Evaluating the Efficacy of the AMS Food Bank
Creators: name: Black, Erin
name: Suen, Anita
name: Baldwin, Caroline
name: Golanty, Sam
name: Zou, Zouye
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2023

description: The AMS Food Bank provides emergency food services to the UBC community, including students, faculty, and staff, to help alleviate food insecurity. UBC students are experiencing food insecurity, with 19% reporting concerns about running out of food at least once a month (Yee et al., 2021). The growing food issues in the UBC community have increased reliance on the AMS Food Bank, with 600 visits to the Food Bank recorded from February to March 2022 (Prost, 2022). As the need for emergency food aid increases, the Food Bank faces many challenges, including providing equitable access for all. Moreover, students of other nationalities are 4.1 times more likely to experience food insecurity, as evidenced by the 28.6% of the AMS Food Bank users who are international students (Marques et al., 2022; UBC, 2022). These issues are significant as inadequate access to food can negatively impact an individual's academic or work performance and physical and mental health (Cady, 2014; Meza et al., 2019). Goal Together with the AMS Food Bank team, our group aimed to develop a plan to reduce barriers to community access to food by helping the AMS Food Bank work more efficiently. Methods Our project took a multi-pronged approach to understand what barriers the AMS Food Bank was currently facing to achieving its overarching goals from the perspective of the FB operators and its users. This multi-pronged approach consisted of a literature review, surveys with the FB users, and focus group interviews with FB users. We identified promising solutions in similar fields through a thorough literature review to understand how Food Banks operate in other contexts and find more efficient practices from other Food Banks. The survey allowed us to gain a general understanding of normal experiences in FB and the focus group provided us with deeper insights of reasons of food scarcity perception among FB users. Key findings Through these approaches, we learned that a shift from old food distribution model to new model has created a reliable adequate food supply for many FB users. We also found that many FB users reported that some parts including line-up, interaction with volunteers, and quality and quantity of food can still result in the perception of food scarcity. As food scarcity is defined as inadequate of food is produced, uneven distribution of natural resource by a country or by institutions (Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources, 2022). We combined the results and feedback from survey and focus groups to develop suggestions for FB about the next steps, including: 1. Selection improvement, 2. Food Bank recipes, 3. Food bank signage, 4. Feedback voting system, 5. Improving volunteer interactions. Conclusions We believed that our recommendations would help FB to lower the barriers to access emergency food services on UBC campus and improve overall wellbeing of UBC community. More importantly, a good relationship could be established between FB users and operators through these ways, which ultimately resulted in the alleviation of food insecurity at UBC. An infographic presentation of this summary can be seen in Appendix A. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”