Community Food Assessment

A Community Food Assessment (CFA) is a powerful tool used to measure the strengths and weaknesses of a local food system in order to make improvements. A CFA brings together diverse stakeholders in a community to research how food is produced and consumed in a specific region.

Food Works' founders Dayna Conner and Jerry Bradley gave a presentation in June 2008 to gauge local stakeholders’ interest in conducting a CFA. The first CFA steering committee meeting was held in July. Shortly thereafter the steering committee adopted the consensus decision making process and defined its geographical region to focus on Jackson and Union Counties.

The first phase of the CFA was to establish its project goals so the committee could find key indicators to develop pertinent research questions in order to arrive at the necessary and best research methods to reach our objectives. We created four subcommittees to work within the areas of production, infrastructure, consumer access, and consumer awareness and education.

In April, 2009, the 12-member steering committee agreed upon its goals and objectives and began the research and development stage. The team broke into four groups to develop research instruments: markets, production, consumer access and secondary data collection. In October, 2009, the CFA team, with dozens of community volunteers, completed a series of consumer surveys. Since then the team has completed a retail market manager survey and a series of farmer focus groups to gather primary data about our local food system.

We expect to have a full report ready in 2012.