Holly Lasagna
Associate Director, Community Based Learning Program
Harward Center for Community Partnerships
Bates College

Bates College and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships have long had an interest in local food systems. Over the past three years, coursework, community-based research, student volunteerism, and student summer fellowships have been integrated to create a sustained program around food issues. Local Food for Lewiston is a collaborative community-based project whose goal has been to develop a comprehensive plan to improve access to healthy food for consumers, support local producers, and create sustainable local food system solutions. Over the course of the project, I have served on the planning committee for the community food assessment, developed curricula for a number of courses and a senior seminar, and have worked with community partners to create collaborative, community-based research projects that address issues in our local food system.

To date, Bates students in five courses and several theses have been involved in integrated quantitative and qualitative research to assess the current state of access, availability and affordability of healthy, appropriate food for residents of Lewiston, Maine. The Bates Program in Environmental Studies re-organized its core Junior Seminar for the past two years around food-related collaborative research projects. Sociology, Biology, Anthropology, and Psychology have also made food insecurity research a core component of courses. In addition, faculty and students from the University of Southern Maine have also engaged with Local Food for Lewiston and Bates faculty and students to implement aspects of the research including GIS mapping of various components of the local food system.

Local Food for Lewiston serves as an innovative model, both locally and nationally, of how to collaboratively address community needs around food security and how to develop and implement sustainable community-based solutions. The project curretlty impacts an array of college and community issues including nutrition and public health, education, economic and enterprise development, and community capacity building.

One of the most interesting aspects of the research has been how the college and the community have developed a robust corps of community action researchers to gather local food system data. This has included the training of local residents who currently access the emergency food system including homeless and immigrant community members. These community actions researchers co-trained with Bates College students and then cooperatively ran focus group and survey projects. Both groups interpreted and presented their data together to the college and Lewiston communities. The result has been research that not only reports the current state of our local food system but also tells the story o how access to healthy food affects and is affected by those who live in our community.

Currently, Local Food for Lewiston is completing a community food assessment report and moving in to phase II of the project; creation of a Food Policy Council. This council will help to implement solutions suggested by the community food assessment.