Why Youthful Indiscretions Shouldn’t Result in Jail Sentences, How to Save Babies Born with Opioid Addictions and More

 
A Prosecutor’s Vision For A Better Justice System, TED
Adam Foss, a prosecutor with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in Boston, recently asked a group of TED participants how many had ever drank underage, tried an illegal drug, shoplifted or gotten into a physical fight. While viewed by most as youthful indiscretions, these same offenses often land black and brown youth in criminal court, viewed as being dangerous to society. Which is why Foss is using prosecutorial discretion to dismiss minor cases that aren’t worthy of a criminal record.
Tiny Opioid Patients Need Help Easing Into Life, Kaiser Health News and NPR
In this country, addiction to heroin and prescription painkillers like hydrocodone, oxycodone or morphine continues to rise, even afflicting new moms. During pregnancy, these mothers must decide between getting clean and risking a miscarriage or delivering a baby that’s likely to experience drug withdrawal. With about 21,000 infants suffering from withdrawal each year, doctors in Rhode Island, nurses in Connecticut, researchers in Pennsylvania and public health officials in Ohio are all working on solutions to help these new families.

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through, New York Times
Just because the government releases endless pages of data to the public doesn’t mean it’s easy to turn those statistics into something that you can actually comprehend and use. DataUSA, an open source brainchild coming from the M.I.T. Media Lab, organizes and visualizes the information, presenting it in charts, graphs and written synopses. Thanks to this project, instead of just hearing a statistic of how many people in Flint, Mich., live in poverty, for example,  you can see it visually represented on a map.

The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More

 
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead

The Van That’s Saving the Lives of Homeless Kids, a Better Way to Govern Locally and More

 
Mobile Clinic Serves California’s Growing Homeless Youth Population, KQED News
In the Golden State, the number of school-age homeless children has jumped by a third in just three short years. Unstable living environments wreak havoc on these youngsters, resulting in increased risk of chronic illness, mental health disorders and trauma. Doctors aboard the Teen Health Van provide free medical (both physical and mental), nutritional and substance abuse care to hundreds of uninsured and homeless youth.
In Snow Removal, a Model for Change, Governing
City officials in St. Paul, Minn., set out to improve how snow was removed from roadways, but in the process, found a smarter method of governing. The unique approach (which should be replicated nationwide) involved teams consisting of outside consultants, working pro bono, and members of the Department of Public Works, who could provide internal perspectives. (Normally, consultants work on their own to create recommendations.) The result of this public-private pairing? More effective snow removal, and innovative, restructuring changes that DPW employees embraced.
When Families Travel for Medical Care, Strangers Open Their Homes — and Arms, Stat News
Health insurance can help defray the costs of medical expenses, but little financial assistance is available for housing expenses incurred by patients and their families when they must receive life-saving treatments at hospitals far from their homes. Since 1983, the nonprofit Hospitality Homes has been connecting out-of-towners (most are low-income) with host families providing a free place to stay in Boston, where the average hotel room costs more than $100 each night.

The Surprising, Eco-Friendly Place to Store Data Servers, Safer Ways to Care for the Sick and More

 
Why Data Farms Are Heading Underwater, CityLab
According to an animated Walt Disney classic, everything’s better, down where it’s wetter. That’s exactly what computer giant Microsoft learned when it submerged a data farm under the sea. Cold ocean temperatures eliminates the need for massive, energy-sucking cooling systems, which land-based servers require.
Hospitals Focus on Doing No Harm, The New York Times
When one hears that an estimated 98,000 and 440,000 people die because of preventable errors at hospitals, it’s easy to think that doctors are breaking their promise to do no harm. In response, healthcare facilities nationwide are implementing new procedures — from the somewhat common sense (practicing consistent hand washing) to the more complex, like immediate monitoring for symptoms of sepsis and changing hospital culture.
Here’s How Houston Boosted Mass Transit Ridership by Improving Service Without Spending a Dime, Vox
Thanks to overcrowding, late arrivals and seemingly constant price hikes, it’s no wonder that subways and buses get a bad rap. In the highway-riddled city of Houston, transit officials found a way to boost ridership: by emphasizing frequency over geographic scope. More importantly, however, was their discovery of a mass transit strategy that can be replicated coast to coast, at no cost.
 

The High-Energy Activity That’s Healing the Invisible Scars of War

Jeremiah Montell, a Navy petty officer with 17 years of service, takes out his frustrations at his UFC gym. “He can knock the heck out of a boxing bag,” says Lynn Coffland, founder of Catch a Lift Fund, a nonprofit that funds a gym membership or home workout equipment for 2,500 post-9/11 veterans, including Montell. In the past year, Lynn witnessed as Montell lost 70 pounds, stopped taking medication and began crafting homemade American flags — all signs of healing.
Lynn has seen firsthand how physical activity and healing go hand in hand. Her brother Christopher J. Coffland, a fitness enthusiast always heading out to “catch a lift” — his term for hitting the gym — enlisted in the Army one month before he turned 42 years old. Dropping him off at the airport, Lynn asked through tears, “What do I do if you don’t come back?” After cracking a joke, Chris got serious, saying, “I probably won’t come back, but I’ve had a great run and I’m ready to meet Jesus. If I can put myself in the place of another man that has family back home, I will.” In 2009, two weeks after being deployed to Afghanistan, a roadside bomb killed Chris and injured two other Marines. As Lynn pondered how to memorialize her brother, messages from people who’d lifted weights with him in boot camp started flooding Lynn’s inbox.
“There was no program that the VA had set up yet for fitness,” Lynn remembers. “Every active-duty service-member has to be physically fit…Many men and women I talk to, they say [exercise is] their happiest memories. If they’re on base or out in another country, they work out. They have lots of laughs, a lot of friendship and bonding. They come home, and everything’s different. They don’t even know who they are anymore, they say. We get them back to that very basic core that they know existed, which was fitness.”
Catch a Lift Fund started by gifting gym memberships to three veterans in February 2010. The soldiers could pick any spot they wanted: 24-Hour Fitness or Crossfit, a place with pilates machines or a pool. Recovery and reintegration started almost immediately.
To find more participants, Lynn’s father wrote letters to every Veterans Administration hospital nationwide. Today, the group has a waiting list of more than 300 veterans. For those who find a gym stress-inducing, or those in rural areas, the fund pays for home systems.
“The culture has taught them that you have to push through,” but trauma “never goes away,” Lynn says. “You have to work on it so it stays at bay. Through fitness, through friendship and camaraderie, that’s how they’re healing.”

Meet the Doctors Building an Innovative, Holistic Bridge to Healthy Living

What if you were able to cure a disease before someone even caught it? Now imagine doing that on a larger scale — for an entire community of people who lack access to medical resources, including basic supplies like bandages for even the most minor of injuries. What would health care look like if you could eliminate the problem at its source?
Dr. Steve Larson, co-founder of the nonprofit medical clinic Puentes de Salud, or “Bridges of Health,” believes he has the answer. For the past decade, he’s been using a holistic approach that includes medical care, education classes and social services to solve the healthcare woes of Philadelphia’s rapidly growing Latino immigrant population. “The answer is not waiting for the next trauma,” says Larson. “The answer is to keep it from ever happening.”
Watch the video above to see how Puentes de Salud partners with local health organizations, medical schools and private donors to provide its patients comprehensive treatment.
 

The Prescription for Healthier Citizens: Cleaning Up America’s Medical Facilities

Twenty-six centuries ago, a Greek physician urged his medical colleagues to remember that a doctor does “not treat a fever chart [or] a cancerous growth, but a sick human being” who has a life and responsibilities outside of a hospital wing. That level of care — a tenet of the Hippocratic Oath — is already difficult to realize, but Gary Cohen, a travel writer turned healthcare advocate, is pushing medical centers to think even bigger, realizing the connections between a patient’s sickness and its roots in an unhealthy community.
Cohen, one of this year’s recipients of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius” fellowships, co-founded the global nonprofit Healthcare Without Harm (HWH), which is headquartered in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Reston, Va., in 1996. As the organization campaigned to eradicate toxic chemicals from medical equipment — mercury in thermometers, dioxins in incinerated plastic IV bags and tubes — Cohen argued that healthcare providers shouldn’t be making people sick. After significant victories, Cohen recently decided to broaden the focus of HWH from “do no harm” (another classical dictum) to actively bettering community health. With more than 500 partner organizations in 53 countries, including three of the largest nonprofit hospital systems in the U.S.: Catholic Health Initiatives, Kaiser Permanente and Dignity Health, Cohen’s raison d’être is to help doctors heal their profession.
“When we started, we were trying to get hospitals to take the Hippocratic Oath internally, applying the same set of values to their environmental footprint: to reduce the use of fossil fuels, detox the supply chain, get rid of sugar-sweetened junk food,” Cohen says. “But the bigger questions are, ‘How can you be an anchor for community and planetary health? How can you move from being these cathedrals of chronic disease to being centers of community wellness and sustainability? How can you leverage your incredible moral authority, your mission and economic clout to support healthier communities?'”
Cohen’s first job after college was writing guidebooks for top tourist destinations — London, Paris, New York — until a friend asked if he would write a primer on toxic chemicals. Not knowing anything about the topic, Cohen conducted interviews to learn more. “I sat around kitchen tables with mothers and fathers. They had no political power, no money, no technical expertise, but they were fighting for their family’s lives,” he recalls. “Their kids were sick. ‘Why does my daughter have this rare form of cancer? Why does my son wake up in the middle of the night choking for air? Why does the water taste so bad?’” The political organizing manual Cohen subsequently wrote, “Fighting Toxics,” launched what has turned into a lifelong fight for environmental safety. In 1986, he helped pass the first national right-to-know law, alerting consumers about possible chemical exposure.
A decade later, a report by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that warned of on-site medical incinerators (which burn a portion of the 26 pounds of waste generated daily by each patient in a staffed hospital bed) turned Cohen’s attention to hospitals. Incineration removes one biohazard by burning pathogens, but the burning plastic sends other dangerous chemicals into the atmosphere. Tests found dioxin in children’s body fat and traces of mercury in infants’ blood. “The healthcare system is a major polluter,” Cohen says, realizing that, “the very institution devoted to healing people is poisoning them.”
Starting with a team of 28 organizers, Cohen’s advocacy has helped reduce the number of on-site medical waste incinerators in the U.S. from a high of 5,600 to just 70 a decade later. And those hazardous measuring devices containing mercury? HWH’s work has resulted in them, for all practical purposes, being eliminated from hospitals and pharmacies.
What’s unique about HWH’s approach is that these reforms went into effect “without basically any legislation at the federal level,” Cohen says. “We started, you might say, in the basement,” talking with the facility managers and architects. As the cause gained momentum and sustainability worked its way into hospital chains’ strategic priorities, Cohen now has access to meet with vice presidents and CEOs.
Recently, HWH worked with hospitals to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, convincing medical facilities not only to buy solar panels for hospital rooftops, but also to subsidize them for employees’ homes. The organization has also helped school systems and hospitals partner to generate demand for local, sustainably produced food. And it’s demonstrated that the construction of new hospital wings can strategically promote economic development in poorer parts of a city.
HWH has also been bolstered by President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which requires hospitals to conduct community health needs assessments (essentially tabulating why people come to the emergency room). “What conditions in the community are contributing to diseases? Is there food insecurity? Is there pollution? Is there poor housing, violence and poverty? These are the things that are making people sick in the first place,” Cohen says. He adds that the same principles apply to climate change. After witnessing Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy, doctors can’t avoid seeing that global warming’s added risk of flooding or extreme heat as essential to their work. “If you’re a person in Cleveland and you think climate change is all about polar bears and melting ice caps, then you’ve got other stuff to worry about. But when you understand that it has to do with [a patient’s] asthma, the spread of West Nile virus or dengue fever, that reality can no longer be ignored. Now I’m paying attention.”
Cohen’s larger hope is that changes in the healthcare profession, which accounts for $2.9 trillion in spending, resonates throughout the broader economy. Because hospitals must prioritize a patient’s wellbeing, they can invest the extra dollars needed to drive innovation and scale greener practices. Once they prove the business model is viable, other corporations might take notice.
If you ask American citizens which profession they trust most, as Gallup has since 1976, doctors and nurses consistently rank among the most honest and ethical. Eighty percent report high trust in nurses; compared to just 7 percent for members of Congress. Cohen believes medical professionals must live up to this respect by watching out for our health — even when we ourselves don’t want to. Not just whether we’re running a high temperature or have a cough, but the broad influences on the health of our cities.
“I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures which are required,” doctors pledge in the Hippocratic Oath. “I remain a member of society,” they add, “with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.” Cohen will be holding them to their word.

See the Seeds of Change Grown by One Bronx Woman

“The first plant that changed my life was a tomato,” says Karen Washington, a black urban farmer in the Bronx. “It was the one fruit that I used to hate.” But after watching one that she’d grown shift in hue from green to yellow to red and taking a bite of it, she was instantly hooked. “When I tasted that tomato, when it was red and it was ripe, and I picked it off the vine, [it]…changed my world because I never tasted anything so good, so sweet. I wanted to grow everything.”

For a quarter century, all manner of trees and flowers, fruits and vegetables, have thrived across abandoned lots in the Bronx because of Washington. Deemed “the queen of urban farming,” she’s an African-American woman who’s dedicated her life to greening New York City’s poorest borough. Since 1985, Washington has assisted dozens of neighborhoods build their own community gardens, taught workshops on farming and promoted racial diversity in agriculture.

Your food “is not from a grocery store, it’s not from a supermarket. It’s grown in the ground,” she says. “You have to understand where your food comes from. It gives you power.”

A lifelong New Yorker, Washington grew up in a public housing project on the Lower East Side. She moved up to the Bronx in 1985 and bought herself a newly built home, which she viewed as, “an opportunity, as a single parent with two children, to live the American dream.” While some gentrification occurred, other parts of the low-income neighborhood looked “like a warzone,” dotted with abandoned buildings. Some of Washington’s windows looked onto an empty lot filled with garbage and rusting cars.

One day, she noticed a man walking by with a shovel and a pick — an unusual sight in Gotham’s concrete jungle. “What are you doing here?” Washington asked. He told her he was thinking about creating a community garden. “I said, ‘Can I help?’”

“I had no idea about gardening. I didn’t have a green thumb,” she recalls. Despite that, a city program that leased undeveloped lots for $1 gave Washington and her neighbors lumber, dirt and seeds, “and we gave them power — muscle power — and hopes and dreams to turn something that was devastating and ugly into something that was beautiful.” Within days, the first seeds of the Garden of Happiness and Washington’s lifelong activism were beginning to sprout.

Ever since, Washington has helped others in the Bronx locate empty neighborhood spaces that are prime real estate for something to blossom and led volunteers through the process of opening a community garden — earning her respect throughout the Big Apple and beyond. She holds positions on almost every board imaginable, including the New York Community Gardening Coalition, Just Food and the New York Botanical Garden. “Can you imagine, a little girl from the projects on the board of the New York Botanical Garden?” she asks in disbelief, her smiling face framed by her dreadlocks.

And then there was the time she met First Lady Michelle Obama. Washington describes feeling, “the elation of the spirits of my ancestors. I just felt them clapping and cheering, because here I was, a black woman, standing in the presence of the First Lady.”
Blooming with daffodils, tulips and hyacinth, the original purpose of Washington’s first community garden — the Garden of Happiness — and others like it was “beautification,” Washington says, “about taking away the garbage” from a disadvantaged minority community. Only later did she start to think about greenery beyond being decoration or as a food source. “When I first started initially in the food movement, I was focused on growing food. It wasn’t until I was in that community garden that I started hearing social issues like low employment, poor health, people who couldn’t afford rents,” Washington says. She learned she had to “feed people’s body and mind.”
To promote equity and fairness, she’s recently been focusing on boosting the number of African Americans in agriculture through BUGs — or Black Urban Growers. The most recent agricultural census figures show 55,346 farmers in the Empire State are white and only 113 are black.
It’s always been a dream of Washington’s to purchase land upstate for a farm, but every time she counted all the zeros in the real estate listings, it seemed impossible. Drawing on her connections, Washington met a businessman interested in launching a farming co-operative in Chester, N.Y. They started growing veggies on three acres of black dirt in January. Located just an hour from the city, Washington hopes the rural-urban relationship will help African-Americans have a better understanding of how food systems work and have a chance to participate.
“Farming’s in our DNA, but [we] never have that conversation, always being pushed to the side as the consumer or the person with their hand out, never the type with their hand in the conversation,” Washington says. “There’s no agriculture without culture, so having people understand that slavery was part of our life, it doesn’t define who we are. … [We’re] trying to have people understand that. Don’t be afraid to put your hands in the soil, don’t be afraid to garden or farm because that’s who you are.”

Which U.S. City Is Close to Eliminating Its Food Desert?

Food deserts — areas without access to nutritious food — dot urban areas. As we previously pointed out, attracting a big-box supermarket isn’t the only solution. San Francisco is proving this by adding fresh produce to bodegas that once relied solely on peddling booze and smokes to the community.
The City by the Bay’s comprehensive approach can be traced back to an initiative started nearly 25 years ago. The Food Trust of Philadelphia, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind in one of America’s poorest and most unhealthy big cities, began in a public housing development in South Philly, with volunteers piling mounds of fruits and veggies on one long table outside the project each week. Since 1992, they’ve taken their work beyond that first farmer’s market, improving access to healthy food and nutritional information for nearly 220,000 residents in poor neighborhoods — making Philadelphia one of the first cities to meet the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” challenge to eliminate food deserts entirely by 2017.
“We started to see that farmer’s markets provide seasonal access to fresh fruits and vegetables, not a long-term solution — or the only solution. They really only can open in summer on the East Coast. We realized it was really important to look at the longer term and more comprehensive approaches to food access,” says Candace Young, The Food Trust’s associate director of research and evaluation. Around 2004, “the first thing we did was we mapped out areas of the city that had low access to supermarkets and high-diet related deaths — the pockets of the city that needed better access. We sent that report to policy makers and practitioners, the health community and its advocates, the food retail community. What was built from there was this multi-million dollar public-private initiative to build new or even just renovate supermarkets around the whole state.”
Just how much of a difference can access to fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood actually make? Research shows that living in a food desert isn’t simply an inconvenience for locals or a matter of how long the bus ride will be; it’s linked to serious health problems like obesity, hypertension, heart disease and diabetes. But The Food Trust’s work appears to be making a dent. Between 2006 and 2010, obesity among kids in Philly decreased by five percent — the first downward trend since 1976.
A key aspect of The Food Trust’s work in Pennsylvania involved renovating bodegas — corner stores where the average elementary school student in Philadelphia buys 350 calories worth of food on each visit, according to a 2008 study. More than one quarter — 29 percent — stop in twice a day, five days a week. That means they’re consuming roughly an additional pound of food from this retailer every week.
In response, The Food Trust convinced corner store owners to sell more fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy and whole grains and offered money for renovations. Since the Healthy Corner Store Initiative launched in 2004, it’s established a network of 650 stores. With $30 million in public financing and $90 million in private financing, it can pay for upgrades that are as easy as buying new refrigeration for $500 and as tough as building a whole new mega-mart for several million, Young says. In total, the organization funded 1.67 million square feet of retail development and created 5,000 jobs.
“Corner store owners are a very different business than large supermarkets. They’re a convenience model: you want to get in and out. Oftentimes, you go in to buy chips and a drink, a pack of cigarettes or a lottery ticket,” Young says. “Partly what we’re trying to do is shift to a culture of health around corner stores, where they’re seen again as small grocery venues. Instead of packaged foods, I may need to grab eggs, some milk, some bread and a couple of fruits for me and for my family.”
There’s still some debate about whether these interventions are the best way to deal with food deserts. Some critics point to a lack of causal evidence and say the theory’s “intuitive” underpinnings don’t check out. “If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” Adam Drewnowski, an epidemiology professor at the University of Washington, tells the Washington Post. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”
After the first pilot at a handful of stores, The Food Trust documented a 35 percent increase in the sale of healthy items and an even bigger boost — 60 percent — in produce sales. That means $100 in extra profits every week for sellers.
Anecdotally, too, customers seem to be buying. “Now, when I’m talking to people who come into the store, they are asking: What do you have fresh today? And I can say I have apples. I have oranges. I have all kinds of stuff,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, one storeowner in North Philadelphia who joined the network after 15 years in business. “We have a refrigerator in the store that we didn’t have before. It has yogurt and fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. And I try to get other products that are better for you, healthier and lower calorie. I’m more conscious of that now.”
The Food Trust’s supporters point to a drop in obesity as evidence something’s clearly working, but they’ll also readily admit fresh food at corner stores isn’t the only explanation. In the City of Brotherly Love, access to fresh and affordable food, amenities for exercise and information to make healthy decisions all go hand-in-hand. Philly’s also added nearly 30 miles of bike lanes, launched a media campaign about sugary drinks that was seen 40 million times and established parent-driven “wellness councils” in 170 public schools.
“We believe that supermarket access is one piece of a comprehensive approach,” says Yael Lehmann, The Food Trust’s executive director. “While bringing in healthy food stores into neighborhoods, we also want to be teaching kids how to eat healthy in schools, we want to be having cooking demonstrations at recreation centers, running farmers’ markets in neighborhoods. All of these things combined is what can improve the health of people and their neighborhoods.”

How Do You Get People to Eat Better? Bring Healthy Food to a Nearby Corner

The cash register has never been busier at Radman’s Produce Market in San Francisco. At 201 Turk St., it’s located smack in the middle of the Tenderloin district, a neighborhood associated with homelessness, substance abuse and extreme poverty and one that you don’t want to be wandering around late at night. Within a two-block radius of Radman’s corner store, police recorded 730 crimes within the past six months.
All of which makes the offerings on owner Fadhl Radman’s shelves even more surprising. He doesn’t peddle the junk food, liquor, cigarettes and pornographic magazines that are the primary items sold at many other bodegas in the area. According to a 2011 count, there are 270 outlets selling tobacco in the district — more than one quarter of all the outlets in the entire city, all condensed in a couple blocks.
“Poison, it’s just poison” is how resident Steve Tennis defines what’s in stock at many other corner stores. “Mothers with little kids in their arms [or] in their strollers. What is the first thing these children see that are two, three years old? Candy, alcohol, dirty books. Nothing healthy,” he tells New American Media. “If this is your experience, week in and week out, it doesn’t take long for you to get hard wired to that food source.”
Because of recent renovations to the store he’s operated since 1998, Radman now sells fresh fruits and vegetables, many farmed in the nearby Central Valley, and has a butcher cutting and grinding meats. He stocks 50 types of fresh produce — staples like apples, oranges, bananas, grapes and tomatoes and less familiar items like celery, broccoli, red lettuce, Italian parsley and kale. It’s made his 2,250-square-foot store a much-needed island of greenery in the impoverished district.
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“The whole idea is to try to modify people’s eating habits,” Radman tells the San Francisco Examiner. “Build up their interest in fruits and vegetables.” At the same time, he can improve his bottom dollar, gaining a bigger profit from produce with a higher sales margin.
Unable to persuade a full-service supermarket to open nearby, the Tenderloin has always struggled with nutritional offerings. The changes to Radman’s store were backed by a city program known as Healthy Retail SF, a $60,000 effort to fix up five stores in San Francisco neighborhoods defined as food deserts, a low-income area lacking healthy food providers. Healthy Retail SF simply looked at existing retailers in the community and invested in the best assets: the bodegas. The collaborative effort between the Mayor’s Office, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development (OEWD) and the Department of Public Health, gives funds and business advice about how to reconfigure shelving and store layout, upgrade refrigerator units and advertise successfully.
“Small investments can go a long way towards creating healthier and more sustainable communities,” Joaquin Torres, OEWD’s deputy director, writes in an email.
After the new upgrades are installed and stores reopen, the next challenge is ensuring the business’s long-term stability. The program’s backers liken their efforts to a three-sided stool: community engagement, physical redesign and business development. Without any of the three, the plan teeters over.
A 2012 survey found that 57 percent of Tenderloin citizens do most of their shopping in other parts of San Francisco. That purchasing power — two-thirds of residents spend more than $100 a month on groceries — means that about $11 million leaves the Tenderloin every year. Redirecting those dollars from Safeway and other supermarkets back into local businesses isn’t easy, but so far, the city’s efforts have gained traction. One store has increased overall sales by 23 percent since the remodel, and all the locations have documented increase in the number of sales of healthy fruit.
You can’t change neighborhoods overnight. But as Healthy Retail SF is finding, adding produce to bodega shelves is a good place to start.
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