News
June 26, 2023
UPDATED: JULY 2, 2023 1060 words 5.4 min read In 2013, CUNY signed a 10-year pouring rights contract with PepsiCo, giving that company exclusive rights to sell its beverages in all vending machines and cafeterias at CUNY. Now a group of students, faculty, and staff are urging CUNY not to renew this contract. Distinguished Professor of Public Health, Co-Founder and Senior Faculty Fellow at the [...]
June 26, 2023
Last month, Emma Vignola graduated with a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. For five years, Vignola served as a doctoral fellow with the CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute. Her dissertation, Investigating and Mitigating the Harmful Impact of Precarious Employment on the Health and Well-Being of New York City Food Workers, received the Dissertation Award for Outstanding Contribution to [...]
June 2, 2023
IN THIS ISSUE: Feature Interview: Racial Equity and Institutional Food Procurement with Rebekah A. Williams and Jessica Gilbert-Overland / Policy Highlights / Research Highlights / Recording from our Urban Food Policy Forum on Racial Equity and Food Procurement / Opportunities EDITORIAL Greetings CUNY Urban Food Policy Monitor readers and members of our food policy learning community! In our interconnected world, the impact of our purchases [...]
June 1, 2023
Rebekah Williams is an organizer and trainer from Western New York and co-founder of Food for the Spirit, the Buffalo Food Equity Network, and the Good Food Buffalo Coalition. Jessica Gilbert-Overland is the Campaign Director of the Good Food Buffalo Coalition. In this feature interview for the CUNY Urban Food Policy Monitor, the Institute Managing Director Craig Willingham and the Institute Director of Policy, Rositsa [...]
January 31, 2023
IN THIS ISSUE: Visualizing Food Systems: A Q&A with Rebecca McLaren / Tracking the Effects of Values-Based Food Procurement: New York City’s “Cool Foods” Dashboard / Leveraging Public Data to Uncover Additional Insights: A Snapshot of School Meals / Building a Dashboard for Urban Agriculture: An International Participatory Data Collection and Analysis Project / Policy Highlights / Research Highlights / Upcoming Events / Recordings from [...]
January 25, 2023
Image Credit: NYC Food Policy Last year, New York City made two important commitments to values-based food procurement, the process by which governments establish social, environmental health and other criteria for the food they buy in addition to cost parameters and technical standards. In February 2022, NYC’s Mayor Eric Adams signed Executive Order 8, which commits the city to Good Food Purchasing based on a [...]
January 25, 2023
Image Credit: foodsystemsdashboard.org Can you briefly describe The Food Systems Dashboard and the motivation for creating it? Rebecca McLaren (RM): The Food Systems Dashboard (FSD) is an innovative data platform that was launched in 2020 to provide a holistic look at food systems. Previously, food systems data were difficult to access and scattered across many different sources. Our motivation was to bring these data together [...]
December 8, 2022
The Grainstand, a former GrowNYC Food Access and Agriculture program, operated from 2015-2021, with the mission of supporting the development of a regional small grain economy in the Northeast by bridging the gap to provide market access to both producers and consumers. The Grainstand operated a series of retail stands at GrowNYC’s Greenmarkets with operations in four of the five boroughs. It served as a [...]
December 8, 2022
The CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute has worked closely with staff and leadership at GrowNYC to evaluate the implementation of the organization’s Fresh Food Box (FFB) program in the South Bronx, funded under USDA’s Community Food Project portfolio, for the period of September 2018 - August 2021. With partners Bronxworks, Urban Health Plan, Children’s Aid Society, and Montefiore Medical Center, GrowNYC distributed thousands of fresh [...]