Thousands of working families in South Florida are struggling to make ends meet, unsure of where their next meal will come from.

We take a closer look at the growing issue of food insecurity, how it's become a critical public health issue, and ways local organizations are helping to find solutions.

That and more stay with us as we dive into "Your South Florida."

Hello and welcome to "Your South Florida."

I'm Sandra Viktorova, filling in for Pam Giganti.

More than 2 million people are facing hunger in Florida.

Of them, more than 660,000 are children.

They're what is known as food insecure.

The US Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as the lack of consistent access to enough food for every person in a household to live an active, healthy lifestyle.

It disproportionately affects areas that are low income and that are oftentimes miles from the nearest grocery stores that offer affordable, healthy foods.

The food insecure are at higher risk for chronic diseases and even delayed development in young children.

According to the latest data from the Hunger Relief Nonprofit Feeding America, more than 667,000 people in South Florida, where food insecure in 2020, that's an increase of more than 38,000 people from the previous year.

Continued supply chain issues and the rising costs for everyday expenses like rent and food has only made the situation worse.

Joining me now to talk more about food insecurity in South Florida and possible solutions is Arely Lozano Cantu, director of Health Access and livability at United Health Partnerships Inc or UHP.

Arely, welcome so much to the program.

We appreciate you joining us.

Well, we wanna learn a lot more about UHP, so we're gonna talk more about that.

But first I wanna talk little more about the food insecure, what these households look like, because with so much wealth in our community, it's hard to understand how this is such a big issue.

So what do these households look like, these families?

Well, and I think that's, thank you for having me.

And I think that's one of the main issues that we think that there's an an image or an or aversion of food insecurity that we're looking for.

And the reality is that there is really not, food insecurity is very, very hidden.

We have older adults who had a really good life and now are in social security struggling.

[sandra] Okay.

We have young people that their parents don't let them see their food insecurity.

We have adults who, because they are able to afford fast food, they don't see themselves as food in insecure, right?

So there's a lot of questions as to what do we, what are we looking for?

But in reality, I think what we're looking at is food is more expensive, as you mentioned.

[sandra] Absolutely.

Food is harder to access, and we are becoming more and more ingrained in a culture that is more about not cooking at home, right?

So we eat outside, we eat fast food, we go to restaurants, we eat on the go.

And so a lot of those things keep us thinking that food insecurity is not an issue.

However, with the pandemic in the last couple years.

[sandra] Sure.

I feel like that that's become a more reality.

And instead everybody in the face.

These are often people who are working.

Yes.

Right, we're not talking, people who are homeless necessarily.

These are people who could be working very hard and more than one income coming into the house.

Yes, yes, a lot of the times you will have, like I said, a lot of the times you will have people, families that have food insecurity and that we do not think that they have food insecurity.

However, at the end of the day, couple things you mentioned in the intro, low access and low income tend to be areas where we see more food insecurity, where we have geographical areas where there are no grocery stores, where there are no healthy food stores, where there are no farmer's markets, where the main source of food is fast food joints and convenience stores.

And what we know about fast food and convenience stores is that they don't offer the most nutritious foods.

And this is a problem that isn't necessarily always consistent, right?

A family can come into and out of this issue.

Yes, or a family that can be in and out of food insecurity.

There may be a lot of other social determinants attached to that, where they live, where they work, if they have a job, insurance, et cetera, right?

So there's a lot of different compounding things that affect the people's access to food.

But in general, the way that Feeding America, Feeding South Florida and other hunger relief coalitions and programs.

We look at low access plus low income when we're looking at areas of food need and nutritional need.

I'm glad you talked about access.

I wanna talk about the term food desert.

We often use that term.

Yes.

When we're talking about food insecurity, but many people are moving away from that term because of a negative connotation.

I want you to explore that idea with me and where, what terms are we better to use now?

Yeah, so for a long time when I was going to school, we were talking about food deserts and it was the common language at that time in public health and urban planning.

And it was useful at that time because it really brought it to the ground, right?

Quite literally.

It looked at the geography and we said, "There's no food in this area.

So when there's no plants in a place, it's a desert.

When there's no life in a geographical area, it's a desert."

So it made logical sense in a way that if there was a lack of food access points, that we could determine that location a desert, right?

A food desert to be more specific.

And for many years that's the language that we used.

However, as we have continued to evolve in the food system world and in our world, and understanding different ways in which language can have different powers, we've recognized that desert doesn't really let us see that the reality of a food insecure community, it doesn't just happen, right?

A desert feels like just a geographical, natural, organic situation.

Whereas low access, low income area of a community is not just by chance.

It has been made through policy, systems and environmental changes that have led that space to be food insecure.

Personally, that's what got me into food access work.

I come from Mexico originally and I had a very different food access experience when I came here.

I was just so impressed with how similar to Mexico the food access was and the terms that a lot of the product that is grown here is taken away into a lot of the United States.

So because we are summer and spring and sun and rain throughout the year, and we grow a lot of really great crops that feed a lot of people across the country, we have a problem where our food gets grown here and then taken away mostly.

And we don't have a strong local agriculture like hyperlocal agriculture.

[sandra] Yes.

We have a lot of commercial agriculture.

And so a lot of our food is going away.

And that was what I couldn't wrap by head around when I first got here.

I was like, how is it that we're producing so much, but we're not getting the affordability in return, right?

Yeah, to our own communities, right?

To our own communities.

I wanna talk about solutions.

So let's talk about the work of UHP.

How does its mission address food insecurity?

So Urban Health Partnerships is an organization dedicated to co-designing and investing into communities, working with communities to co-design sustainable change, right?

Overall, we are looking at public health and social determinants of health in a holistic way, but we have identified five main areas that lead us to our goal of building a culture of health equity.

And one of those is food access security injustice, which is one of the ones that leads me to this work.

We also have work around healthy streets and public spaces.

We also have work around age friendly communities for longevity, building a culture of health equity and community led, community driven leadership.

So with all those five initiatives, we look for opportunities to work with communities and throughout a long period, we don't like to just come in and out to do a small project and leave.

We'd rather like to start small and slow and try to build with the community members that we're working with and the local stakeholders that are part of the communities that we are a part of to little by slowly really co-design the plans for change in those communities.

And through that we can build policy change, coordination and collaboration, collective impact work that can then help more partnerships develop to support the goals of each of our initiatives.

And in particular for food access, we look at so many different community members and stakeholders that are either food insecure or working across the food system or just local business owners interested in health.

And so we have a wide diverse range of folks that we work with and we're really dedicated to co-designing those changes with the communities that we work with.

Obviously there's not one solution to this problem, and I know a lot of folks are talking about the importance of urban farming.

How important is that as part of the solution here?

I personally think that it is one of the bigger areas of our solution, when we see examples like the pandemic, where our supply chain just fails us, right?

Where we don't have, where the trucks are not coming in, where the food is lost somewhere else, or it's spoiled on the way.

And then we live in a state that pass hurricanes and activities that sometimes can detriment the flow of the chain, right?

[sandra] Yeah.

So thinking like that, I think that in particular for South Florida and for our state growing food locally, urban agriculture, local agriculture is super important, because more than in any other place, I really do think, because when we think that our gross product is always leaving us and we don't have, and if things can't come to us from other places, if you think about it, how do we get our stuff, right?

So if we had more community gardens, more communities, service agriculture, horticulture at schools, I think that that element, really does bring resilience, right?

And I think that that's what we're trying to build in the state in South Florida.

It really is important that we think of how do we stay in this place to be able to thrive even if we live in the most affluent areas, right?

So that's when food insecurity hits us all.

Adeley, thank you so much.

We're gonna have so much more about this topic and on UHP on our social media.

Adely, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for being here.

Well, as the largest agricultural facility in Broward County, the Urban Farming Institute serves as an urban farm market warehouse, resources center, and community garden.

They're on a mission to teach everyone how to grow and prepare nutritious food, while building stronger communities.

Where does our food come from?

Was a real question that we had in our office 12 years ago actually.

And it was a serious concern, because we had people very interested in how food was produced, where does it come from?

The Urban Farming Institute really is a platform for as many growing technologies and capabilities as we can fit on this piece of land, that the city of Oakland Park allows us to use.

When we first started this idea, we thought it was gonna be a lot of fun.

It was gonna be, gee was it's gonna be barbecue and beer on a Saturday afternoon and everybody's gonna show up and it'll be just a big deal.

Well, we found that that was not the case.

The people that were coming to us were, where does my food come from?

How do I grow it?

How do I grow it more effectively?

I have limitations, I have a balcony.

My mobility is not quite what it needs to be.

Can you help me out?

And that led us then to building 65 raised bed gardens and as well as elevated gardens for people who have mobility issues and people then who have no issues at all and just want to learn how to garden.

And every Saturday we do a talk at 10, which is a free open to the public class on techniques of gardening.

So today is gardening by the numbers.

What is the economic advantage of growing food in an urban setting and can you do it successfully?

We're really fortunate today to have Sally Smoller here from Plumosa School of the Arts, say hello to Sally.

[participants] Hey Sally.

Urban Farming Institute has helped me in many ways.

So I'm the librarian at Plumosa School of the Arts.

I also have a garden club.

In my garden club, we have nine raised beds and I teach the children from seed to harvest, how to grow and enjoy healthy nutritious produce.

But when I come here, I know everything I'm learning is true tested, there's no guesswork involved.

And I know that the products that I buy here, are better than anything I can get in the big box stores.

So I buy my seeds here, I buy my supplements here, I buy my soils here.

And I just know that everything's gonna work out, just the way it should.

It's really an important sort of thing to realize that there are resources available locally where high quality, nutritious food can be found, below the cost of what you're going to find in your favorite shopping location.

And why not reach out and take advantage and understand that this is something that for sure you can do.

Our training here is free.

Today, we'll have a student with us, Vicki Abraham, who's finishing her graduate program, and we'll have Chef Pat Quinn who cooks for some of the NFL guys, and they will be here to demonstrate how you can take very simple product and from your garden and produce really dynamic, beautiful, highly nutritious product because you know that the product has been minutes away from the kitchen as opposed to something that's been on a truck and in a distribution warehouse for who knows, maybe a week or more.

So while we like the fun and frolic of growing, we understand that there is also an academic requirement that comes along with being able to reinforce the fun.

We reinforce it with the opportunity of having our farmers, our growers, our community, interact with professionals in the world of high level nutrition.

Hi, my name is Vicky Abraham.

I'm a graduate student dietician at the Dr. Quel College of Osteopathic Medicine Master of Science and Nutrition.

It's something that my program developed our relationship with UFI, Urban Farming Institute as they are hosting as a preceptor.

So last semester I was able to intern here and develop recipe cards, work with the community supported agriculture and do many more things here at the garden.

And one thing that I strongly believe in is that food is medicine.

And I see that strongly practiced here at Urban Farming Institute.

So that's one of the reasons why I keep coming here.

I also am a master's student with NSU and we bring in other research students from NSU to different environmental programs here, we're going to be starting up an orchid project and then we're also doing Oyster Project, which is part of my master's program with NSU without UFI and the property and infrastructure we have available be difficult for research students to start the process because it's very time consuming to collect all the materials and equipment.

And this allows for us to have a nice space to conduct that research.

One of the important projects that we have here is the kids garden.

And we realize that if we don't get kids with an understanding at an early age, they're never gonna get it.

So we involved not only the child, but also the parent.

And so it's an 11-week program, it started with art, art in the garden.

And you can see some of the art on the domes, today is going to be the activities, the shapes of nature and how they relate to what goes on in the garden.

I was so drawn to this place, I walked through the magic door, so to speak, as John would call it.

And the Urban Farming Institute means so much to me as a mother.

I'm really looking forward to learning more about nutrition, especially for my children.

And so that's one of the reasons why I come here all the time, because I wanna learn how to grow nutritious food for my family.

Now, as people come in here, they really learn about how to reduce their footprint.

And that is so important these days because we know our climate is changing and it's really important for people to learn how easy it is to make small changes in their everyday life from growing nutritious food, from using the right things in their garden so it doesn't harm our environment and in our ocean and in those small changes can have a really big impact.

So we start locally with our community, but we have wide ranging impacts globally.

We want to branch out, we want to be able to take what we do here and move it into backyards so that people have, though they may never come here, they still have the resources available to them that we practice and develop here at the Urban Farming Institute.

To have a sustainable diet means to eat foods that have low environmental impacts that are healthy and contribute to food security.

Karin Mariposa director and founder of Miami Seed Share has distributed seeds freely to the community since 2019.

Every month she teaches a variety of workshops on stem cutting, medicinal plants and heirloom garden seeds.

She forages for all the seeds she distributes and works with schools, public parks and libraries to ensure that everyone has free access to the seeds, plants, and knowledge to live sustainably.

Here in Florida, we can grow plants year round.

So it's not even just the spring and summer we can feed ourselves.

There's something you can grow on your yard to eat to add to your diet year round, food is expensive.

Humans are the only creatures that go out and buy their food.

And Miami Seed Share wants to give them the seeds, the plants, and the knowledge to do it for themselves.

I'm Corinne Mariposa.

I am the director and founder of Miami Seed Share.

We distribute seeds freely to the community.

We have distributed over 20,000 packs of seeds in the last three years.

It's our mission to let people grow plants for free to share them year round and take the guesswork out of what should I be sewing at what times of year.

We share these seeds freely because they are life.

Life shouldn't be sold.

It is a part of your ecosystem that you should share.

Miami Seed Share is here to make sure you can get those seeds to make it more available.

You don't have to know someone who's growing it, you don't have to know when the seed is viable and ready to collect.

We go ahead and take care of that.

And then we offer you workshops and we do propagation workshops with seeds and stem cuttings.

We also do air layering workshops.

We do medicinal plant walks and tincture making classes.

We do butterfly garden workshops.

We like to do nature games.

So I'll write rhyming clues and you'll go to a botanical garden and follow them around.

Welcome to Garden Day 2022 everybody.

We've got, garden day, it's a start of the the heirloom garden season.

We distribute garden heirloom edible plants.

That way, we can cultivate Miami's own garden plants here in Miami over generations.

Today we were sharing arugula, Mizuna, Florida speckled butter beans, a variety of eggplant.

For the bees and the butterflies, we've got a huge variety of flowers from native tickseed.

We've got galadia, so Miami Seed Share is for people, plants and pollinators.

We're up for collaborations with public libraries for any events they want to do or garden buildings, public schools, other non-profit organizations.

We've got seed spots all around town and always looking to open new ones.

Currently we have a seed spot at Broccoli Memorial Library at Miami Shores, at Miami Beach Botanical Garden on South Beach.

We also work with the schools.

So every year, 20 to 30 teachers.

I give them plants and seeds for their school.

I will go to schools to help them scout their garden location.

Well, I've loved seeds my whole life.

I've always collected and shared them.

Growing up in the south for a trans girl, it wasn't super easy.

When I got here, I was able to share my knowledge on a level that wasn't really possible in Virginia or North Carolina.

It's really important to me to be zero waste and zero carbon in that Miami Seed Share and the good work that we do isn't doing harm in another way.

It is a big job to supply seeds to all of Miami.

I'll bike 8,000 miles a year for Miami Seed Share, collecting seeds on workshops all over town.

It is a little bit extreme perhaps.

I personally don't have a zero carbon footprint, but Miami Seed Share does.

I really want people to come and learn and to come and get their seeds.

So please just contact us when you're ready to grow.

Come to a plant propagation workshop.

Sew some seeds with us.

Let us learn about what your growing conditions are and we can recommend plants for you to grow.

For local educator and nature advocate, Anuela Alexander, Gardening is in her blood.

Born from a Haitian family rooted in farming, Anuela is now cultivating a community of future gardeners through her organization, A Green Community in Palm Beach County.

Here in South Florida, PBS intern reporter Annalise Iraola, with more.

Growing your own garden from the ground up, might seem intimidating even as an adult, but one local educator and nature advocate is proving anyone can do it.

Today we're catching up with Enola Alexander at Rohi Reary, where she teaches gardening to young children every month.

My name is Anuella Alexandre and I am the founder of A Green Community.

We offer services to schools and private businesses like this, community centers.

The services that we offer are our workshops where I connect children to nature.

I am from a tiny, tiny little village in Haiti.

I come from a family of farming on both my father's side and my mother's side.

And they are still there farming to this day.

So that love of nature, I think was nourished from a really, really young age.

And I carry that with me throughout the time that I came here.

The program that I teach is really to encourage them to be curious really, about where food comes from, about planting their own things at home, learning from the land.

I think people see plants grow and they think that's all it is.

But really there's so much more to it.

You know, you can learn math in the garden, you can learn science in the garden, you can read in the garden, you can learn to be cooperative and work together in the garden.

And we incorporate all of that in our garden science program.

I have a lot of my workshops here at Rohi's Reatery.

I've really lost count.

I think one of the most important things about my work is liberating young minds, to feel empowered and to take their nutrition and to really just see nature in a new light.

And I think Rohi does that in a different way here in the community.

She liberates folks to experience knowledge and learning in a new way.

It's revolutionary and in a way something about my work is very revolutionary.

What sparked this relationship was really trying to ensure that we are creating opportunities for our babies to see themselves, specifically with historically marginalized communities.

I think one of the greatest impacts is seeing that her classes really do bring that sense of freedom to know that you have the power to connect with this work too.

When we know that nature in a green community is really all about those original ties to Mother Earth.

And so, being able to show that everyone can have accessibility to this is really powerful.

So welcome to my workshop.

This particular workshop is called Green Making.

The workshops that I have here are called Creative Gardening Workshops.

The specific workshop that I'm teaching today is a pressed flower wreath workshop where we have pressed dried flowers that the children will then make into a wreath that they can either keep for themselves or gift to someone special in their lives.

I love to encourage that they gift nature to someone to spark the curiosity amongst their friends and their families.

We've been coming to Rohi's Readery for about a year and we come to the Green Goddess classes for the same reason we come to all the classes at Rohi's Readery loving adults who are experts in their field and enthusiastic about connecting children over our topics they care about.

We are also nature-based homeschoolers.

So the Green Community classes are really important for our curriculum.

We also are learning about pollinators because we're working with flowers, I feel like they just go hand in hand.

You can't really talk about flowers without talking about pollinators.

That's usually how my workshops work.

There's a learning component and then there's a DIY component where we make something tangible.

The best part about the classes is how they reverberate through even weeks after, how we go back to the concepts we've learned or we go back to projects we've done and do them again and expand on them.

They really become a part of whatever we're doing going forward.

That's what I really like about it.

Always touches off something that ends up staying with us.

You know, there isn't that accessibility to gardening all the time, or there are smaller city gardens, but it's hard to even find those spaces, oftentimes.

She is providing this understanding of knowing that it can literally be within your house, it can be within your heart, it can be within like steps away from you.

It's just a matter of tapping into that, that green space.

For children, it's really important to do something that is creative.

We wanna make things, we wanna create something out of nothing.

I think that's why it's so magical when a child can see a seed turn into something tangible.

Through her work right here in Palm Beach County.

And while is cultivating a community of future gardeners by promoting sustainability through agriculture.

Her presence on social media and her dedication to sustainable gardening will make any doubts you had about starting your own garden wilts away.

And we'll have more on all the organizations featured on today's program, on our social media at YourSouthFL.

I'm Sandra Viktorova, thank you for watching.