3 Years of unBox Action
From April 2020 to April 2023, unBox was active as a youth-led organization working to unite and empower young people to fight US food insecurity.
Since then, we have no longer been running active programming such as events, campaigns, or communications. However, we reflect back with indescribable gratitude for the passion, time, energy, creativity, and commitment that our youth members, our advisors, and our partners have poured into our community—and for the opportunity to work in coalition towards food systems transformation. Within and beyond the domain of food systems, members of our unBox community continue to work towards achieving a more just and sustainable world.
Some Highlights from unBox’s Work
We created a Bay Area school meals map that was viewed over half a million times, appeared on school district websites, and was featured in SF Gate, Mercury News, NBC Bay Area, KQED, Palo Alto Online, Stanford News, Local News Matters, Stanford Pyjama Talks, and Stanford Media.
We hosted two White House Conference dialogues, one in-person and one virtual, comprising 28 (mostly youth) attendees, and submitting our feedback to the White House conference organizers.
School Meals and Pandemic-EBT
By collaborating with professional programming, design, and data engineers, and by informing our work through 20 compensated, bilingual, semi-structured, 30-minute interviews with Bay Area school social workers and English- and Spanish-speaking parents, we turned our schools meals map into a mobile-friendly, multilingual website called BayAreaCommunity.org. Read the whole story of BAC here!
We joined the California School Meals for All Coalition alongside over 70 organizations which successfully made California the first state in the nation to provide free K-12 school breakfasts and lunches to all.
Collaborating with Food Systems for the Future, Hunger Free America, and US Senator Dick Durbin’s team, we conducted research and provided feedback to help inform what would ultimately be introduced by Senator Durbin in the US Senate on July 2, 2020 as the Expanding SNAP Options Act of 2020, and by Representative Kelly on September 3, 2020 in the House. The Senate Bill was reintroduced in February 2021 and in the House in April 2021. Ultimately, recommendations from the bill were implemented in the December 27, 2020 Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which allocated $5 million for technical support within the SNAP online purchasing program. In March 2021, the American Rescue Plan allocated an additional $25 million to improve SNAP online.
To help individuals more accessibly use SNAP to order groceries online during the pandemic, and informed by compensated bilingual interviews with English and Spanish-speaking Bay Area SNAP participants, we created a walkthrough visual booklet and one-page pamphlet—for every state participating in SNAP Online—guiding individuals through the SNAP online ordering process in English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. With the support of our partners Providers and Project Bread, our guides were accessed over 40,000 times.
We began supplying our school meals data to populate the Bay Area regions of No Kid Hungry’s National Free Meals Texting Hotline. The UC Nutrition Policy Institute and Nourish CA leveraged our data to advocate for expanding school meal funding, child nutrition benefits, and USDA school meal waivers.
We partnered with San Francisco Unified School District to help design and execute their Pandemic-EBT communications and outreach strategy.
SNAP Online
We submitted Freedom of Information Act data requests from the USDA and from each state participating in the SNAP online purchasing pilot and compiled the data we received into a research brief cited by peer reviewed research papers and distributed amongst USDA decisionmakers. We also used the data to publish two academic research papers:
Foster, I. S., LeBoa, C., Hoffs, C. T., Polselli, A. M., de Nocker, C., Liu, S. Y., Rummo, P. E., Brandt, E. J., & Rimm, E. B. (2023). An Analysis of SNAP Online Purchasing Behavior in California: A Review of the First 7 Months of Program Implementation and Lessons Learned. American Journal of Health Promotion, 37(3), 333–344. https://doi.org/10.1177/08901171221131194
Foster, I. S., Liu, S. Y., Hoffs, C. T., LeBoa, C., Chen, A. S., & Rummo, P. E. (2022). Disparities in SNAP online grocery delivery and implementation: Lessons learned from California during the 2020-21 COVID pandemic. Health & Place, 76, 102811. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2022.102811
Elevating Youth Voices and Building Partnerships
We presented our work and research at virtual and in-person conferences, including Yale Law School’s Reforming America’s Food Retail Markets, Universities Fighting World Hunger, the NOPREN HER Summer Student Session, and World Information Architecture Day 2021. Among hundreds of project submissions to the Clinton Global Initiative University program, unBox’s BayAreaCommunity.org was among 5 selected to have one of its project team members participate in a roundtable with Chelsea Clinton.
We deepened relationships with organizations, agencies, and companies including Hunger Free America, Nourish California, San Francisco Unified School District, No Kid Hungry, Food Systems for the Future, FTS Solutions, the Ecology Center, Nazun, Mazon, Mapbox, Code for San Jose, GrowNYC, Tangelo, Food Rescue Anti-Hunger Coalition, UCLA CalFresh Initiative, the UC Berkeley Basic Needs Center, the Stanford Pop-Up Food Pantry, Second Harvest Silicon Valley, SF-Marin Food Bank, the Union of Concerned Scientists, North Dakota RAD Co-op, DataKind, World Central Kitchen, and many more.
We presented a conference paper at Yale Law School’s Reforming Americ'a’s Food Retail Markets Conference in 2022:
Foster, I. S., Hoffs, C. T., Polselli, A. M., Winterboer, K. (2022). Exploring Consumer Data Privacy & Retailer Competition within the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Online Purchasing Pilot. Reforming America’s Food Retail Markets, 134. https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/center/isp/documents/grocery-compendium_may2023.pdf
Our members participated in the Campus Hunger Project’s SNAP Into Action Campaign, and met virtually with Congressional representatives across the country to advocate for the EATS Act—which would make SNAP more accessible to college students.
We helped FTS Solutions, a grocery technology company specializing in SNAP- and WIC-accepting stores and seeking to be involved in the first SNAP online farmers market pilot, connect with farmers markets nationwide to learn about and discuss their SNAP online ideas and questions.
Thank you for joining us on this journey, and for continuing to support youth movements for change!
To explore more of unBox’s greatest hits, scroll through our media coverage and our blog post archives.