The Montgomery County Food Council, at the request of Montgomery County Council President Gabe Albornoz and the Department of Health and Human Services, is serving as the project manager for the creation of a county government Strategic Plan to End Childhood Hunger. This plan will identify food access barriers and strategies to reduce food insecurity across all childhood age groups in Montgomery County. The plan will outline the current policy, investment, and programmatic landscape related to childhood hunger in Montgomery County, accompanied by legislative, funding, and program expansion and creation recommendations and their associated estimated budget impact and metrics for success.
Strategic brainstorming groups will help:
One brainstorming group will focus on each of the intervention pathways (for a total of six groups):
Each brainstorming group will meet three times (2hrs per session, spaced three weeks apart), each time refining and focusing our discussion.
We will work to define the scope and scale of childhood hunger in Montgomery County, and discuss the role of their area-specific strategies in combating childhood hunger. The group will also discuss major issues or challenges that need to be addressed in the final plan. In this session the group will discuss how to measure the need, as well as the success metrics for childhood hunger interventions.
In its second session each group will dive into childhood hunger intervention strategies, and talk about how those strategies could be developed, replicated, or scaled to help end childhood hunger in Montgomery County. Each group will work to determine what additional research, background, or investigation is needed to develop final recommendations in Meeting 3.
Each group will conclude by making actionable recommendations, picking the best strategies identified in Meeting 2 to meet the challenges identified in Meeting 1. They will work to give County leadership their best advice on what areas to focus on given limited resources, and provide suggestions on how to measure the success of these initiatives.
To collect qualitative feedback from residents, MCFC will have three 60-90 minute resident listening sessions, hosted by community organizations. MCFC will provide a toolkit to host organizations and send a representative to take notes for sessions conducted in English or Spanish.
To collect quantitative feedback, MCFC will be conducting an online survey (based on questions from the Community Food Access Survey) administered in English and Spanish. The goal is to collect at least 500 responses.
June 5th - August 14th