Food Needs Assessment
Valley Verde is conducting a large-scale community needs assessment (CNA) to gather timely, nuanced, and diverse perspectives from Santa Clara County residents on unmet food-related needs and access to food-related services.
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Are you a Santa Clara County resident? Please contact us to schedule an interview or participate in a focus group, or complete a survey.
If you are a community member and are interested in supporting this project, please contact us!
Community Needs Assessment
​Unmet food-related needs are on the rise in Santa Clara County, as public assistance programs face cuts while the cost of living continues to rise. With community members of varying degrees of vulnerability increasingly struggling to access many of the essential food resources, there is a pressing need to go beyond the broad categories, statistics, and rankings that characterize many recurring food-related needs assessments in the County. There is a need to understand the complex situations and nuanced food-related experiences of County residents whose food-related needs are unmet, so that the nonprofits and government agencies that serve them can tailor their services accordingly.​​
To gain this deeper understanding, Valley Verde and Professor Chris Bacon at Santa Clara University are conducting a community-science-based needs assessment that, through surveys, interviews, and focus groups, provides County residents with an opportunity to have their voices heard about their and their community's food-related needs and about how they would prefer local nonprofits address them.
We plan to share the results widely with interested community members and academic, nonprofit, and government organizations, and to apply them in identifying new and strengthening existing collaborative efforts to comprehensively address the county's short- and long-term food-related needs.​