Louisville/Jefferson County, Kentucky residents have large disparities in health outcomes that are related to many social determinants of health such as race, socio-economic status, residential address, educational attainment, etc. The Center for Health Equity in Louisville releases a periodic Health Equity Report that captures both the challenges and the places for innovation in improving community health. The 2017 Health Equity Report identified food systems inequities as a major root cause of the health disparities in Louisville, KY (https://louisvilleky.gov/government/center-health-equity/health-equity-report). A coalition of local food and food access community organizations that included the Extension Food Systems Specialists decided to collaborate in the application for a USDA Regional Food Systems Partnership Grant to develop a guiding document for city officials to use when considering how to approach food systems equity and access as they worked towards addressing the root causes of health disparities in the city. While the Extension Specialist was not a named grant applicant, they provided support to the group in the outline and scope of project and agreed to provide support should the application be approved. The grant application was successful and from 2022-2024, the coalition engaged in community-based research that lead to the publication of Food Vision 2030.

In 2022 & 2023, the Food Systems Specialist provided guidance for the community group of 5 local non-profits and an additional 40 interested community members as they engaged in gathering community input for the Food Vision 2030. The Specialist supported the groups in writing an online survey to collect data and also provided suggestions to the grant application partners on best ways to distribute the survey. The survey was live from June 2023-January 2024 and received a total of 378 unique and complete responses.

Between February and April 2024, the Food Systems Specialist support the 40+ community volunteer group in learning how to do thematic qualitative data analysis of the survey results. The Specialist did a initial coding of all survey results to group responses into 4 thematic areas that were identified by the grant partners: Food Policy & Land Access; Education & Training; Food Infrastructure/ Food Supply; Food Access. In cases where responses touched on multiple categories, the results were duplicated in each thematic area.

In May and July of 2024, the Food Systems Specialist continued to review and thematically organize the data with the help of a core team. The data was then reviewed again in a community setting to help prioritize the themes for what would become Food Vision 2030. At the end of July, the grant partners and community volunteers had selected three overarching “Visions” from the data as the basis for the Food Vision, Healthy Local Food for All; A Just and Sustainable Food Economy and Environmental Justice.

Between July and September 2024, the Food System Specialist joined a core writing team to draft Food Vision 2030 based on all of the data and collective input of community.

Food Vision 2030 was publicly launched at the Sept. 2024 People’s Summit on Food Systems and Urban Agriculture and the full publication was made available online on October 15, 2024 and can be found here: https://foodinneighborhoods.org/.

Food Vision 2024  will be utilized by community organizations, local, state and potentially federal government as a document that describes a community-driven roadmap for food systems change in Louisville, KY. Currently, the newly formed Greater Louisville Food Council will be working with local elected officials to enact some of the policy-based recommendations outlined in the Food Vision. The community groups that wrote the initial USDA grant are continuing to meet and plan to partner on future funding opportunities to enact the suggested food systems changed outlined in the Food Vision.