Increasing access to healthy food at a cooperative grocery store

Abstract

A variety of approaches, including public and private food assistance and community-based models, are being used to address food insecurity. In this participatory project, I worked with representatives of a grocery cooperative and interviewed social services staff and low-income residents from the surrounding community in order to develop programming and policy suggestions for the coop that could make it more inclusive and affordable, thereby helping to increase community members' food security. In the process, I learned a great deal about the challenges faced by people with low incomes, their resourcefulness, the values that

The Impact of Simplified Boundary Conditions and Aortic Arch Inclusion on CFD Simulations in the Mouse Aorta: A Comparison With Mouse-specific Reference Data

“…The method can therefore be very attractive in some circumstances, e.g., when mouse-specific boundary conditions are not possible due to a lack of the necessary imaging techniques or simply due to time and/or cost constraints. De.spite the fact that Murray's law is often used [8][9][10], this method has not been validated with in vivo data in a murine setting. We therefore investigated to what extent the flow splits generated by Murray's law compare to the actual in vivo measured flow rates.…”

“…Apart from making assumptions with respect to the imposed boundary conditions, most CFD studies on the murine aorta also restrict their geometry to the part that is of interest for the study, e.g., the aortic arch [2,3,5,6,8,11,12] or the abdominal aorta [1,4,13]. This approach allows for the saving of computational time and restricts the number of assumptions that need to be made, but it is unclear if and to what extent this simplification of the problem influences the calculated flow field.…”

Measuring the Impact of a Full Service Grocery Store in a Food Desert

“…One model for addressing food hardship and unemployment issues within lowincome food deserts is a cooperative grocery store (Soulis, 2012). Through the cooperative model, the grocery store can serve as a cornerstone to address socioeconomic marginalisation of low-income neighbourhoods and improve the health and well-being of its residents (Theodos et al, 2018).…”

“…Cooperative grocery stores by default cannot be expected to be socially just, address needs of low-income community members and have the capacity to solve significant social problems (Soulis, 2012). Soulis (2012) argues that it is important to examine the different areas of impact and the values that undergird a cooperative organisation in order to better understand how they work and how they relate to targeted community members.…”

“…Cooperative grocery stores by default cannot be expected to be socially just, address needs of low-income community members and have the capacity to solve significant social problems (Soulis, 2012). Soulis (2012) argues that it is important to examine the different areas of impact and the values that undergird a cooperative organisation in order to better understand how they work and how they relate to targeted community members. As cooperative grocery store initiatives, such as the GCM, aim to address broader socio-economic goals, it is important for communities and policymakers to be able to assess the effectiveness of these types of endeavours beyond traditional economic factors such as profitability.…”