Pursuing sustainable community health

The Food Trust’s dedicated Community-Based Programming staff provide adaptable community-level education and food access work. Through SNAP-Ed, we use an asset-based, trauma-informed lens to provide appropriate, fun, interactive programs to positively affect quality of life, while respecting ethnic, racial and cultural foodways. We work closely with partners on policy, system and environmental changes to help support sustainable community health.

Our community-centered approach

Spotlight Program:
Inside Out

Inside Out: Returning to Health is The Food Trust’s program tailored to recovery and re-entry communities. Inside Out is focused on enhancing people’s lives by providing nutrition education; facilitating access to healthy foods in prison and halfway houses; offering job training; and coordinating the distribution of fresh produce grown at a local prison orchard to re-entry houses and community groups.

Through engaging community-based groups, institutional partners and potential employers, Inside Out’s collaborative effort works to provide food and nutrition services and supports both inside and outside the prison system and creates employment opportunities to increase access to healthy food and improved health. Partners in North Philadelphia currently include the Philadelphia Department of Prisons Office of Sustainability, the City of Philadelphia Reentry Coalition, city officials, Temple University and national organizations working in this space.

The program’s goals are to:

  • Create and sustain a healthy food environment for formerly incarcerated individuals;
  • Promote the greening of prisons and communities through growing food and composting;
  • Provide nutrition education, along with policy, systems and environmental changes at the prison and in target communities to which the formerly incarcerated live;
  • Offer workforce development training related to the food service industry; and
  • Develop a startup catering business for the formerly incarcerated and increase job opportunities for those completing culinary training.

FEATURED RESOURCES

This institution is an equal opportunity provider. This material was partially funded by USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) through the PA Department of Human Services (DHS).

Meet the Community-Based Programming team

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