Center for Regional Food Systems

This webinar introduces a range of sources for accessing secondary data related to healthy food access and provides an overview of the value and limitations of utilizing secondary data. The webinar also highlights how the Ottawa County Food Policy Council used secondary data to inform their work.

This webinar is hosted by:

• Lisa Uganski, Ottawa County Department of Public Health
• Kathryn Colasanti, MSU Center for Regional Food Systems
• Courtney Pinard, Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition

Accessing and Understanding Secondary Data on Food Access Webinar Slides

Key Secondary Data Resources Referenced

Webinar Transcript:

Kathryn Colasanti: Welcome everyone to today's webinar, "Accessing and Understanding Secondary Data on Food Access." My name's Kathryn Colasanti. I'm a specialist with the Center for Regional Food System at Michigan State University and the coordinator for our Michigan Good Food Charter Shared Measurement Project. Just a quick housekeeping note before launching into our webinar for today. Only the panelists have audio but if you have any questions, we encourage you to use either the chat box or the Q and A box at the top of your screen. If you scroll over to the top, that should pop up. We'll save most of the questions of discussion for the end but it may take a few immediate clarifying questions along the way. But feel free to type those in as those occur to you. So now as we get started, I want to go ahead and introduce today's speakers. So we will hear first from Lisa Uganski, dietician -- registered dietician who's been working with the Ottawa County Department of Public Health for 15 years.

And Lisa is also coordinator of the Ottawa County Food Policy Council, a role that she has held since the council began in 2011. And Lisa brings a great passion for making healthy food available and accessible to everyone and has a lot of experience utilizing secondary data on these topics in her work. And we're excited to have her with us today. If you've been with us on any other previous shared measurement trainings, you know by now Courtney Pinard.

Courtney is a senior research scientist with the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition based in Nebraska. And her work focuses on public health outcomes and has an overall emphasis on measurement and evaluation. And Courtney also has really extensive experience accessing secondary data related to these topics. So a great assets to our webinar today. So before marching in and again, if you've been with us on previous trainings, this is review. But I was just -- I'd like to make sure everyone is starting on the same page. So shared measurement is part of our larger collective impact framework that we at the Center for Regional Food Systems are utilizing in our approach to food systems work in Michigan, as a way to just help ensure that we're all working together as organizations interested in related goals. And with a common agenda so that we can really leverage our impact and have a greater impact on food systems work than we would working in isolation. So our shared measurement project started with a stakeholder engagement phase in the fall of 2014. And through that phase, we were able to identify what areas were our greatest interest among stakeholders and partners involved in food system work in Michigan. So through that conversation, interviews and surveys, three priority areas really emerged and rose to the top. And those are institutional procurement, economic impact, and healthy food access. So of course today, as you know, our focus is on that third priority of healthy food access.

Again, if you've been enrolled in earlier trainings or following our work from other sources, you know our big focus mainly has been on developing a new survey tool to assess food access at the local level. And we're planning to pilot that tool on three communities over the summer. So we see that as one portion of an overall strategy on measuring food access in Michigan. That would be complemented by state primary data collection and also secondary data we're hoping. So we know we don't have the resources as any one organization or even collectively to do really extensive in-depth surveys in every community in the state. But we hope that we can target key communities with that primary data collection capture a state level snapshot with primary level data collection of the state. And then utilize secondary data publicly available through the accessible secondary data to fill in the gaps. And that's what we're focusing on today. And today's webinar is really complemented by earlier trainings that we've offered. So if you weren't able to participate in any of those, we encourage you to go back to the food systems, set up a regional food systems website. Those recordings and slides are all available. And particularly, I would say that over the end of research process and introduction to food access survey are particularly complementary to what we're sharing today. So with that I'll turn it over to Courtney.

Read the full Accessing and Understanding Secondary Data on Food Access Webinar Transcript