Miami Gardens
Miami Gardens: Overview
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Florida Impact to End Hunger’s first healthy retail project began in 2018 as part of a REACH (Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health) grant from the CDC with the City of Miami Gardens. This project is part of the Live Healthy Miami Gardens collective impact initiative to foster and maintain a community culture of health and well-being for all residents of the city through access, information, activities, and services.
The initial phase of this project involved conducting a food environment survey utilizing the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey (NEMS) tool. All non-restaurant food retailers were surveyed with the NEMS-CS (Corner Stores) survey, and residents were surveyed with the NEMS-P (Perceived) survey. This formed a baseline of information to assess healthy food access and need across the city. 83 food stores were initially identified in the city, of these 42 were surveyed, and 18 were targeted for intervention as they are independently-owned, and accepted SNAP/EBT.
The NEMS-CS survey assessed each store for its availability of healthy and nutritious food items, the price of these items relative to less healthy options, and the quality of these items. These three scores produce a total score for the city.
Miami Gardens: Incentives
A series of incentives have been developed for participating stores:
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Development of a community purchasing group
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Connecting all participating stores to a single produce distributor
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Increasing purchasing power and driving down purchase price
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Development of citywide marketing and branding to identify project stores and healthy options within those stores
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Improvement of store accessibility and visibility to attract customers
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Assistance with equipment needs
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Assistance with applying for Fresh Access Bucks
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Doubling the value of SNAP when purchasing produce
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Provided by Feeding Florida
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Miami Gardens: Accessibility
→ Store accessibility is a critical consideration for food environment interventions. We are working to ensure that project stores are accessible to all city residents
→ The City of Miami Gardens is developing a Master Mobility Map on the GIS platform. Florida Impact to End Hunger is utilizing this map to identify store accessibility issues and to make recommendations, as necessary, to the relevant city or county departments. It is hoped that this map will ultimately be made available to city residents, to help them locate their nearest healthy corner store.
Miami Gardens: Participating Retailers
There are currently 6 retailers in Miami Gardens participating in this program. The majority of them are already selling supplemental produce provided by Florida Healthy Retail, and a couple are still in the earlier stages. Please click the yellow button below to see these retailers. Looking to get involved? Please contact us.
