wish you were here: liveblog from the Association for Community Design Annual Conference

I’m watching local Rochester-area advocates respond to presentations by three panelists on the subject of “Community Food Supply and Environmental Justice” at the Association for Community Design annual conference. We’re here hosted by the Rochester Regional Community Design Center.

2 minute read

June 5, 2009, 7:27 AM PDT

By Jess Zimbabwe @jzimbabwe


I'm watching local Rochester-area advocates respond to
presentations by three panelists on the subject of "Community Food Supply and
Environmental Justice" at the Association for
Community Design annual conference
. We're here hosted by the Rochester Regional Community Design Center.

The panelists are:

And the respondents are:

Inspiring/Sobering Facts from the Panel and discussion:

  1. Mapping project by Potteiger and his students show historic
    patterns of full-service grocery stores moving out of central Syracuse.
  2. Research by Sandy Lane shows the connection between
    proximity to "corner store" type of groceries and lack of access to
    full-service grocers with low infant birth rate.
  3. In the U.S., there are more people in prisons than working
    on farms.
  4. Buffalo has 657 acres of vacant land and an overweight rate
    that is three times the national average.
  5. The Massachusetts Avenue Project is opening an aquaponics
    project that will grow 3000 tilapia (plus produce fertilized by the tilapia's
    poop.)
  6. The Massachusetts Avenue Project has a 100% high school graduation
    rate and college attendance rate among the high school seniors who work with
    them. These students will all be the first person in their family to attend
    college. (This generated applause from the audience.) Buffalo has a 45% high
    school drop-out rate.
  7. The town of Chester, Pennsylvania hasn't had a grocery store
    for over 40 years (but they are getting a new soccer team).
  8. The Community Design Collaborative uses design as a tool to
    overcome the perceived or real obstacles that developers encounter in trying to
    locate grocers on infill sites.
  9. Foodlink, which operates as a food bank in the Rochester
    area, several years ago came to the inclusion that meeting emergency food shortage
    needs would never solve the problems of hunger, so they changed tactics and
    starting looking to create jobs and opportunities around food.
  10. After finding high rates of lead in the soil, SWAN began
    working with kids to build earthboxes to allow healthy gardening. Unexpectedly,
    they learned that the boxes allowed a quadriplegic in the neighborhood who had
    never been able to garden before to do so.
  11. In an informal study of 40 Rochester corner stores, one was
    found to carry fresh produce.
  12. Some scientists believe that we might be about to see the
    first generation since the civil war of children who will not live as long as
    their parents due to obesity and food insecurity. 

Jess Zimbabwe

Jess Zimbabwe is the Principal of Plot Strategies. She served until recently for ten years as the founding Director of the Daniel Rose Center for Public Leadership—a partnership the National League of Cities (NLC) and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). The Center’s flagship program was the Daniel Rose Fellowship, which brought the mayors and senior leadership teams of 4 cities together for a year-long program of learning from land use experts, technical assistance, study tours, leadership development, and peer-to-peer exchange.

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