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Examining efforts to help those facing food insecurity

Posted at 6:29 PM, Mar 17, 2021
and last updated 2021-03-17 19:20:43-04

(WXYZ) — While efforts are increasing to vaccinate the public and better educate people on beating this deadly virus, there is still a huge ongoing need to help those struggling to feed themselves and their families in this pandemic.

We're being joined for the 7 UpFront segment by Winona Bynum with the Detroit Food Policy Council to talk about it.

You can see the full interview in the video player above.

"The Detroit Food Policy Council is one of more than 300 Food Policy Councils operating around the country. We've been around since 2009 and, unlike a lot of Food Policy Councils, we really came out of community action," Bynum says. "We have been to, with our coalition of partners, we've been able to work on the issue we've seen with the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, about 40 percent of Detroiters were food insecure, meaning they did not have access to healthy, nutritional, culturally appropriate foods. We've seen that increase since then. One of the first things we've been doing through our grocery coalition, working to make grocery stores able to serve the needs of the community better. We were able to do a large pitch effort through Food Secure Detroit, we had a three-month project where we had our community partners and we did things like give food boxes, we were able to have educational classes, and, also, able to give out equipment all to our neighbors, just to make them more ready to ride out the pandemic and make them able to meet their food needs."