 Hello, this is Wendy Peters-Moschetti. I am Director of Food Systems at LiveWell Colorado and I'm welcoming you to a short and sweet 15 minute overview of one of our new tools called the Colorado Food Systems Hub. So what I'm gonna do very quickly with you all today is show a few things about the hub, starting with how to actually log in and become a member of the hub and then I'll walk through a little bit of the history and the intent and the purpose of the Food Systems Hub that we're building and then I'm gonna walk through and actually show you a few of the tools that we have built into this digital hub and walk through some of the different tools and capabilities as it has and then send you off with that so that you can share this sweet little overview with any partners you have and come back to it when you have any questions. So first thing we're gonna do is to make sure that everyone knows how to become an actual member of the Colorado Food Systems Digital Hub. This digital hub is built within the platform of the Community Commons. So as you can see here, it's www.communitycommons.org. This is a national platform available for free to all of us and as you can see on the screen here, this platform is committed to compiling and sharing data tools and stories to improve communities and inspire change. So it is a tool that's available to movements across the country and they maintain and update a very deep set of indicators and data sets related to all sorts of activities but including the food system. So we went to the Community Commons and requested partnership with them that we could build a very tailored hub within the Community Commons just for Colorado and strictly focused on food systems. But step one is you do need to be and register for the Community Commons and then for the Digital Hub. So what you see here is where you would go to register. So on the top right hand corner, the first step is to actually register on the Community Commons. You'll see it's very simple. You just need a username and a password and then you will become registered on the Community Commons. Once you have a username and password, you would go to the Hubs tab of the Community Commons and scroll down until you find us, the Colorado Food Systems Hub. So what you would see here, if you were logged in as right here to the right of Colorado Food Systems Hub will be a little tab, a little button that says request membership and all you have to do is hit that tab, request membership and we will approve your membership within 24 hours. When you get an email approving your membership to the Colorado Food Systems Hub, you will also get an email that provides a little overview of the hub and how it works. We do require this very simple step of membership because it allows us to really track and understand who is using the hub, but it also helps facilitate information sharing with all of our users. For example, every other week as a member, you will all receive a very well-organized digest that will summarize all of the activity that's happened in the hub and the types of activity will become more apparent as we walk through the hub in just a few minutes. So I'm going to log in myself so that we can dive in. So logged in, I'm gonna go right into the Colorado Food Systems Hub and this is what it looks like. There's a lot going on here. So first, a little bit of history and background on the Food Systems Hub. Livewell, Colorado, along with many other partners have been working with our local food policy councils or local food systems coalitions as well as our state food systems advisory council for several years and have worked to support these coalitions in coming together face to face and virtually to network with each other and learn from each other. And we have over the past several years received a lot of feedback and requests for some sort of online digital space that would really support food systems focus groups really coming together and learning from each other and learning about their food environments. So this tool really is in response to those requests as we need this sort of digital backbone for this kind of movement. So you'll see that sort of throughout here about sort of what is this hub and who is it built for and really I kind of boil it down to two things. All of the tools that we're gonna show you should do one or both of these two things is really help coalitions with their case making, making a case, access to data and information and resources that will help coalitions or any other group, whether it's making a policy case, developing talking points for city council or county commissioners or whether it's making a case in a grant application and pulling really critical data into a grant application. We want those kind of resources to be available here. The second intent is really about peer connections. So we have a variety of tools here that are built to connect you all to each other, right? Who is doing what where? How is it going? What resources are you using? So hopefully that'll become apparent as we walk through these tools. The other thing that hopefully is pretty obvious that we try to make this very user friendly. So I'm right now on the homepage and what you'll see mirrored on many of the pages are things like this, big, bright, bold buttons that really lead you to different tools that you can find throughout the hub. So right away on the Getting Started page, we want to kind of lead you right into what is it you can do here? And I'm actually just gonna show you some of those things. So the Getting Started tab is actually a really good place to get started. What we're trying to do here is to give you a little bit of background. If you want more extensive background about the hub and about who we are and work with local food systems coalitions, this is a place to find out. We have some really great guidance about how do I, we sort of put some of the primary questions that we get asked all in one place here. A lot of questions we get asked are like, how do I start a food assessment? How do I connect with others? How do I make a case with the data available here? How do I search the database? So this is the place to kind of start directing you. So for example, on how do I connect with others? Here what we've done is it links you always within the hub to all the different tools we have in the hub that hopefully help you connect with others to see what others are doing, what questions they're asking, what projects they're working on. So again, a great place to start. The Colorado Food Systems Report is a tab I will come back to you in a minute. The Colorado Food Systems Report however, is a summary of a whole lot of indicators. We customized basically data sets for the state of Colorado. So what we did is we worked with the community commons and we kind of just picked and chose whatever we wanted out of existing national data sets of items that relate to food systems. And then we added on top of that a lot of data sets that you can only get in the state of Colorado. And we put them all together in this Colorado Food Systems Report. So this is a place where we really hope folks will go to look for data that you can either report or map about their communities. And I will come back to this to show an example in just a minute. The movement map is our attempt to show and provide access to that question of who is doing what across the state of Colorado. So as you can see, there are a lot of categories reflected here and there's a lot of efforts going on which is really exciting. So this is the opportunity to identify maybe peer groups that are doing similar activities to yours. Right now, every category is checked. You could check or uncheck as many as you want. So you could for example, go in and look at just who is identifying as doing farms or preschool or some sort of farm to school. This isn't everything under the sun in Colorado. We built this for a variety of different means but I'm sure we're still missing some information. So we want to keep this really current and we wanna add information as we go. So at the bottom of the screen here, you will see this note that says not seeing your initiative here, email us. That email actually comes to me and I have a form, a simple form that you can fill out to submit your project data. So if you do not see your project on here and want to be included, please reach out to us. We'll give you a form and we'll include your project here. And this is an example of the kind of tool that really is only as strong as it is used, right? So the more people use it and add their projects, the more robust it becomes and the more helpful it becomes in terms of finding your peers and who is doing like projects but also in terms of collecting really good information that might be useful in things like grant applications to demonstrate how robust our food systems work is in Colorado. So the resources tab is just that is primarily funding. We do have a link out of the resources tab to food systems coalitions. Since this tool is really built by and for our local food policy councils or food systems coalitions, you can click here and learn a lot more about who they are, what they look like in the state of Colorado. Primarily on this page though, it's just links to funding. Something that people are always asking about and we have provided a few different categories here. We really direct people to Live All Colorado's funding website because we actually keep that very, very current for any healthy eating, active living funding opportunities that arise. But on this page we link to sort of our favorites or the best of the best in terms of federal funding opportunities, social impact investment, health equity funding and other financing and sort of lending opportunities. The activity tab I'll let you explore on your own. It just kind of shows kind of who's been doing what and who's a new member. The forum is a tool we hope gets used a lot. This is a very typical online forum. This is the place you would go to post something new that you wanna share to ask a question of your peers. And the nice thing about this is that, so you can see some examples here of things that we've already posted, that we just posted as kind of samples in here. But this is where you would go to create a topic, to post your question, to attach your resource, share what you wanna share. And the nice thing is that you can select this, notifying me if anyone falls up via email. And so if the thread that you have started does get replies, you'll get alerts about that. Similarly, if you wanna go and actually follow something that someone has posted, you can right here select it as a favorite. And then every time someone else does anything with that post, comments on it, shares it, you will also get an email that there's activity related to it because it's your favorite. So this is a tool we're really gonna be directing people to use. If you have updates to share, this is what I will be using instead of emailing people anymore with updating new research, new reports, items of interest to everyone, new funding opportunities. This is where I'll post them. So the Hub Libraries is just exactly that. It's a place that every report or map that gets created on here is stored in the library. So if you just wanna go and see, oh my God, what are all the different resources available? What are all the different maps? Maybe all the different reports. This is the place to go and just kind of immerse yourself in all of that. So two last things I wanna flag. The feedback tab, we hope people use this and use this a lot. You know, it's always hard to get people to take the time to do this. We do want your feedback. Your feedback is gonna make this a really strong tool. So just consider it every time you're here or every other time you visit the site. Please feel free to come in here and provide us with some simple and quick feedback about how you're using the tool or how you might wanna use the tool, any other comments or questions that you have. The last tab I'm gonna highlight before I go back to the report is the Stories tab. And again, please feel free to nominate stories for us as we go. This is the place where we wanna showcase the work that you're doing. So in more than just that, we want short and sweet little case studies and stories, but we also wanna show them using a variety of media. So as you can see here, it's a nice case study about the Montezuma School to Farm project. We have pictures down here. We have a video and we also backs it up with a map that we created with the Food Systems Hub that brings data points together related to things like farm to school. So just as an example of the kind of stories we wanna present here. If you have a story you want us to highlight here, please do let me know. So before I let you go, I just wanna flag the Colorado Food Systems Report a little bit more as this is sort of the heart of the Food Systems Hub. The Food Systems Hub really is intended to be a resource for food environment data and mapping and reporting and this is really sort of the key place to get into all of that. So a couple of things in the Food Systems Report. Even though we did sort of hand pick a lot of indicators from national and state data sets around the food system, it's still a lot. So a really good place to start is the data library. And if you click on this, it pulls up just all in one page every indicator that's included in the Colorado Food Systems Report, where it's from, the date it's from. It's just a really nice place to start to kind of wrap your head around, okay, what is everything that's available to me? We also have template reports. So if you were like, huh, what are some other interesting questions? What are other people looking at? We have created some template reports. We just picked random counties. But these are reports that you can click on. So if you're also interested in mapping out the food environment, you could click on our template report and simply use those same indicators and create the same report for your county. I should say in the For the Food Systems Report, our basic requirement was that any data in here has to be available at least at the county level. A lot of the data is available at census tract level and much lower than that. And there are opportunities within the Food Systems Report to really cut the data a variety of different ways. For example, by zip code, not just counting. But we wanted all data to be available at least at the county level. So last thing I'm gonna show you is if you wanted to create your own new report. A very quick and dirty example here is you can pick counties, you can pick multiple counties. I'm just gonna randomly pick Arapahoe County and go in and view a report. So then it pulls you right into all of our data sets. So just as an example to show you what will pull up when you select anything. Right now I'm sitting in demographics, but this is a good example of for any indicator we have in here what will automatically populate for you is a simple table comparing your county to the state and to the United States. If it is locational data, it will pull up that data in map form as well. And then it will break down all of that data by other demographics. So this is just a quick example of the kind of data you'll see when you pick any indicator. And the last thing I'm gonna show you is to actually customize a report. So this is an easy way to just go in and create any report you want. So for example, I'm going to go in, I wanna look at Snap Authorized Farmers Market, Snap Authorized Farmers and Snap Authorized Food Stores. And I'm also gonna wanna look at household receiving Snap benefits. Let's just pull that. And I wanna view a report. So then automatically it gives me just those data sets I have selected just for the report area that I happened to select, which is Arapaho County. And it'll pull that data from me right here on the website. What's nice about this is that I can also just save this report. You do have to tag it before you can save it. And you can decide to share this with the hub, share it publicly, save it just for yourself. Just to demonstrate though, I'm just gonna download it as a PDF. You can download it as a Word document or a PDF. But just to show you sort of what it looks like when you download a report. Here it comes as a PDF. What you'll see is that a nice clean report is a PDF. What's also nice though is about being able to download this as a Word document, is then you're gonna have all these different data layers to play with that you could move around. So here's what my little new report looks like, pulling together Snap Authorized Food Sites all across farmers, farmers markets and retailers, as well as Snap Authorized Households. And it'll show the data exactly in the order that I requested it. Again, comparing to the state of the United States, we have it with the map, et cetera. But just imagine if I downloaded this in a Word document as well, I could move these tables and move these maps to be next to each other, however I wanted to present the data. So that is the last thing that I wanna show you in the Colorado Food Systems Digital Hub today. And I hope that you all use this as much as you want. And if you have any questions, you can always reach me at wendymoschetti at livewellcolorado.org. That's M-O-S-C-H-E-T-T-I for Moschetti. Wendy Moschetti at livewellcolorado.org. Thank you so much for joining us.