How Does Food Insecurity Affect Communities?
Key Highlights:
- When nutritious food is out of reach, both individual and community health can decline.
- Strengthening food security requires community collaboration to expand access to nutritious meals, reduce stigma around food assistance, and align local resources and programs.
- Elevance Health helps improve food security in communities through initiatives including funding community gardens, school food pantries, and food as medicine programs that integrate nutrition into healthcare.
In every community, access to nourishing food contributes to overall well-being. Still, nearly 14% of households across the United States experience food insecurity — a persistent challenge that restricts access to affordable groceries, especially fresh produce. When nutritious food is out of reach, both individual and community health can decline.
“Food insecurity is about quantity — not having enough food to eat to sustain daily life. It’s often triggered by financial hardship, scarcity of grocery stores, or transportation barriers,” said Dr. Kofi Essel, food as medicine program director at Elevance Health. “When money gets tight, families may compromise on food. Skipping nutritious food — like eating bread and butter only for a week — can make a sick person even sicker.”
Food insecurity can lead to serious health concerns. For example:
- Increased hunger often leads to greater consumption of ultra-processed foods, raising risks for high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.
- Inadequate nutrition can disturb sleep patterns and contribute to stress, depression, and poor concentration.
Chronic illnesses made worse by unhealthy diets can raise the likelihood of developing certain cancers.
How Communities Can Help Strengthen Food Security
What do these outcomes mean for the health of a community? Just as people’s well-being is shaped by where they live, a community’s collective health depends on the well-being of its members. Food insecurity isn’t just a personal issue — it’s a community one.
Communities can take action to strengthen food security by ensuring reliable access to nutritious meals and reducing the stigma tied to seeking food assistance. When individuals feel supported, they’re more likely to reach out for help.
Collaborative networks — made up of residents with firsthand experience, local businesses, nonprofits, and government agencies — can align public and private efforts to connect people with programs and resources that make healthy food more accessible.
Elevance Health Helps Improve Food Security in Communities
Communities can work together to improve food security, creating consistent access to the food needed to sustain daily health and well-being. Elevance Health helps communities improve food access by:
- Supporting local stores to develop the needed infrastructure and to stock food items that reflect the community’s culture. Store owners may find it difficult to outfit their markets with the necessary equipment to expand and diversify their food products; however, with financial support, these stores can purchase refrigeration and storage units. This enables them to offer more whole foods such as fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, and other necessary items tailored to their communities.
- In 2019, Elevance Health began working with the Food Trust to establish programs in San Jose, California; Cleveland, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana. In 2023, another 12 stores across 10 states* participated in the Food Trust’s Healthy Corner Store Program.
- In 2019, Elevance Health began working with the Food Trust to establish programs in San Jose, California; Cleveland, Ohio; and Indianapolis, Indiana. In 2023, another 12 stores across 10 states* participated in the Food Trust’s Healthy Corner Store Program.
- Community gardens can improve a community’s access to food including fresh fruits and vegetables. They can be created in rural, suburban, and urban areas, wherever there is open space. If land is available, existing soil can be prepared and used. Building raised platforms and plant boxes and filling them with nutrient-rich soil provides gardening space on hardscape surfaces like concrete or asphalt.
- Community gardens produce benefits for those working on the gardens. The increased social interaction reduces loneliness and isolation, strengthens interpersonal relationships among community and even family members and increases physical activity.
- Community gardens also bring more green space, encourage outdoor time, and present educational opportunities — especially for young people.
- Encouraging community support, such as volunteering, donating money or food to community food pantries/banks and buying food from local growers (via farmers markets or food suppliers).
- Since 2014, we’ve partnered with local Lions clubs to host an annual season of service. In the last 10 years, 15,000 Elevance Health associates have served more than 3 million people through more than 40,000 hours of service.
- Elevance Health Foundation supports organizations working to improve food security. Its $14 million grant to Feeding America’s Food as Medicine program increases access to nutritious foods through public food programs. The grant provides resources to assess people for food insecurity and connect to essential local community and federal resources.
- Food pantries inside schools provide a reliable, local source of groceries and nutritional support beyond school meals. Elevance Health built on-campus food pantries at elementary schools in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Brooklyn, New York in 2021 and continues to keep them stocked during the school year. Associate volunteers distribute free food to school families monthly.
- Creating food as medicine programs in community health centers across the country. For members of Elevance Health-affiliated Medicaid plans in Virginia and Kansas, primary care at community health centers includes personalized nutrition support for people at risk for diet-related chronic conditions. Eventually, a nutrition center of excellence designed by Elevance Health, the National Association of Community Health Centers, and community health centers, will serve as a scalable national model to promote food-based clinical care.
*Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Nebraska, South Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, California, and recently, in Kansas.