County of Hawaiʻi Emergency Feeding Plan
Summary of Stakeholder Feedback
September 17, 2021
The MEFP planning team held 17 interviews with key stakeholders who perform a broad range of roles in Hawaiʻi County’s emergency feeding system. These interviews helped identify what is working well within the system as well as the gaps and challenges stakeholders feel need to be addressed in a new plan. Responses during the interviews highlighted important lessons learned from recent experiences with the Kilauea eruption and Hurricane Lane in 2018 as well as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
The planning team reviewed and analyzed the full set of interview responses and summarized key points in relation to the following driving queries:
What systems seem to be working well?
Feeding Support Organizations and Resources
Hawaiʻi Island has a strong set of networked organizations and individuals. Many people know who to call within their community during an emergency and have a genuine desire to work together. On the macro level there are already strong relationships between Hawaiʻi County Parks & Recreation, Civil Defense, Hawai’i County Research and Development, The Food Basket, The Salvation Army and the National Guard, and other community based groups to support large feeding efforts in times of crisis and the island has strong experience in responding to natural disasters.
The Food Basket is the critical hub of this network and is well-connected with a broad and diverse range of feeding and support organization partners. From the COVID pandemic, they have expanded their systems for sourcing and distributing food and increased their ability to purchase food from local sources.
The COVID pandemic has prompted many people to connect and share resources for supporting their communities. Many community and non-profit organizations have established systems to feed constituencies and through COVID have expanded and strengthened their feeding networks in several functions - procurement, aggregation, storage and distribution. These organizations are building upon existing relationships and pulling together resources to solve problems formally and informally.
Networks, both those that share single functions (i.e feeding, funding) and those that span multiple functions in a particular area (i.e. a feeding location linked with storage facilities and distributors), have formed over the course of COVID and these can be re-activated during other emergencies. Large network organizations such as Vibrant Hawaiʻi serve as a useful resource and umbrella for engaging and connecting many smaller organizations and more efficiently channelling resources.
Human and Material Resource Management
Feeding organizations have expanded their use of feeding funds to purchase food from local farmers and have now expanded their network they can pull from during times of crisis. There is a growing awareness of the need and opportunity for having food supply chains and facilities that can pivot from normal operations to emergency food distribution when needed. Organizations and community members are continuing to recognize the value of having strong partnerships with local farms, restaurants and distributors to rely upon.
Additionally, Hawaiʻi County having a Food Systems Specialist is a key strength in ensuring the pieces of the emergency feeding system stay connected, informed and share resources in the most efficient manner possible.
What are the most important gaps and challenges in the system?
Resource Management Considerations
Community Feeding Networks
Coordinating resources and efforts around the island is a challenge. There is a need to keep feeding organizations better connected and coordinated to know what organizations are providing feeding services when and where. During interviews, stakeholders mentioned challenges occurred at times when several organizations were trying to provide feeding in the same area and even at the same time. More collaboration is needed to increase efficiency and spread out resources over a longer period of time to conserve resources. Cooperation within the system can be improved by increasing capacity within the feeding organizations, to enable them to build stronger networked relationships and integrated communication and data systems.
Infrastructure
There is an ongoing need for greater access to certified commercial kitchens and storage, including dry, refrigeration and freezer storage. There are not enough facilities in the right places to effectively support emergency feeding throughout the island.
Food Safety
There are challenges in coordinating the many community-led efforts in ways that avoid the distribution of unsafe food products. There is a need for more effective ways of incorporating and integrating local community feeding efforts without causing confusion or discouraging community members from giving. Community members want to feed the community, but often cannot do so when their contributions are not prepared in a certified kitchen.
The island lacks the infrastructure and refrigerated trucks to sustain an adequate cold chain for food distribution and storage where it is needed most in times of emergency. There is a need to increase the availability of refrigerated transport and cold storage facilities throughout the island.
Kūpuna
Identifying and reaching vulnerable kūpuna is a critical component of emergency feeding, but gaps often exist in how they are identified and supported, particularly those who may not be within the Hawaii County Office of Aging system. There is a need to establish a more formal network of organizations and community members that support vulnerable kūpuna, in order to know who to contact to understand their needs and make sure they are receiving feeding support.
Animal Feeding
Livestock feeding needs to be considered as a part of any emergency feeding plan, particularly when they are displaced from their feed source in times of natural disaster such as an eruption, fire, hurricane, or other unforeseen disasters. Hog feeding that depends on food waste from restaurants, schools and hotels also needs to be addressed when their kitchens are shut down.
Pet Food: When pet owners are displaced, they often have to bring their pets to shelters and there is a need to have cat and dog food there or at other access points for displaced community members not staying in the shelters. There is a need for feeding organizations to increase their work on addressing the demand for pet food during emergencies.
In-Kind Donations
There is a need to have effective mechanisms for supporting food safety standards associated with donated food. Many community members want to offer food, but lack appropriate certifications or onsite training in maintaining cold chain and food temperature procedures.
Feeding organizations want to channel that collective community energy towards donations of acceptable food products and donations and not turn away support. There is a lack of information and awareness about how community members and organizations can help those in need around them in ways that integrate and enhance the emergency feeding system rather than interfering with it. Some stakeholders seek more effective strategies for aligning and incorporating impromptu or isolated efforts rather than discouraging them.
Volunteers
Many small organizations lack internal processes to stand up quickly and flexibly add staff during emergencies, thus they end up relying too heavily on a limited supply of volunteers. Several pantries are run by vulnerable groups themselves, mostly kūpuna, and need a more robust volunteer network with increased support from young people.
Being a volunteer with the Salvation Army or Red Cross during an emergency requires a double check process. Their training programs must be completed ahead of time. The Salvation Army rotates their volunteers every two weeks and thus needs to train new people every two weeks during an emergency.
Feeding Delivery Methods
Distribution sites need to be equitably distributed throughout the island. Distribution is not as efficient and effective as it could be due to lack of needed infrastructure, resources, communication, and coordination. There needs to be a more coordinated and efficient transportation and distribution within the system. The system cannot rely on one centralized distributor, but needs distribution to be networked and localized. There is also a lack of CDL licensed truck drivers available on-island, making distribution a challenge, especially finding independent contractors that can support localized feeding efforts.
Although a lot of progress has been made over the last three years, stakeholders would like to see a reliable system formalized for redirecting supply chains to feed communities in times of emergency. Feeding organizations found it difficult at times to know what supplies are available from local producers, aggregators and distributors and how to efficiently acquire those supplies for their feeding operations. There is a need for a coordinated procurement and delivery system available from a strategic partner in the emergency feeding system that several small organizations can utilize for emergency feeding. The Farm Bureau played a critical role in purchasing and redirecting farm products to feed organizations during the COVID-19 feeding efforts. Several community groups would like to see that program formalized to be able to stand up in future disasters that require community feeding.
Cost Recovery
There is a need for more efficient ways of coordinating and allocating funding for feeding operations. Feeding organizations need mechanisms for accessing resources that do not require such a significant investment of time involved in fundraising, including applying for grants. They also often lack the financial resources to support feeding operations until cost recovery is available. They need capital that builds capacity, resilience and also helps establish appropriate internal controls to get reimbursed with federal funding.
Information Management & Reporting
There is a lack of available data on the most vulnerable and who are reaching out to them. A critical need also exists to have systems in place for feeding groups to share data in real time to understand the needs of the community and prioritize where feeding is needed most. Organizations throughout the emergency feeding system need to collaborate more effectively in data collection, aggregation, visualization, sharing and storage.
There may be gaps in how vulnerable kūpuna are identified and tracked in times of emergency. There is a need to centralize that information and make it available to a broader network of organizations involved in feeding.
Training
There is a need for more training throughout the emergency feeding system. Feeding organizations rely heavily upon volunteers with minimal or no training and often lack resources to carry out any kind of disaster response training in anticipation of a crisis. Training support for feeding organizations and community support groups needs to be aligned and coordinated to ensure the County’s feeding networks can be aligned and coordinated during times of emergency.
There is also a need for more training for feeding organizations and their volunteer networks on all aspects of food safety from food preparation and handling to maintaining safe cold chain procedures throughout emergency feeding operations. Food handlers throughout the system need to be identified, networked and trained annually by the Department of Health to ensure food safety standards are not compromised in times of need.
What clear actions can the County and its partners take to improve emergency response protocols to ensure a rapid response in disasters that threaten community access to food?
Feeding Support Organizations & Resources
The County should establish memoranda of understanding (MOUs) internally between Civil Defense and Parks & Recreation. Externally, the County should establish MOUs with the Salvation Army and The Food Basket which would include the use of the County’s Parks & Recreation facilities for food distribution and temporary shelters. Those facilities should be maintained, updated and available for community use.
Identify how additional support can increase The Food Basket’s capabilities to support emergency feeding and enable them to hire a Food Access Coordinator to support the coordination and integration of different community feeding efforts.
Work with Vibrant Hawaiʻi and their resilience hubs to establish more certified kitchens and storage facilities available for emergency feeding operations. Look at ways of expanding their capacity to help in times of crisis to serve as localized, community coordinating centers where people can not only get food, but possibly access other support services.
Work through HIFA and other networks to do outreach and encourage community organizations to participate in the MEFP system. Create space for feeding programs to meet that enables existing and emergent organizations to consolidate and be communicated with easily. Explore new models for engaging partners that could be established as a way for procuring food from local farmers for emergency feeding and that can pool funds for access by smaller community organizations during a crisis.
Work with MEFP partners to establish a committee to work on improving logistics. Utilize more trucks and trailers that can serve as cold storage for use in moving, storing and distributing foods. Work with HFA and others to plan how best to leverage and use their equipment during emergencies.
Information Management & Reporting
Establish a MEFP group to harmonize data collection and reporting using a common and aligned set of metrics. The group should coordinate building the capacity of all organizations in the system to:
Describe and define the framework for organizing and monitoring feeding data;
Establish and maintain a feeding system network map;
Compile data on funding avenues and requirements (including eligibility, reporting requirements, etc.);
Improve impact modeling (capacity and speed);
Total affected population
Feeding infrastructure within/near impacted areas
Improve data infrastructure for need reporting;
Stoplight map
Network of key informants on vulnerable populations/regions