Food Services
Non-profit workers providing food-related services use SparkMap’s Community Needs Assessment and Map Room to identify food deserts, assess food-related resources, and pinpoint populations vulnerable to hunger.
Food Services with SparkMap’s Community Needs Assessment
I co-run a soup kitchen for women, and we are blessed to help a large number of people across our community. After several years of business, we decided we had the volunteer and resource capacity to open a second kitchen, so we began applying for grant funding to help with startup costs.
We included our own data in the funding application, such as our volunteer records, donation records, typical expenditures, and the approximate number of women and children fed, but we also needed to demonstrate our community’s need for our expanded services. We used a 90 day Pro SparkMap Subscription to generate a report on our county’s poverty levels, access to transportation, and access to food demonstrating the additional need for our services. The report was effective, detailed, and allowed us to view data by gender — which enabled us to demonstrate that issues pertaining to food access disproportionately impact women in our community.
— Zana B., Soup Kitchen Director, Pro Subscriber
Food Services with SparkMap’s Map Room
My non-profit organizes food pickups and pop-up soup kitchens. We use a few standard locations and expand to new locations based on need expressed through word of mouth. While this process is effective, we wanted to make sure we were servicing our community’s most vulnerable populations.
We began using SparkMap’s Map Room to view areas within our community with low transportation access, low food access, and high poverty levels. This research helped us expand our pickups and popups to several new locations and has allowed us to serve even more community members.
— Chris Q., Free Subscriber