Defining Your Project

Scope and Boundaries

Setting a clear geographic and demographic scope is key for focusing your resources and effectively addressing the needs of the population. It’s also important for assessing your impact over time. Defining boundaries will help keep you from feeling like you need to tackle every issue.

Key considerations to define your community include:

Geographic Boundaries

Choose whether to focus on a city, county or specific areas based on the severity of food insecurity and available resources to effect change. Consider factors such as access to food resources, transportation or school district, for example.

• Though most of our population is in Austin, Minnesota, we realized we needed to think bigger (Mower County) to better encompass our community.
• Addressing hunger at just home, work or school would only address a portion of the problem. For us, many organizations and resources operate on the county level, including the county SNAP office and United Way. Therefore, the county made a logical target area.
• We realized that food insecurity doesn’t adhere to strict boundaries, and it is, in fact, mobile. People may live in one community and work in another. Students may go to school in one community while living in another. People may shop in more than one location.
  • • We learned that this reality applies to food pantries. For various reasons, people might not be able to use the food pantry closest to them—or they may be able to use more than one.

Population Priorities

Regardless of the geographic boundary of your project, it is important to identify and prioritize the needs of at-risk populations. You should consider targeting efforts to particular groups with pockets of need, such as:

• Seniors and older adults
• Seniors living alone
• Adults recently released from prison
• College students or recent grads
• Single parents
• Veterans
• Elementary school students
• Immigrants and migrants
• People with a physical disability or experiencing mental health issues

Create a Broad Vision, Then Set Specific Goals

Your initial project vision should broadly encompass what you hope to achieve. For example, “reduce food insecurity in your community.” We started with a goal that was quite specific—reduce food insecurity to 3% in our county—and later realized this was a significant stretch goal that would be difficult to achieve or track.

With a broad project vision defined, we suggest setting specific, measurable goals that are achievable in the foreseeable future. These goals will differ for every community and can be based on learnings you take away from your community assessment. For example:

• Help X more seniors become food secure
• Provide X more senior meals per month
• Reach X number of people each month with messaging about SNAP
• Create three new food shelf resources in the community

We learned that having “bite-sized” goals that are achievable in months or years is crucial. It may take a long time to achieve your entire vision, so interim accomplishments are key for demonstrating progress, providing momentum and reinforcing the idea that what you are doing today is important and making a difference.

There are a number of frameworks and strategies for setting your goals. One is the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) which may be a good place to start (read more).  

Don’t Lose Sight of the Wider Community

Early on, we found ourselves spending a lot of time and resources on the city of Austin, Minnesota, where most coalition members are based and where the need is most visible. However, we also know that other areas within our focus area of Mower County are facing significant challenges even if they aren’t immediately in the spotlight. We continue to mobilize resources and expand our reach to ensure support extends across different county areas. This also helps create a more inclusive approach to food access.

Visiting Rural Food Pantries

During the first year of operations, the coalition visited every food pantry in Mower County with the objective to get a sense of their capabilities, meet their team members and volunteers and gain a better understanding of the challenges and unique circumstances they face on a daily basis. This helped form relationships and kickstart a broader network of resources that has been key to the coalition’s success.

Some key insights from visiting food pantries: