
Work by the Franklin Township Food Insecurity and Safety Coalition begun in 2024 resumed on January 29, with representatives from various walks of township life meeting at the Community/Senior center to lay out strategies to end food insecurity in the Eight Villages.
The group met several times in 2024 and developed a list of the main problems in Franklin contributing to food insecurity. The January 29 meeting was meant to coalesce the work done last year into five top solutions to those problems, said the group’s organizer, Sami Shaban.
Attending were representatives from the Board of Education, the Township Council, the Greater Somerset County YMCA, several houses of worship, and other non-profits that are working to end hunger.
“This is sort of the culmination of a lot of the planning we did last year,” Shaban said. “So we have those five big solutions that we want to solve. And then we want to sort of gather people around each one.”
The group also celebrated what it said were six “wins” experienced over the past year, including revitalizing a failing community garden, the creation of a 1-page food resources guide, studying moving the Franklin Food Bank to the Pine Grove Manor school campus, creating a list of food insecurity issues facing Franklin, creating an after-school meal program at Pine Grove Manor school, and creating a “food kiosk program” in several township schools, Franklin Park, Pine Grove Manor, and Elizabeth Avenue schools.
The five overarching solutions to food insecurity problems developed over the past year include co-locating essential services in convenient locations, distribute food in remote township locations, partnering with outside organizations to ensure that students have nutritious meals during and beyond school hours, hosting classes and workshops on healthy eating, and providing enrollment support for wraparound programs such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at schools, food pantries and community centers.
Shaban said that by the end of this year, he would like to see “an improvement in the food security of our population.”
“We have statistical data that we have at the county level and even at the township level that tells us the life expectancy between one ward and another ward,” he said. “Right now there’s an eight-year difference between two of our wards. It tells us how many of our families are unemployed or underemployed. So we’d like to see all of those statistics at that level start to come down.”
“And we’re going to do it by helping the food bank to move on to PGM’s campus,” Shaban said. “We’re going to do it by partnering with the business folks, connecting them with the folks that need to be hired and hopefully getting our job population up.”
Food bank Executive Director Derek Smith gave the group a pep talk at the start of the meeting, telling attendees that the group’s efforts are serving as models for organizations around the state.
“When I speak with other executive directors and CEOs in the food security space, each and every one of them talk about trying to either launch what we’re doing here or how it has already launched, but there’s no momentum behind it,” he said. “We get to brag about what FISC does on a regular basis.”
“Right here in Central New Jersey, in a town called Franklin Township, we have a coalition that is the number one coalition addressing food security in the state,” Smith said. “This is not ‘Big D’ bragging about it, this comes directly from the (state) Office of Food Security Advocate. They have that balcony view looking across the entire state, and this is the model that folks want to replicate.”
Smith noted that about 21,000 of the roughly 70,000 Franklin residents are living with food insecurity.
He said the key to ending food insecurity in the township is to tailor food and wraparound programs to individual neighborhoods, much like teachers tailor lessons to students with different levels of abilities to learn.
“I’ve worked in education in New York City, so I’ll see 32 kids in the classroom, 15 have an (Individual Education Plan), probably another four or five, if they got tested, would have IEPs,” he said. “And in order for them to truly understand the content, you have to differentiate the instruction.”
“The same is true for the work that we’re doing to try to bring food security to Franklin,” Smith said. “We have to differentiate and tailor the supports in each individual neighborhood to ensure that the needs in those neighborhoods are addressed sufficiently and sustainably by something that truly does get to the root of the challenge in that neighborhood, as well as leveraging and optimizing the resources in that neighborhood.”
“For example, right, we are blessed to have eight villages here in Franklin Township,” he said. “Imagine one village has a school located in that area and we know that food insecurity is high. We can plug a satellite pantry into that particular neighborhood.”
“If there’s a neighborhood where there isn’t a house of worship, where there isn’t a school, but there’s a community center, maybe in that neighborhood we’re putting food lockers,” he said. “Maybe we’re coming by on a Saturday and Sunday and doing pop-up free farmers markets in that neighborhood. Because the other infrastructure doesn’t exist like in other neighborhoods, like a school or house of worship to do something like that.”
Smith said elderly residents who don’t get out could have food delivered to them.
“We have an army of volunteers that are willing and able to drive and drop off food to people’s homes,” he said.
Smith said that hand-in-hand with combating food insecurity is providing other, wraparound, services such as healthcare, employment and housing.
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