Saint Francis Hospital is aiming to change the food landscape in North Hartford through a $275,000 grant from the Greater Hartford Gives Foundation.
The hospital will launch a pilot project to help bodegas in the neighborhood increase their capacity to source and sell fresh, nutritious and culturally relevant foods.
North Hartford lacks a full-service supermarket, making it difficult for many residents to get groceries.
The area scores especially high in concentrations of cheap, unhealthy foods compared to the rest of the state, according to DataHaven, a nonprofit. North Hartford also ranked higher for people with diabetes and high blood pressure.
Damion Baker, community impact officer for the foundation, said the initiative is part of a larger goal to improve access to healthy food.
“This work intersects with the foundation’s ongoing investment in basic human needs supports including efforts to reduce food insecurity throughout the Greater Hartford region,” Baker said.
North Hartford residents who lack their own transportation often take two bus lines to reach stores that stock healthy produce in other towns.
Tashjian Farrell, a preschool teacher who lives in the neighborhood, said her family is West Indian, and typically eats meals with starch, veggies and protein. But many stores in the area sell snacks, cakes, candy and sugary drinks, which can be marked down to as low as $1.
"We would have to travel to Newington, Avon or East Windsor to get the good produce," Farrell said. "But even then those are predominantly white neighborhoods so they won’t have the produce we want, like yucca, malanga and taro.”
Carolyn Alessi, regional director of community health and wellbeing at Trinity Health of New England, which operates Saint Francis, said North Harford is characterized as a "food swamp," meaning the groceries available in the area aren't nutritionally sound.
“They're typically located in a Family Dollar store, a Walmart or a bodega, and those foods are the ones that are contributing to many of the chronic conditions that we see within this community,” she said.
Shariff Akeem Lewis, another North Hartford resident, said even fresh produce available in his neighborhood isn't the best quality.
“It can be harder than it should be,” he said. “Much of the [fresh produce] we get barely has a shelf life. I have newly-bought strawberries molding in one to two days after purchase.”
The pilot project will focus on converting bodegas into healthy access points by bringing in locally grown food. And to make this affordable, the Saint Francis team is studying a sliding scale grocery store model, like the one used by Forge City Works at The Grocery on Broad in the Frog Hollow neighborhood. It's also looking at leveraging public assistance programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC).
Organizers are also working with the city to support the initiative, Alessi said.
“That was one of the challenges we needed to really think about and solve for, and that's why we engaged the city to be a partner in this to look at ordinances that can incentivize the bodega owners or storefronts to continue this model,” Alessi said.
