Help the WHIN Food Council continue its food justice mission and to provide workshops, garden, and distribute free fresh produce to the community. As COVID-19 has decimated our grant funding, we need your support!
Leader
Eman Faris
Location
3703 10th Avenue New York, NY 10034
Since 2016, the Washington Heights/Inwood (WHIN) Food Council has been organizing community members around food justice in Uptown Manhattan. We create a space for residents to identify and determine solutions to the food justice issues they see in our community. We aim to empower community members to make positive changes in WHIN around food and land.
Our programs are free to the community and are offered in English and Spanish, ensuring access for our Spanish-dominant residents. We currently maintain three New York Restoration Project garden plots in the Riley-Levin Children’s Garden where we grow and harvest produce, ranging from cantaloupe, mint, kale, eggplant, tomato, squash, peppers, radishes, carrots, basil, and more. This produce is available for free to community members. During the growing season, we host weekly open garden hours and 4-5 Family Garden Days, where participants learn about urban gardening through hands-on engagement. We also host cooking demos, share healthy recipes, yoga, garden-treasure hunts, and butterfly releases for adults and children alike to build social cohesion amongst our members! Outside of the growing season, the WHIN Food Council hosts a range of monthly workshops and activities for members. We’ve organized film screenings and discussions, a holiday gift-making workshop using sustainable and eco-friendly materials, fermentation workshops, potlucks, and nutrition workshops with cooking demos. We have also hosted guest speakers on food policy, as well as educational presentations on topics such as composting.
We strongly prioritize building partnerships with community organizations whose missions align with our goals and activities. We recently established a partnership with Plant Powered Metro NY (PPMNY), an organization building a movement to educate communities about the benefits of whole food, plant-based diets. We are currently working with them to design a plant-based nutrition workshop series that aligns with the interests of our members to achieve healthier lifestyles and prevent or reverse chronic diseases.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been sharing resources on our social media channels to address current needs and challenges, such as local opportunities to secure food, local food businesses to support, and calls for volunteering. In addition, we have started sharing an ingredient of the week and asking members to submit photos of what they cooked with that ingredient. All of our communications are bilingual in both English and Spanish. We have also started to host virtual events such as bilingual yoga classes and bilingual plant-based eating workshops with PPMNY.
When you support our work, you're supporting a grassroots, community-led organization that has a steering committee made up of volunteers from the community and one part-time paid administratie coordinator. You're helping an organizaiton where every dollar matters. We partner regularly with other organizations in our community such as Friends of Inwood Hill Park, El Nido, New York Restoration Project, Plant-Powered Metro NY, and Connectemonos.
Thank YOU for fueling our food justice mission!
We do this to serve our community and address systemic inequities we see. According to the Department of Environmental Conservation, WHIN is a designated environmental justice area. According to the Community Health Profile published in 2018 by the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH), a majority of WHIN residents identify as members of minority groups (72% Hispanic, 7% Black, 3% Asian). Access to affordable housing and employment opportunities with fair wages and benefits are closely associated with good health. However, nearly 20% of residents live in poverty, while another 12% are unemployed, which is higher than the city’s 7% unemployment rate. Over half (53%) of WHIN residents are also rent burdened, which means that households pay more than 30% of their income for housing and may have difficulty affording food, clothing, transportation, and health care. Another way to consider the effect of socioeconomic status on health is looking at death rates across neighborhoods. According to the DOHMH, if the death rates from five of the richest NYC neighborhoods were achievable in WHIN, it is estimated that 12% of deaths could have been averted in our community.
In studying the food environment, bodegas are generally less likely to have as many healthy options compared to supermarkets. The lowest supermarket to bodega ratio in NYC is one supermarket for every three bodegas. In WHIN, for every one supermarket, there are 13 bodegas. Additionally, the food retail environment can also be measured by the number of supermarket square footage (per 100 people). In NYC’s best ranking neighborhood, there is 450 supermarket square footage, compared to only 119 in WHIN, ranking it 43rd out of NYC’s 59 community districts.
So, how do all these social determinants affect WHIN residents’ health outcomes? A little over a quarter (26%) of residents are obese, which is significantly higher than Manhattan’s 15% overall average. Similarly, WHIN residents experience higher rates of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease. This data indicates that members of the WHIN community bear a disproportionate burden of negative health outcomes compared to other neighborhoods in NYC. There is a close correlation between health and the environment. It is the WHIN Food Council’s mission to improve the food landscape and green spaces in upper Manhattan to make it easier for residents to make healthier choices and thus enjoy a higher quality of life.
