Improving Health while Alleviating Hunger: Best Practices of a Successful Hunger Relief Organization.

BACKGROUND: Food insecurity affects millions each year in the United States. Hunger relief organizations work to reduce hunger and food insecurity; however, the foods they provide are often unhealthy. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this article is to document the policy, systems, and environmental changes that Samaritan Community Center made to their programs in order to better serve Washington County and Benton County, Arkansas. METHODS: With the use of a case-study approach, researchers held 17 meetings with key members of the organization and conducted >30 h of observations to document policy, systems, and environmental changes and best practices for implementing those changes. RESULTS: Researchers identified emergent themes and grouped best practices in the following categories: 1) removing stigma and empowering clients, 2) incremental steps to increase access to healthy foods, 3) embracing multiculturalism, 4) donation policies and procurement, 5) collaboration is key, 6) organizational culture, and 7) challenges and resolutions. CONCLUSIONS: Samaritan Community Center has successfully implemented and adopted new programs and practices in order to improve the health of their clients. To our knowledge, this is the first case study to document best practices for making policy, systems, and environmental changes by a hunger relief organization to improve the nutritional quality of foods provided to their clients.

Population responses of small mammals to food supply and predators: a global meta-analysis.

1. The relative importance of food supply and predation as determinants of animal population density is a topic of enduring debate among ecologists. To address it, many studies have tested the potential effects of food on population density by experimentally supplementing natural populations, with much focus on terrestrial vertebrates, especially small mammals. 2. Here we perform a meta-analysis of such experiments, testing two complementary hypotheses: (i) small mammal populations are bottom-up limited and (ii) population increases in response to food supplementation are constrained by predation, a top-down limitation. 3. In the 148 experiments recorded, food supplementation had an overall positive and significant effect, increasing population densities by 1.5-fold. Larger population increases occurred when predation was reduced and populations were open to immigration. Predation appeared to be unimportant when populations were closed to immigration. Immigration was the major mechanism underlying increases in abundance by increasing local population density and crowding. Contributions of increased reproductive rate could be detected, but were minor compared to immigration, and no effects were detected from survival. 4. Our analyses support the view that animal population density is determined by both bottom-up and top-down forces. They also suggest the possibility that food supplementation experiments might unintentionally create ecological traps by aggregating both prey and predators in small areas of the landscape. We suggest an alternative experimental design to increase the contribution that food supplementation experiments can make in future.