Resources
The Healthy Corner Store Network has compiled a list of resources that cover a range of topics related to improving access to healthy foods through work with small stores and corner stores. Websites, publications, research articles and media articles that discuss healthy corner store efforts are listed below. Also, see our new WIC (Women, Infants and Children) Implementation section at right for resources specifically targeted to these important changes.
Websites
- The Food Trust : Corner Store Campaign
Corner Store Campaign website includes information about the Corner Store Campaign's social marketing efforts in Philadelphia’s’ inner-city corner stores and schools, along with lesson plans, other resources and links to related programs.
- Prevention Institute: Strategic Alliance Enact Neighborhood Program
Strategic Alliance Enact Neighborhood program website includes suggestions for store owner incentives, links to reports, model programs, tools, policies and coalitions.
- Community Food Security Coalition: Community Food Assessment Survey Tools
The Community Food Security Coalition’s (CFSC) site contains a list of various community food assessment survey tools compiled by CFSC.
- Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Human Nutrition : Healthy Stores Project
The Healthy Stores Project, based in Baltimore, with specific information for Manitoba, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Hawaii communities including downloadable, community-customized nutrition education & promotion materials for stores. Coming soon: posters, information for kickoff events, shelf-talkers, fruit & vegetable promotion, and more. Also includes information for retailers (Baltimore-specific) in Korean.
- PolicyLink: Healthy Food Retailing
This online tool focuses on increasing access to retail outlets that sell nutritious, affordable food in low-income communities of color. It includes multiple strategies for increasing access to healthy foods, including working with exisiting small, neighborhood stores.
- Literacy for Environmental Justice : Good Neighbor Project
The Good Neighbor Project Case Study explores the community capacity building process in public health assessment, the role that LEJ youth interns played in the project, and the findings eventually contributed to the Good Neighbor Program.
- Environmental Justice Institute (EJI)
EJI, through the West Oakland Food Collaborative, outreaches to neighborhood markets on two levels: (1) providing fresh produce and healthful snack choices in corner stores and (2) working with store owners to identify alternative, profitable business choices.
Publications
- Neighborhood Groceries: New Access to Healthy Food in Low-Income Communities
Authors: Ed Bolen & Kenneth Hecht, California Food Policy Advocates, 2003
The report includes an overview of the problem and case studies of store conversions with cost analysis and recommendations.
- Economic Development and Redevelopment: A Toolkit on Land Use and Health
Produced by Planning for Healthy Places
This toolkit provides a fundamental, introductory understanding of the economic development and redevelopment tools available to improve food access in low-income neighborhoods. It offers strategies for a range of healthy food retail, including developing small stores and improving healthy food options at corner stores.
- Good Neighbor Program: Best Practices Guide
The Guide provides a full description of the Good Neighbor program, step by step, including sample agreements, evaluations, applications, compliance plans, signage, promotion activities, and the youth connection. (A hard copy of all materials is available from Literacy for Environmental Justice, San Francisco).
- Healthy Food, Healthy Communities: Improving Access and Opportunities through Food Retailing
Authors: Rebecca Flournoy & Sarah Treuhaft, PolicyLink, 2005
The report discusses programs increasing access to healthy, affordable food that are revitalizing communities and contributing to better health. Ithighlights three of the most promising strategies: developing new grocery stores, improving the selection and quality of food in existing smaller stores, and starting and sustaining farmers’ markets.
- Improving Access to Healthy Food: A Community Planning Tool
Produced by the Columbus Health Department, November 2005.
Includes strategies for working with corner grocery stores and existing supermarkets, as well as bringing new supermarkets to a neighborhood and starting a food cooperative; also discusses how to choose among strategies
- Replenishing Our Food Deserts
Published by the National Conference of State Legislatures, by Mark Winne, 2007
This report discusses legislative efforts to improve access to healthy foods in America's "food deserts." Download the full report here.
- Strategies that Work: Healthy Food Retailers in Hartford’s Neighborhoods
Produced by Hartford Food System
With diet-related diseases like diabetes and hypertension near epidemic levels in Hartford, what can local stores do to promote good nutrition? This report describes the Healthy Food Retailer Initiative, a partnership with corner markets and bodegas that is changing the type of food available on grocery shelves.
- Micro Business Development and Denver Public Health Launch Healthy Eating Project with Westside Small Businesses
Produced by LiveWell Colorado, August 2007
The Healthy Eating Project aims to increase access and consumption of nutritious food by providing fresh produce for local corner store entrepreneurs in the West Denver community.
- Apache Healthy Stores: Results of the Main Trial and Future Directions
The report is a case study of Apache Healthy Stores project including step by step actions taken by the local community in the introduction and implementation of the program, including promotional materials and signs used, etc.
- Apache Healthy Stores Manual of Procedures
This Manual of Procedures details the responsibilities of the project interventionist(s) and describes the intervention plan, promoted foods, and communication materials for each phase of this one-year program.
- Don’t See It? Ask For It!
The Steps to a Healthier New York’s brochure encourages neighborhood residents to ask for fruits and vegetable at their neighborhood stores.
- Neighborhood Food Watch Shopping List and Store Quality Checklist
Published by Community Health Councils, Inc.
This publication was created to support a community campaign to hold local food retailers in Los Angeles accountable to standards of quality.
Articles - Research
- Grier, Sonya and Bryant, Carol. (2005). Social Marketing in Public Health. Annual Review of Public Health. 26: 319-339
The articles focus is “to enhance public health professionals' knowledge of the key elements of social marketing and how social marketing may be used to plan public health interventions”. Includes practical and conceptual discussions of social marketing, including case studies illustrating the application of social marketing to the public health sector .
- French, Simone, et al. (2001) Pricing and Promotion Effects on Low-Fat Vending Snack Purchases: The CHIPS Study. American Journal of Public Health. 91: 112-117
The study found that “reducing relative prices on low-fat snacks was effective in promoting lower-fat snack purchases from vending machines in both adult and adolescent populations.”
Articles - Media
- "Delivering on a quality promise: Mainstream convenience store brings fresh, local
food to Lansing, MI neighborhood"
Katie Olender, The New Farm: Farmer-to-Farmer Knowhow from the Rodale Institute - “Greening the liquor store: a national network of organizations is trying to bring healthier food choices to the ubiquitous liquor stores in poor neighborhoods : But converting is hard to do”
Kara Andrade, Colorlines Magazine: Race, Action, Culture, Summer 2005
- “Health Department Launches “Move to Fruits and Vegetables” Campaign with Bodegas”
New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, December 2006
Article covering an effort by the New York City Health Department to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to dozens of bodegas in Harlem and the South Bronx - Corner Store Cornucopia
Tracie McMillian, Good Magazine, March 2008
Brief article about Romano's Grocery in Philadelphia, PA which increased its healthy offerings with support from The Food Trust.