes

– Understanding and familiarity with community – Potential list of places for future

programming/expansion – Able to provide available local resource contact info – Promoted awareness of TFT nutrition programming

• Challenges – Language barrier – Survey length – Discomfort with food security and income questions – Turning away ineligible community members – Using paper maps during surveying

Our process: Results • General Results

– Importance of looking outside the immediate community for sites

– Focusing on smaller area to reach community members multiple times

– Importance of building partnerships in order to reach community members multiple times

• Challenges

– Technology - Alternatives: Google Maps, Carto

– Data entry and processing time

– Census tract eligibility

Questions?

Thank You!

• Chantal Roberts, MS

– Research and Evaluation Coordinator

– croberts@thefoodtrust.org

– (215)575-0444 ext. 7150