NUTRITION PROGRAMS The Council of Senior Centers and Services (CSCS) estimates that 35% of older New Yorkers live with limited or uncertain availability of nutritionally adequate food, also known as “food insecurity.” The national figure for this age group is closer to 6%.23 The health tolls of overall food insecurity are further compounded by the malnutrition that comes with living in “food deserts” – areas where the main purveyors of nourishment are McDonalds or ill-stocked bodegas.
RETHINKING OUR APPROACH
Enrollment in SNAP benefits (e.g. food stamps) and access to food pantries and well-balanced meals provided by the senior center network are New York’s broadest-based and most frontline approaches to addressing the nutritional challenges of low-income seniors. However, an innovative strategy to combat malnutrition has emerged out of NYC’s burgeoning community-based urban farm movement.
Getting Old Doesn’t Mean Slowing Down
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“For a long time, East New York was a high-crime area filled with abandoned garbage-strewn lots,” recounts Ana Aguirre, Executive Director of NYWF grantee partner, United Community Centers (UCC). “No one in the City was doing anything about it, so the community decided to take action. We agreed that our two main liabilities were: (1) the abandoned lots; and (2) the community-wide lack of nutritious food. And that our two main assets were our young people and our seniors – seniors who had often spent their childhoods working on farms, seniors who knew how to grow things. And so we said: ‘Let’s turn those lots into food-producing assets, with the older people leading the way!’”
“I’ve been a gardener since my early days in Jamaica,” explains one of the older volunteers. “But I never dreamed I could use what I know the way I do now. But when UCC said: ‘Let’s do something,’ we proved what could be done with a little energy and direction.”
UCC created a plan for a neighborhood-wide network of urban farms that began attracting supporters, including The New York Community Trust, the NYC Sanitation Department, and NYWF. It recruited 80 gardeners – mostly older women who came to the neighborhood from the South, the Caribbean, Africa, and South America, and they transformed the empty lots into gardens. They established a weekly farmers’ market from which they sold their produce to other local senior women and to low-income single mothers and brought in neighborhood high school students to work alongside them.
“We start out the morning saying: ‘my back hurts, my leg hurts’ but after a day bending and digging, we feel limber and good,” explains the volunteer. “We make things grow. And we teach young people that getting old doesn’t mean slowing down. You know what those young people tell us? They tell us: ‘From you, we’ve learned that we need to take care of the earth…and of ourselves.’”
A New York Academy of Medicine evaluation of the project found that as many as 97% of the participating senior women reported feeling less isolated and less depressed, lost weight, and needed fewer medications to control cholesterol, depression, high blood pressure, diabetes, and arthritis as a result of both their hands-on farming activities and their access to better nutrition.24
CSCS. Hunger Hurts: A study of Hunger Among New York City’s Elderly. NYC: 2007. ew York Community Trust. Three Year Progress Report, Community Experience Partnership-Community Solutions Program. NYC: 2013. N The New York Women’s Foundation
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