Founded in 1992, The Food Trust works with neighborhoods, institutions, retailers, farmers, and policymakers across the country to ensure delicious, nutritious food for all. Backed by three decades of research and evaluation, our holistic, community-centered approach to nutrition security weaves together three core programming elements — access, affordability and education — as well as a focus on advocating for public policy solutions.
Headquartered in Philadelphia, TFT works locally and nationally to further its mission of improving access to healthy food and nutrition education. Over the years, the organization has become a regional and national leader in developing innovative strategies to improve nutrition security, increase healthy food access and prevent diet-related disease. TFT’s core programs include: operating the region’s largest network of farmers markets; running fruit and vegetable incentive programs; providing training and technical assistance for the Healthy Corner Store Initiative; providing nutrition education to children and adults in schools and community sites; and advocating for policy change at the local, state and national levels.
Recognizing that low-income communities are challenged most by food insecurity, TFT gears its programs to community residents most impacted by food, health and economic injustices — Black, Brown, Indigenous, poor and marginalized residents, with a focus on families with children. TFT provides direct service in: PA (Philadelphia, Reading, Pittsburgh, Central PA); NJ (Camden, Trenton); and San Jose, California, and Food Trust programs serve more than 800,000 people annually.
The Food Trust’s Farmers Market program (FMP) is the foundation of the organization’s mission and how the institution got its start in 1992. More than 30 years later, TFT has built up their holistic community-centered approach to nutrition security by focusing on three core programming elements — access, affordability and education — as well as a focus on advocating for public policy solutions. FMP remains a core program at The Food Trust, creating greater food access in underserved Philadelphia neighborhoods and while the program has undergone enormous growth, the evaluation practices (e.g. how we collect data, how we process the data, how we report findings, etc) have not and it’s evident that there’s room for improvement. In 2019, The Food Trust had to do some restructuring and lost the majority of its evaluations team which has made the process of assessing our current model and researching other avenues very challenging.
Goals for this project:
Goal 1: A full review and assessment of FMP’s current processes regarding evaluations and data collection which would include auditing current surveys and data collection forms and database, how information is entered, aggregated and processed internally, and coming up with recommendations that may include: gaps in data being collected, opportunities to glean additional metrics from existing data, and comparing it to evaluation and data best practices throughout the industry.
Goal 2: Review the technologies currently used (both on-site to deliver the program as well as administratively) to evaluate, make decisions and report out impact of the program. Identify areas to streamline and be more efficient for each use case as well as make recommendations on additional tools, technologies or practices to make the systems more efficient. FMP current methods/softwares used are: Google forms, paper forms, google sheets, an online database and POS terminals at each market which are Pax machines and serviced by Cardpointe.
Both of these goals require a level of research to learn about best practices and how other similar agencies or programs use and manage technology and evaluations. This project would also benefit from someone that has cross sector experience in data management that could pull on knowledge from other sectors that could be useful for our program.
A successful project would conclude with the aforementioned goals met and an analysis of our current practices and processes as it relates to technology and evaluations with recommendations for improvements.
There are no special considerations, other than to note that we do some form of surveying (customer surveys, vendor surveys, customer counts, etc.) regularly throughout the Farmers Market season, May-October.
