Photo by Puentes de Salud
A new project between the local Philadelphia community organization Puentes de Salud and The Urban Health Collaborative (UHC) has been announced. This project will explore Philadelphia’s food security landscape and help create a better picture of what access to healthy food looks like across the city. The initiative will be funded through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) and The Urban Institute’s Local Data for Equitable Communities program to Puentes de Salud.
Founded in 2008, Puentes de Salud is a community organization that promotes health equity, empowerment, and cultural resilience for Philadelphia’s Latino immigrant community. The organization has collaborated with researchers at the UHC in the past, most recently through initiatives such as the Latino Health Collective. The project, titled "Reimagining Food Access in Philadelphia: Community Data for Equitable Food Systems” seeks to address a needs gap found in confronting growing food insecurity experienced throughout Philadelphia. While the city’s food security services are seeing increased investments from public agencies and local foundations, these services would benefit from more data on assets and residents’ perspectives. Puentes de Salud, with help from the UHC, will seek to bridge this gap.
The project will use a mixed-methods, community-centered design and will recruit members from community leadership structures to form a community advisory board for the project.
Puentes de Salud will partner with community and food access organizations to survey residents and assess food access patterns, affordability, transportation barriers, cultural relevance, benefit participation, and perceived institutional barriers.
As part of the team, Faculty Members at the UHC Félice Lê-Scherban and Mariana Lazo will support culturally responsive study design, facilitate meaningful engagement with immigrant communities, assist with data analysis, and help translate findings into actionable recommendations.
Félice Lê-Scherban, PhD is an epidemiologist and expert in food access, structural determinants of health, and neighborhood-level analysis. Her research focuses on how policy environments and institutional systems shape food insecurity and health outcomes. She will provide methodological guidance, support quantitative and spatial data analysis, and contribute to the development of policy and funding recommendations grounded in the project’s findings.
Mariana Lazo, MD, PhD, is a physician from Mexico and a social epidemiologist specializing in immigrant health, health disparities, and community-engaged research. She leads the Community Engagement Core at the Urban Health Collaborative and brings extensive experience building ethical, equitable research partnerships with marginalized communities.Dr. Lazo will support study design, guide community engagement strategies, and ensure research practices align with principles of equity, inclusion, and shared power. The UHC was also responsible for bringing this funding opportunity to the attention of Puentes de Salud, helping prepare the proposal, and working with Puentes de Salud to ensure that the proposal was attractive in the competitive grants program (only 30 awards given this year).
This work is closely aligned with the mission of the UHC: partnering with nonprofit and community-based organizations to better understand urban health challenges and advance opportunities for healthier, more equitable communities.
Preliminary findings will be presented at the inaugural Food Access Collective convening, led by Puentes de Salud, where residents and partners will assess findings and prioritize next steps. Across sectors, this project will produce shared data to guide how resources, services, and policies are designed and implemented. The Philadelphia Department of Public Health and the Mayor’s Food Policy Advisory Council will be able to use these findings to set priorities and refine citywide and neighborhood plans. Food distribution organizations, such as the Share Food Program, Sharing Excess, and Philabundance, will be able to use the findings to align services to community needs.
The project will help shift Philadelphia’s approach to food insecurity from fragmented services between a variety of organizations and sectors toward coordinated, systems-level solutions that are data-driven, equitable, and community-informed.