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Community Engagement Experience

Our team utilizes many strategies to conduct research and implement programming that center community partners most affected by societal problems. These strategies include:

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Engaging Community Members as Full-Time Employees

Two community members have joined us as staff members on the FFORC team.

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  • Rev. William Kearney and Dr. Molly De Marco have been community-academic research partners for ten years. In 2015, Rev. Kearney became our FFORC Community Field Coordinator, a full-time UNC employee. He developed the Warren County Local Food Promotion Council and is a boundary spanner between communities and the academy.​

  • Judit Alvarado started as a community garden manager for one of the gardens FFORC supports. In 2017, Judit became an outreach specialist, a full-time UNC employee who facilitates engagement with low-resource mothers in our active living research program.

 

Equitable Compensation for Community Members

We work to equitably compensate low-resource community members who partner with us to implement interventions.

  • County-level coordinators and community garden managers (of and in the community) compensated as independent contractors or vendors.

  • We buy food and garden supplies in the communities where we partner to move more resources to those communities.

 

Human-Centered Design

We employ human-centered design principles to engage historically marginalized communities.

Projects using human-centered design principles include:

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  • Journey mapping with low-resource Latina moms to learn how they budget for healthy foods.

  • The Food, Fitness, and Opportunity Research Collaborative and Share Our Strength’s Cooking Matters convened parents and caregivers of young children (0 – 5 years old) in a series of human-centered design workshops to learn about how SNAP-Ed could center their needs and desires when developing food retail interventions promoting healthy food choices.

  • The Using Human-Centered Design to Test Food Retail Strategies guide highlights the key insights and learnings from these sessions and provides two intervention frameworks prioritized by caregivers – a meal box intervention and a rewards program. The intervention frameworks were co-created with food retail stakeholders, SNAP-Ed Implementing Agencies, and caregivers using human-centered design methods. The guide will walk you through how to use human-centered design methods to select an appropriate intervention framework as well as how to test and refine the framework to your local context.

 

Check out the Design Thinking forSNAP-Ed project page to learn more or to get in touch with us about incorporating these participatory strategies into your work!​

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Participatory Grantmaking (PGM)​

After several years of planning, in 2024, the FFORC team launched its inaugural round of Participatory Grantmaking (PGM) process with a cohort of several community garden partners. With the help of our Community Advisory Board (CAB), proposals were reviewed and voted on, resulting in eight (8) of the garden partners being awarded funding for the 2023 - 2024 season. PGM is a style of allocating resources that emphasizes decentralized decision-making by those receiving funds​​. This allows for 1) peer-to-peer learning​​and 2) puts power in the hands of the people doing the work​ in communities. Check out the PGM project page for more information and updates on each garden's progress in achieving its proposed goals!​

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> Check out the list of all our community partners here.

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Contact Us

Food Fitness Opportunity Research Collaborative

Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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1700 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
CB# 7426
Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599-7426

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p: 919-966-6080
e: fforcteam@unc.edu

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