Feeding America

Our Research and Evaluation Team spearheads critical research initiatives to better understand hunger and to continually improve our strategies to end it. We analyze the dynamics at play among the Nation's food insecure individuals and families, the patterns surrounding their use of our services, and endeavor to utilize this data to ultimately create better local feeding programs. Additionally, we investigate our own Organizational operations as a network, identifying opportunities for continual growth and refinement.During fiscal year 2023, we released the thirteenth consecutive edition of Map the Meal Gap, our signature study on overall and child food insecurity in every county and congressional district in the United States. Not only does this study allow our partners, policy makers, donors and the public to understand the picture of hunger in their communities, it provides our food banks with data that enables them to target their services to people most in need. Feeding America also released county-level food insecurity estimates for Black and Latino households, providing new insights into racial inequities at the local level. Feeding America produced The State of Senior Hunger in America in 2021 which documents the prevalence of food insecurity among the senior population age 60 and older in the United States, and older adults age 50-59. In order to best use our resources as a network and work toward meeting our collective needs of having more timely neighbor insights now and into the future, Feeding America is scaling no-cost data collection platform to support neighbor intake at partner agencies across the country. This platform is a preferred provider for food banks implementing Service Insights, a network-wide approach to electronically collect consistent administrative intake data from and about the people who access the Feeding America network. Collecting this data electronically, using a common framework, will enable us to have a complete and up-to-date understanding of who we are serving locally and nationally. Feeding America launched a new initiative, the Network Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) Approach, aimed at creating a common and consistent approach to program evaluation, using a shared language, in order to better understand the effectiveness of food bank programs across the network. We hosted our first ever evaluation grant to support local communities to assess and improve their programs.