 Hi everybody, welcome to our second webinar in this series, Opportunities to Integrate Nutrition, Education, Market Tours, Food, Budgeting and Community Engagement into Your Market. We have a great set of panelists today. And if you need to have questions, there's a chat box and we will be answering those at the end. And then that chat box is to the right. And it looks like we still have a couple people joining. And this webinar will also be recorded for availability later. So today I will be presenting and my name's Amy Nelms and I work with Liberal Colorado coordinating the Double Up Food Bucks program. We also have Martha Solens. Since 2005, Martha has worked with farmers markets and ag and food producers navigating food safety and business regulations, as well as those starting value added agricultural enterprises. And she's also on the board of directors for the Colorado Farmers Market Association, which provides a lot of technical assistance for farmers markets and a gears a lot of that towards SNAP and farmers markets, equitable farmers markets and accessibility. We have Cody Reinhimer, who is with the Durango Farmers Market. You can always find Cody at the Durango Farmers Market info booth and he's eager to meet people in person. So stop by the Durango Farmers Market and say hi. We also have Aaron Jolly with us, the program manager for share our strength cooking matters. Aaron Jolly has worked for share strength since 2010, implementing and managing cooking matters programming in Southern Colorado. Lastly, we've got Beverly Grant. Beverly Grant is the founder, founded the Urban Farmers Market in Mobeda Green Marketplace in June, 2011. She's in Denver's historic five points neighborhood since the markets opening it has improved community connectedness, increased awareness between food consumption and overall wellness and helped to link disconnected populations to local food and pathways to active living. Today we're gonna go over a range of topics what we'll start out with what is our context here in Colorado, followed by a presentation about cooking matters. We'll hear from Beverly with Mobeda Greens and then I will talk about farmers markets as one stop shops for community health and then we'll go over some simple steps to begin. So I am going to pass it on to Martha. Great, well, thank you, Amy. So what I'd like to do is give everyone a bird's eye view of what our communities are, how they're changing what they look like now, what we can expect in the future and hopefully there's some takeaway here for you in your individual communities of programs that you could be working on. And one of the really important things is Colorado is gonna continue to grow. We're at 5.4 million people right now but we are gonna see a lot of different changes in communities around the state. So next slide, please. So one of the things that's really important is most of our population growth is right along the front range. So we have a lot of consumers, 82% of our population and thus our consumers are located right along the front range and that's where most of the growth is. That also means we've got communities that are losing population. So that really has some implications for how those communities, how their community base is changing and the impact of direct food markets. Next slide, please. Next slide, yep, thank you. So one of the key areas of change that is particularly important in Colorado is that population of older folks over 65. And in the next five years, this is where we're gonna see so much growth. And if you look at those darker shaded Central Mountain counties, we're gonna see a lot of growth there, a lot of older individuals. But we also know from the last 10 years that we have a high proportion of older individuals who are aging in place in other counties. So if you look along those Eastern Plain counties, they may not be growing anymore in terms of the proportion of older folks but there are a lot of older individuals there. And so that really calls into question how our markets are gonna be serving older adults who may have very different dietary needs and preferences and especially low income older individuals. So next slide. Another area where we're seeing a lot of change is in diversity, ethnic and racial diversity. And this slide just shows you the percentage of individuals who were born in another country. And so sometimes we have to look at these kind of broad brush indicators but this slide shows you that there are five counties where more than 12% of the population was born in another county. And other information tells us that there are six counties where between 18 and 45% of the households speak Spanish at home. And so that's one of the primary changes that we're seeing in terms of cultural and linguistic diversity. Next slide, please. And so not only have we starting to see that but it's gonna continue and all the way up to demographic projections out to 2040, we're expecting to see that the share of Hispanic and particularly Asian population is going to change. And so we're gonna have a lot more diversity in our communities around the state. And interestingly enough, it's going to be amongst those who are under 18 that where we'll see that greatest increase in diversity. Next slide. So as a broad indicator of resources, let's look quickly at per capita personal income. And so overall in the last five years per capita personal income has grown 3% at the state level but we have five counties in the state with negative growth and 23 counties that have more than 3%. So more than that state average. That tells us we've really got different access to resources and income in our counties. And so there's a fair amount of disparity and we can drill down into that later. But just as an overview, I wanted to share that with you. Next slide. And an interesting thing to consider is how individuals in those communities are spending their resources on food. And so this shows you average food expenditures per year in communities. You can also look at average food expenditures for food consumed at home or food consumed away from home as an indicator of where nutrition and cooking education may be more important. And you can drill down to the census tract level. This information comes from Colorado Market Maker and you can really pinpoint some very specific areas, particularly in urban areas where nutrition education could be really critical where you see a lot of expenditures on food away from home. Next slide. And then lastly, food insecurity is a national issue, remains an issue in Colorado, hence a lot of our programming and collaboration with LiveWell. So we know 12% of our population is food insecure, but that differs dramatically around the counties, around Colorado counties. That still means over 665,000 individuals are estimated to have limited or uncertain access to adequate food. And so that really remains an important issue and is one that we are certainly conscious of as we look at programming and particularly through the double up food box program and making sure that our markets are equipped to serve communities who may not have consistent access to adequate food. Next slide. So our farmers markets are really important in our communities and they definitely provide fresh and nutritious food. They also serve as business incubators for fresh food producers, as well as those who are producing value added and ready to eat foods to help those individuals grow or expand their businesses. Well, they're equally a great way to engage members of your community and especially a diverse community. A farmer's market provides a lot of different pathways to bring in new community members. So next slide. So in order to engage those, your community, it's not just understanding who is currently coming to your market, but there is clearly a changing customer base and that's going to continue well into the future. And so having a better sense of what enables shoppers to get there, what's keeping potential shoppers from arriving at your market and taking advantage of all the great opportunities and community programs is really important for us as a statewide organization and helping our individual market managers to do that. And some of the things to consider are just how convenient are markets, not just in terms of transportation, but what are the hours and a lot of other issues, just understanding how a market works in terms of pricing and market box and what the signage may really be telling someone whose first language is not necessarily English and how welcome our customers without different backgrounds, how welcome they feel in our markets. And then lastly, which is where we're really gonna focus part of the time today is, do our shoppers have the skills and information necessary to be able to shop and successfully prepare foods. And so what we wanna really focus on today are some of the programs and outreach strategies that can help connect our markets better to in their communities, which are increasingly more and more diverse. So next slide. So just to wrap up a couple of resources that hopefully you'll be able to come back to, Colorado Farmers Market Association. We have a lot of great resources on our website, the Farmers Market Coalition, Colorado Market Maker, and then Community Commons website. So I'll just point those out and hope that you will explore them in an effort to get to understand your communities better. Thank you, Amy. So now we're gonna move on to Aaron Jolly with Cooking Matters. Great, hey everybody. This is Aaron Jolly. I'm the program manager for Sheriff's Strength. I'm in Southwest Colorado, located in Durango today. I wanna share about our program, Cooking Matters, and how it could be used at the Farmers Market in partnership with these double up food banks. So next slide. First of all, I just wanna make sure for those of you who are not familiar with Cooking Matters, we are a national food skills and nutrition education program. We're working to end childhood hunger by empowering low income families to prepare healthy meals on a budget. We do this primarily through our hands-on cooking courses and our grocery store tours. Next. So with the grocery store tours, basically when we work at the Farmers Market, we're basically adapting our curriculum so that it applies in the Farmers Market setting. So we're the official kind of nutrition education partner with LiveWell. We're helping to promote double up food bucks around the state because we are located in a lot of the same areas that double up locations are located and we'll get into a map in just a few minutes. But basically we want to help promote double up food bucks so that we can diversify those markets like the presentation just a minute ago and make sure that people have the skills to feel confident to use their SNAP benefits at the Farmers Market. The tours that we offer through Cooking Matters, they vary quite a bit from market to market. So I'm gonna be giving some examples, the examples that I know best are here in Southwest Colorado. So I'll be kind of speaking from my perspective, but for those of you who are around the state, just know that our curriculum is meant to be adaptable. So here in this slide you can see that, I'm sorry, go back one more. Go back one more before that. Okay, so our tours basically cover a lot of the same information even though the tour will be adapted to different markets, but basically we wanna help low income shoppers understand about all these different topics. So I have listed here how to use the seasonal fruits and vegetables. A lot of things are maybe not familiar to our customers and we wanna make sure that they feel confident that they can get that bunch of chart and they'll go home and be able to know what to do with it. Our basic curriculum also covers things like how to know if something is a whole grain product, comparing unit prices, we do label reading, lean meat, sign and bulk. And then obviously we're gonna be talking about in our tours how to redeem their SNAP benefits and how to use Double Up Food Bucks at the market and then highlight any other incentives that might be available. I know that there are a few markets that maybe offer like WIC vouchers and things like that. Okay, next. So the way that we get families to come to our tours is we partner with our agencies that reach low income families. So places like Head Starts and WIC, Family Centers, Human Services. The flyer that you see on the right-hand side is an example of what our flyers look like. A lot of our cooking courses, we recruit from those courses as well for folks to come and check out the market in places where we're offering our regular programming. We also hang flyers in very strategic places like the places I just mentioned above, but also clinics and other types of resource centers. And basically what we're trying to do when we get people to come to the market to do a tour is we wanna be targeting SNAP and SNAP eligible folks, specifically to use Double Up. Next slide, please. So even though market tours look different around the state, typically the tours last about 45 minutes to an hour, we basically go around and talk about how to shop at the market and highlight those different topics I mentioned before by actually going around and visiting different booths. I know that there are some markets around the state who don't have a lot of as much food products. They are kind of mixed with different crafts and things like that. So I know with those market tours, maybe some of that touring might be a little bit limited. Here in Durango, we have a very diverse market. So we're able to visit like a meat booth. We're able to learn about cheese. We're able to learn about different fruits and vegetables, things like that. But for any markets that don't have that diversity of food, that's not a problem. We bring supplemental materials to go over the things that maybe aren't available at that particular market, things like reading a label for buying bread, things like that. We also on our tours, we visit the market manager booth to learn about how to redeem their SNAP benefits. And I have Cody Reinheim right here with me, the Durango Farmers Market Manager, and he's gonna talk about that in just a second about some of the things that he's done to help us out with our tours. Around the state, every tour participant who comes to the farmers market will get a $10 voucher to spend at that market. So we're challenging them after they learn how to shop to basically go out and use their $10 voucher to practice shopping. They also get a reusable shopping bag and a booklet with tips and recipes. And that's all provided by our Coaching Matters programming. Next. So these are the three main components that we need to make a tour successful with Cooking Matters. So maybe some folks on the phone or listening to the recording, maybe you fall into one of these categories. Next slide. So basically these are the components that go with each of these roles. Cooking Matters, so that's myself. We provide a tour facilitator. We provide flyers, all the supplies that we need. We do evaluation, which means we have surveys at the end of the tour to make sure that we were effective educators and we actually measure that and we provide all the incentives. Like I said, we also partner with agencies in our local communities to make sure that we're distributing those flyers and reaching the families who can use these tours. And then even some things that market managers can do to help make these tours successful. We try to make it easy, an easy lift, but a few things are basically helping to identify what are some good tour dates, kind of coordinating those times with the Cooking Matters facilitator. The market manager can also help by promoting any upcoming tours to people who are using the EBT machine in the weeks coming following, or I'm sorry, weeks leading up to the tours. They can be a tour stop, basically telling people who are on our tour, how does double up actually work? What does the transaction look like? They can help furnish those $10 vouchers and that we will purchase in advance. And sometimes we could use booth space as well and I'll go over that in just a second. So advance please. Above and beyond what I just mentioned as a tour, just a group kind of showing up in a Cooking Matters staff person kind of leading people around is actually having a booth. And we've had some luck with that here in Durango where Cooking Matters had their own booth and that served as kind of our home base where people met to go on our tour. We were also able to do some cooking demonstrations so that we're doing some of that hands-on education about how do you prepare food at the farmer's market? And then we also provide extra samples and recipes. This is a nice benefit, not just for the people who are taking the tour but because we're there as a booth, that means general shoppers kind of stop by and talk to us and we get to share a little bit about what we do with Cooking Matters and we've actually found a lot of new volunteers by just being present at the farmer's market and getting our name out there and then letting anybody who comes to the farmer's market learn about how to prepare food. Next. So I'm gonna turn it over to Cody for a minute and he's gonna share about how Cooking Matters and Durango farmer's market have partnered and what some of the benefits have been. Hi everyone, this is Cody. I'm glad to be here. Working with Erin has really been a fantastic win-win. I think the biggest benefit really is that with this Double Bucks Food Bucks program we do everything we can to get the word out to folks who are using the SNAP program but posters and that sort of thing only goes so far. I think what Cooking Matters is doing is by far the most effective way of actually one, getting folks to the farmer's market into that space and then also just providing them with the education and the know-how that's required to actually use whole foods and making a meal for your family. I am super grateful for all of the work through Cooking Matters and I would recommend to any other market managers that they take advantage of any tours. It's been really easy for me to simply talk with Erin via email or a quick phone call and set a tour date and then she would provide me with little flyers that anyone else who's using the EBT machine and be aware of the tour and can jump in on that as well. Erin and I coordinate on a time to be a tour stop. I like to do it kind of in the middle of market where I'm generally a little less busy with vendors and this and that. So it's a great time for me to chat with folks and meet them and kind of let them know how the EBT transaction works and let them know a little bit about the market. Luckily for us at our farmers market we have an informational booth program so it's real easy for Erin to fill out a simple application and I don't have much work on my end to provide them with a booth space and that I know is really helpful not only for the tour participants but I think it's fun for everyone at the market to see a little cooking demo and to be introduced the shishito peppers for the first time or what have you and kind of learn something fun and new that's available at the market. Most importantly, like I said, these tours have really helped bring new customers to our farmers market. It's great that I see a lot of folks from the tours returning to use their EBT card in weeks following and throughout the season that right there is exactly what we're trying to do to get nutritious food onto the tables of these families and then also for me it's really important to open the door to any opportunities to increase customer traffic and increase income for our farmers. Farmers have been really happy. I know Juan was telling me his sales have increased 20% since the advent of the Double Up Food Bucks program last summer and I'm really happy to hear that. So our farmers are happy and that's my number one priority. It's just increased the traffic and sales for the whole market. And I think that again, it's probably the most effective avenue of outreach for Double Up Food Bucks. Not to say that the other avenues are not important but I'm just wholly impressed by the effectiveness of what cooking matters has done. So I'm very grateful. I'm really glad that it's really easy on my end. Aaron has been great to work with and I'm sure this could work for other communities as well. Thanks, Cody. So you can see the photo there. That's Cody giving his spiel telling market donors and our tour participants about the market. So that's been a really great bonus for us to have that relationship going. Next slide. So these are the locations. There's two maps here. The one on the right is where cooking matters exist around the state, which is anywhere that has a colored in counties. So that's a lot, most of the state. But I do wanna highlight that the orange and the light orange counties are where we have full-time staff who are available to offer these tours. They're all kind of trained on how to offer farmers market tours. So if you live in one of those areas and you wanna get in touch, we'll have some contact information at the end. If you live in a green space, that doesn't mean that that's not available. That just means we don't have full-time staff there. That means we have some partners there and we could potentially make that happen as well. So take down our information at the end of this segment to find out how to get ahold of us. Next slide. These are what we have already kind of in the works this year. We have an online kind of list where we put in where all of our tours are gonna be happening around the state. And this is just what was on the list the other day of what's in the works. If you live in an area where your name isn't on that list, that doesn't mean it's not gonna happen. That just means it's not currently something that I have this record for. So as you can tell, the Denver Metro area will be offering at a lot of different locations, these tours and not just farmers markets, but also retail places that are also offering double up food bucks. So there will be tours offered at those locations as well. Next slide. So this is the contact information that you can take down. If you're in the Metro area and you wanna contact Cassandra Webb Cole, she's one of our program managers for Cooking Matters and she will be happy to kind of answer your questions or direct you in the right person. I'm a good person to contact for anything that's happening in rural areas or anything outside of Metro area. I kind of help oversee a lot of that programming and I'll be able to point you in the right direction to make those types of connections with Cooking Matters. So thank you. Now we're gonna move on to Beverly Grant with MoBeta Greens. Hello everyone. Glad to be a part of this. My farmer's market is seven years old and it's a totally grass root led and born kind of operation. And in a way, it's a combination of what both Martha and Erin was just talking about except we do it kind of through more informal channels with small businesses, neighborhood heal practitioners. So this first slide I wanted to share is just kind of about the vision and mission of my farmer's market which is a little bit different to most because I work in urban areas that are designated as food deserts or swamps. And also the residents who are my targets within these neighborhoods happen to kind of be poster children for the social and physical determinants of health. So keeping that in mind, I had to build from the ground up to build relationships in order to reach my population. So these two slides kind of tell you about my vision and mission. And then these are the founding principles of my farmer's market food literacy, environmental stewardship, social responsibility. The reason I had to evolve to these being my framework for relationship, for mission alignment, for programming and education is because many of the folk that I am living with food is a very important need, but so are other things. And so I wanted to be able to have accessible links to help address those things because each of us like an algebra equation, we have our own personal equation for our health. And those variables are represented by what we're eating, how much stress we are dealing with, what resources we do and don't have, et cetera. And so over time with every farmer's market, wherever I am, I tell people I am a heel zone because all of these things will be happening. I'll have some kind of free exercise. There's always live juicing. If possible, we cook and we do whatever is in season and whatever our inventory is. And I try to show people immediately on the spot several different ways to use the same thing. So we might make a smoothie juice and cook kale, for example, and have it raw. And something that you saw made, you taste it right now, et cetera. The other thing I try to teach people about is food miles. And that's one of the things that I'm really proud of with my market, me being in the city, there's a lot of urban farmers and greenhouses that are popping up that have meticulous standards. They know the plight of food deserts and food swamps. They know the plight of access. And so people are creating small and large scale businesses that create sourcing that I can tap into. And so now you see what my integrity word means, tricep origin, which is majorly key. I tell people that I visited every farm or greenhouse or whatever the food has come from, there's always information there. And in starting as of last year, this will be my second season, I now have my own urban farm, so I can even source from there and I grow organic heirlooms to source. This slide basically is the backbone of how I've built relationships to be able to deliver a heal framework because I can't do all those things me. So because my mission is around healthy eating and active living, then I get in mission alignment with small businesses, entities that are nonprofits, the city of Denver, a church and individual. I don't mean this in a bad way, but I don't care. If we are in mission alignment, then guess what, we can work together and we can help to connect people that are disconnected from healthy eating and active living in all kinds of ways. And I say that this is how my best practices for community weaving are, which again, as I summarize, I'd say seeking that alignment, which would be the number one. And then this reciprocity factor I'd like to talk about, I like to tell people that I have shifted the definition of wealth, that wealth equals health, not money and things as we have come to believe. And as a result, there's another form of currency that I've been blessed to build called community currency. With everybody I have woven, so to speak, a relationship with around mission alignment, we have a reciprocity factor. So the barriers that I have to accessing, funding that would help me, I can tap into a relationship to get these things done so that, so if I don't have for, I'll give you a very good case in point for this year. I partnered with a yoga collective that has a grant to do pop up yoga. Brilliant, what am I? A gypsy, I'm popping up all over. So we're gonna partner so the yoga structure, instructors that support the market will be paid through this partnership. Thank you God, I don't have to worry about that. And so that's an example of what I mean. And because we do have a shared vision, we're both getting the benefit, the collective needed places to pop up. Well, guess what? I'm popping up and I need people to pop up with me. So, and this slide is here basically to show you an example of what I was trying to articulate. There are nonprofits, there are big entities, there are tiny little businesses all in this list. And we are doing this work together because we're in alignment around healthy eating and active living. Thank you, Beverly. Thanks, Beverly. And I'm gonna hop into Farmer's Markets as a one-stop shop for community health. So before my days at Livewell, I was working at the Northwest Detroit Farmers Market nestled in the Grand Mount Rosale neighborhood in Detroit. The market there had a huge mixed income of a population with a lot of mixed income residents. There were people young and old. There were a few different schools. There was a hospital, senior centers. So we had a very diverse community and had done a door-to-door kind of survey and question asking to find out what our community wanted out of their farmers market. So what we found is that people really wanted a one-stop shop. And so that could mean one of two things. A lot of them said, I don't go to the farmer's market because when I go to the grocery store, it has paper towels and toothpaste and toilet paper. And what we figured out is that we could not provide all of those things, but what we could do is find other community needs and try to help meet those at the farmer's market so that they could get some grocery shopping done, while also getting some other portion of their day taken care of. So what that looks like was a lot of the cooking classes that Erin had talked about, a lot of what Beverly talked about around Heel, but in case you're in a community where those food-specific partnerships don't always get you as far as you want or you would just like to add additional ideas, we got really creative. And so that started with things like a bike repair station. So we had one market volunteer who was just excellent at fixing bikes, started bringing a bike pump, started bringing a wrench, people started bringing their bikes. And within two years, there was a regular scheduled day, once a month at our farmer's market that people would bike or bring their broken bikes and there was a team of people there to fix them. We had kid stays, a huge one at the end of the summer where farmers would donate potato sacks and kids would have sack races, pumpkin, bowling. It was really everything you could think of, but the idea behind this was creating a place for kids to learn, to create, to do crafts while their parents could shop, which adds an extra benefit at your market. We were in a neighborhood that had a lot of health issues as far as air quality, a high population that struggled with diabetes and high cholesterol, but a lot of that population was uninsured or struggled to get to a doctor's office on a regular basis. So we talked to a hospital and for free had free health screenings. And then if you've driven around a city, you'll notice lots of churches just have buses that if your market's on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, even Saturday, just sit in a parking lot vacant. And so we created a little bus shuttle service for people who were not able to get to the market because they could not drive or had accessibility issues. So I'm bringing all of these up because I just want to remind everybody to be creative when planning your farmer's market to imagine who's in your community. And I think Colorado has a huge amount of resources as far as food access, health access. But if your community has other needs, why not try to offer those at the farmer's market? And then I just want to talk a little bit about how to begin with any of these ideas. I think the first thing touches on Martha's slides at the beginning to consider who is in your community, what language are they speaking? Are they young? Are they old? Is it a mix? Is there an elementary school nearby your market? Is there a hospital? And to capitalize on those partnerships. To consider what neighborhood resources are within, and I say a five mile radius because in all of the surveying that we've done for Double Up Food Bucks and our equity work with farmer's markets, we find that people usually only travel five to 10 miles to a farmer's market. So even just a 20 minute community mapping might help you think of some new resources that you weren't thinking of before. And then the last one is, as you work with your community, are there services that you're hearing people need but that you're seeing don't exist? Are there gaps? And that's how we came up with those health screenings. We heard people saying, I'd love to eat healthy, I'm having all of these health issues, but I can't even get to the doctor. So I'm just gonna give up. So kind of creating this one step shop idea in services can negate the fact that you might not be able to have toilet paper and paper towels and the things of a large supermarket. And then I just wanna touch on, we had so many great presenters today where you can find more ideas. Martha had brought up the Colorado Farmers Market Association. This webinar will be posted on there as well as all the links that they had. You can look back and contact any of our presenters with other ideas about farmer's markets and then live all Colorado will continue to share farmer's market ideas throughout the entire summer of things we hear from around the country that people are doing to make their markets welcoming, inclusive, and more equitable. So I'm gonna open it up for questions and leave the contact information up. Just a reminder, if you have questions, there's a chat box to the right. So I'll give people a couple of minutes and we'll get to that. So. All right, well I'm not seeing any questions come into the box. The contact information is on this screen. If people think of questions later on in the day or the week, feel free to contact any of us. And I just wanna say thank you for taking part of your day to learn about community programming at farmer's markets.