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Cincinnati Uses Data-Mapping to Tackle Food Insecurity

Motivated by the steady rise in the region's 'food deserts,' the government in Cincinnati, US, used data-mapping tools to help feed more than 76,000 food-insecure children living in 20 counties in the Cincinnati Tristate area. 

Councilman Greg Landsman, Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and local school district partnered with data science company 84.51° to collect data and identify pockets where food needed to be provided. This helped Kroger, an American retail company, on many food data-related initiatives in the area. 

The company helped identify and deliver emergency provisions at locations convenient to food-insecure families with children through its Growing Beyond Hunger Initiative and Local Freestore Foodbank.

84.51 °'s goal was to ensure that no child walked more than a mile to get to a food distribution site, a metric used by the Atlanta Community Food Bank. They used Esri's software to view the number of impoverished children and overlaid it with the 24 Cincinnati Public Schools. This ensures easy access for food-insecure families.

The goal of the food distribution program is to reduce the gap between the number of meals a neighborhood needs and the number of meals it receives. Currently, they plan to test this in Avondale, Lower Price Hill, and East Price Hill neighborhoods and then eventually scale the program to the whole city. 

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