A New York Health Funder Looks to Small and Urban Farms as a Solution to Hunger
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Urban farm in manhattan. littlenySTOCK/shutterstock
The U.S. may be the wealthiest country in the world, but that doesn’t shield many Americans from hunger. In fact, 38 million people in the U.S. — including 12 million children — face food insecurity, according to Feeding America.
Like many major health funders today, Mother Cabrini Health Foundation (MCHF) includes access to food — along with economic stability, secure housing and environmental safety — in its broader definition of healthcare, and addresses these social determinants of health as part of its mission.
To tackle the root causes of hunger, MCHF is supporting an innovative new project with a long name and a clunky list of participants. FoodMap NY: Developing Long-Term Solutions to Food Insecurity in New York, is a collaboration between the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business (CSB), the Figueroa Interdisciplinary Group (FIG) Lab at Cornell University, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering’s Sustainable Urban Environments Program.
MCHF recently announced a $2 million investment in the project, which will map barriers to food access and “identify barriers to successful farming outcomes, as well as actionable, long-term solutions to these barriers, with a focus on small farms, new farmers, women farmers, and BIPOC farmers in New York State.”
Mother Cabrini Health Foundation is the largest foundation focused exclusively on the state of New York. It is named after Frances Xavier Cabrini, a Catholic nun who cared for immigrants and others living in poverty in New York City. Mother Cabrini was the first American to be canonized as a saint. MCHF is a health conversion foundation created after the 2018 sale of Fidelis Care, a nonprofit health insurer. Its mission is to improve the health and well-being of low-income and underserved New Yorkers, and to eliminate health disparities.
Food and hunger have represented a dynamic space in philanthropy in recent years. A number of diverse funders stepped up to address hunger during the pandemic, in Los Angeles and across the country. Even before that, innovative, intersectional funding with healthy food as a core goal has been salient, including through such programs as the Kresge Foundation’s Fresh, Local & Equitable (FreshLo) initiative.
While MCHF routinely provides funding to organizations that address food insecurity, including food banks and food pantries, FoodMap: NY is unique, according to Daniel Frascella, chief programs and grants officer at MCHF. “We fund direct services, but we’ve also been hoping to understand the issues that create food insecurity and to develop new ways to address them,” he said. “This proposal jumped out at us because it’s pointing the way to long-term solutions.”
Mapping hunger
FoodMap NY is part of a larger initiative at NYU Stern’s Center for Sustainable Business (CSB) called Invest NYC SDG. The initiative was launched in 2019 to support New York’s effort to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The U.N. adopted the goals in 2015 “as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that by 2030, all people enjoy peace and prosperity.”
“Our purpose is to help engage the private sector and support private investment in sustainability projects in New York City, using the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals as our framework,” said Marianna Koval, Invest NYC SDG’s director. “It’s an exciting opportunity because New York City was the first city in the world to take its own sustainability plan and map it against the U.N. SDGs.” Food and Health is one of six areas CSB is addressing as part of the Invest NYC SDG Initiative.
In 2021, Mother Cabrini Health Foundation provided an initial $300,000 to support CSB’s effort to identify and map sources of food production in New York City. The result was M.A.P. NYC, which Wythe Marschall, senior research project manager for the Invest NYC SDG Initiative, describes as an online database of community gardens and other sources of food production in the city.
Most people don’t associate New York City with farming, but as M.A.P. NYC illustrates, there is an abundance of urban farms and gardens around the city, especially in the South Bronx, Harlem, the Lower East Side, and particularly in Brooklyn. There are also a number of commercial indoor farms in the city and across the river in New Jersey. The database includes information like acreage, what crops are produced, how food is distributed, and even volunteer opportunities for those who want to get involved.
Marschall and his team have shared the map with the city’s new Office of Urban Agriculture, just created by incoming Mayor Eric Adams. “One reason we want to do this is to create better relationships among everyone working in this area,” he said. “There are literally thousands of gardens, and it’s exciting to have all this information in one place. We’re hoping it will help in, for example, getting food to donate to food banks, and getting compost to gardeners and farmers who need it — helping move and share resources.”
The M.A.P NYC project, which Marschall co-directs with Alice Reznickova, industry assistant professor and director of sustainable urban environments at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, is still being updated.
Renewable Rikers
The recent $2 million grant from the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation will allow CSB to expand its work across the entire state. “The goal is to explore how food production and distribution can be improved, especially in areas of the state where there are food deserts,” said MCHF’s Daniel Frascella.
“We’re going to be looking beyond the downstate region to the rich agricultural regions of New York, many of which have real issues with food insecurity that look different than in larger urban areas,” Marschall said. He describes the end product as “a really thorough landscape analysis, a kind of typology of strategies that will actually help reduce food insecurity in New York State.”
Along with the mapping project, CSB will be working with organizations and companies to create pilot programs to increase food production. That work is just beginning, but Marianna Koval points to one of CSB’s New York City-based projects: a plan for an indoor farm on Rikers Island. The notorious prison there is slated to close in 2027, and a coalition called Renewable Rikers is planning a vast green infrastructure project for the island.
“We’ve spent the last two years working on a proposal to build an indoor farm that would employ formerly incarcerated people,” Koval said. Plans are still in development, but the goal is for the farm to be owned by workers through an employee stock ownership plan or worker cooperative structure.
CSB will use the new MCHF investment to create and collaborate on innovative food production projects like this throughout the state, with a specific focus on financial and other challenges that hit small farmers, new farmers, women farmers, and BIPOC farmers particularly hard. “Access to capital is a serious issue these populations face,” Koval said. CSB is exploring ways to boost access to capital for farmers through existing programs that provide low-cost capital to people in underserved communities.
Feeding a changing planet
Mother Cabrini Health Foundation’s support for CSB’s work has been essential, says Marschall, who sees an important role for philanthropy in seeding new projects and helping them get off the ground. “[MCHF] has a longer-term vision, and they’re looking for evidence of what can work,” he said. “We want to be able to provide that evidence and to work with them to come up with novel strategies, to get them going, and to show, ‘Here’s where your support can have a big impact.’ We’re a very small team, but we’re coming up with a lot of ideas, moving on them quickly, and not wasting anyone’s time or money.”
Marschall is in a hurry — not just because of the alarming, shameful number of people in the U.S. who experience hunger every day. The rapidly changing climate, he points out, promises to make the problem worse, in the U.S. and around the globe.
“A lot of my interest in this work is motivated by climate, and the fact that the climate is changing, and that really affects agriculture,” he said. “We’re seeing that already, in addition to all kinds of other things affecting agriculture, like war and the pandemic. At the city level, at the state level, at the national level, we need to think about how we’re going to produce enough healthy food and how we are going to distribute it equitably.”
