 I'm Wendy Peters Moschetti, Director of Food Systems at LiveWell Colorado, and I'm with Dwayne Wharton, who is the Director of External Affairs from the Food Trust, which is based out of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And for those of you who are here at our Heel Summit today, you know that Dwayne was our keynote this morning and kicked off the summit with a lot of words about sharing his own personal experience and professional experience and sort of what brought him into this world of food justice and advocating at many different levels to remove barriers to access to healthy food. So we have this opportunity to sit down and talk a little bit more about a lot of issues that you brought up this morning. Yep, happy to. Great. So we had a little bit of time when you were done talking to address some questions. So some more questions have come up that we'd love to dive in a little bit deeper with you about. Sure. So a first sort of set of questions that I'm really curious to hear more from your perspective about kind of fall into this bucket of sort of restriction and regulation and issues I think of that people don't like to talk about a lot because people like to talk about how do we promote access to healthy food and how do we incentivize new grocery stores and how do we bring in farmers markets and one thing that you brought up is you brought up a couple of things. You brought up food swamps. So this notion of having sort of this overabundance of less healthy sort of food environments, corner stores and liquor stores and convenience stores and you also brought up soda taxes. And so issues that bring to mind a lot of like how do we and when do we and if do we do actually restrict or regulate parts of our food environment that may not be as health promoting. So some questions that came up specifically were about the soda taxes that you brought up that have passed in Philadelphia itself. So some questions were about can you talk about soda taxes as an anti-poverty measure and as a follow-up talk about how do you respond to the argument that these taxes might be regressive. Yeah. So the unique thing about Philadelphia I think is this approach to the tax itself. It failed twice under prior administrations to pass when it had primarily a health focus. So this new administration decided that health was not the priority but it would really focus on anti-poverty measures. Interesting. So pre-K slots. The revenue. Correct. The revenue itself. Address anti-poverty efforts initiatives in the city. Correct. Interesting. Yep. So that's you know universal pre-K so 2,000 kindergarten slots for children giving them an early start in life with the idea that it pays off later on was important. The improvement to our infrastructure like our parks and our rec centers and our libraries which are in dramatic disrepair. Yeah. So that was how the administration chose to kind of frame the need around the tax itself. As a public health organization you know the Food Trust really maintained that health is our reason for supporting the tax itself. So as you said you know we do try to provide pro-incentive support to businesses fresh through financing initiatives and support to healthy food retailers at corner stores but this tax is a little bit different. We understand through history that you know when you do tax items using tobacco as an example we see a decline in tobacco use particularly with young kids who are more price sensitive. So with that in mind adding a bit more cost to this product soda which really has been overly marketed to young people, overly marketed specifically to young people of color and underserved under-resourced communities to begin with. So we you know decided that we were going to support this measure solely to try to improve health to get these kids to drink less soda but also we looked at the revenue that would fund Pre-K as being an excellent opportunity to improve long-term health. Absolutely. You're channeling that right back into prevention. Correct. So by the time they're teenagers they have that foundation so they're making different choices perhaps anyway. To understand this also is that there are lots of complementary efforts that were in place in Philadelphia so for a decade we have been already working with food retailers to help them sell healthier items and healthier beverages so when the tax you know was enacted we felt the need to double down on those efforts to help them mitigate their fear of loss of revenue. Absolutely. They were here for you and you had that foundation, years of relationships so it wasn't just like this coalition coming in saying we're going to implement this tax. We know it's going to hurt your revenue but trust me it's going to be okay. Years of relationships were saying we're here to support you, we're doing all these other issues. It was interesting that the data is coming out that it isn't necessarily hurting revenue so soda sales are down and there's some questions around that and whether or not it's going to kind of meet its fiscal goal to fund the programs that it intended to fund but sales and stores are not down so they're selling more. Right so that's what we're seeing so that's something that we'll continue towards. And have you seen then a coalition of these stores and retailers sort of come on board and be advocates for this work as well or are we not there yet? We're not there yet. There are a few who have really been champions for this issue for health reasons for just wanting to become a business that is more sustainable not only for their fiscal health but for the health of their communities because these customers need to stay around and continue to be customers. So we've had some owners that live in these communities. Correct and they do care. Right so we've had a few but I think that there's been a lot of backlash from some businesses and from the beverage industry around this but we're holding strong. And interestingly enough then you do see I think some of beverage industry and other you know partners use some of what you think would be sort of our language as advocates that these are regressive. Yeah it's really interesting. So it is interesting so how do you typically respond and sort of say we're not restricting choice, we're not being discriminatory against low-income populations, we're actually removing barriers that have been put in place for low-income populations. What are some talking points? Yeah that's that's really a challenge especially when you look at the amount of resources that the beverage industry has put to spin that message you know first labeling it a grocery tax it's not a tax on groceries it's on beverages that have added sweeteners. Right. Period. Or in the case of Boulder here locally our one example it's a tax on a distributor. Right yeah. Correct well the same actually is how it's structured in Fallofi as well. There's no tax on thirst you know fruit juices, milk, water all of that. They're all available. And things that are going to be better for you in the long run. Yeah yeah absolutely great. So another some other questions I had were about sort of your comment you made about food swamps yeah and where we and we see it I think this is a universal story right across the country I think urban suburban rural communities where you tend to see a congregation of convenience stores and corner stores and liquor stores and quite often in under resource communities communities of color and so some questions I always struggle with as well is then what are like politically feasible right viable strategies that we could have to address some of that like you know what I mean do we or do we continue to do what the food trust has been doing for years and we work store by store and we promote and we incentivize we never get to a point where we actually start talking about regulation restriction and what are you know what I mean what are our policies yeah it's interesting so everyone loves the free market and free enterprise and I think one thing is that there was this notion that many of these communities did not even want healthier options right so that they could not have success selling these items in their communities so that's a myth and it's not true there's a tremendous demand not only for healthier items but people are even pushing it further looking at more sustainably grown you know things that are more local yeah things that are organic and community people know what's good for them yeah of course so I think that we all want to feed ourselves and our families good healthy right so it's a broken model at this point right so there's an over saturation of unhealthy foods and poor communities if you look at many communities that are more affluent you don't see stores selling tobacco yep you don't see stores with the primary focus on selling junk food yeah they sell items that are going to be healthier for communities and the expectation is that the more affluent want and can support these things but we know that that's not true yeah that everyone wants and deserves to have the same quality absolutely and access to these items that's right we all eaters and spend money on food and we everyone wants to feed their kids healthy food so I'm not sure about like regulating the number of right restaurants that can operate in a certain neighborhood right but I but we know that you know we're talking about promotion of unhealthy items billboards and signage and radio messaging and television ads targeting these unhealthy items to youth and you know underserved under resorts communities yeah marginalized groups that really don't need that junk yeah and that's really problematic when that's your target audience and you know we're looking at like soda taxes now and you know the declining sales of soda here yeah in the states yeah but they're looking at other regions across the world yeah to pick up that slack yeah we look at fast food yeah actually not being the preference for new businesses in many communities people want food that's better and healthier for you but we see a growing market in developing nations as well so we're just kind of passing on these bad habits to people who aren't even resource and prepared to deal with them as well so our last set of questions were really shifting to sort of how to do policy advocacy work and you talked about this in your talk this morning you show this whole pyramid of change right from the CDC yeah from the CDC right so at the very bottom of the pyramid being the sort of highest impact mm-hmm change is really about policy and systems level change where right where it's not where a lot of us have always sat so um you know it live while we're an organization that we're a statewide nonprofit and we are trying to do more and more policy advocacy work but we dabble in a lot of different areas right we do we run some programs we try to do policy work we um we work with partners so one thing I'm wondering about is how do you to be an effective policy advocacy organization what does that relationship look like with actual on-the-ground work can you be an effective policy advocacy organization if you're not actually running programs and on the ground work and how do you best inform sort of your policy agenda yeah does it does so I think I'll borrow something from folks from the hunger community who look at feeding the line while ending the line and I think as the food trust has approached this work in a comprehensive way we've looked at the need to have balanced approaches so programming around education around improving the food environment but also the policies that are needed to ensure that those programs won't be needed that's right that's right right so the bottom of that pyramid right we're talking about yeah I think you know highlighting areas around poverty alleviation and improved education and housing resources I mean those are real big policy issues that need to be addressed and you know the issue around health and socioeconomic status can't be avoided and until we improve people's conditions in life then we're not going to move the needle on their health so fair wages are so important adequate housing yeah access to medical care yeah like all those things as well as increasing access to healthy food and physical activity all those things have to work in tandem if we're really going to try to build a culture of health right and I would assume that it means a lot of organizations working together because it's also a lot to ask of one organization you just said there's over a hundred employees of the food trust yeah but we don't do it all and you don't do it but you do you do the programming all the way to policy but it's a lot to ask of one organization we do a lot and it's because we have great dedicated staff who really work hard and believe in the mission but we partner incredibly with the Department of Health and with you know philanthropy and lots of other public health organizations and the community so I think that's really important we can't do this alone and there are going to be so many things that we're not going to be able to get to someone else has to pick that up yeah and we'll support that and hopefully they'll support our efforts as well absolutely I think that'll continue to be our challenge here at Livewell as well is how do we continue to be a voice for policy advocacy but work with the partners that can help inform that advocacy agenda because we don't we don't know it all makes a lot of sense so thank you so much for your time all day today um and have a good safe trip home I appreciate it thank you very much