Advancing Food Access Through Data: Inside New Jersey’s New Food System Dashboard
Accurate, centralized data improves insight and fuels action to address NJ food system challenges.
Nearly one in ten New Jersey households—around 350,000—faces food insecurity. While the impact is deeply personal, the causes are often systemic, influenced by decisions made by food banks, nonprofits, policymakers, and funders. Addressing it requires looking beyond individual experiences and examining how the state’s food and agriculture systems contribute to the issue.
The New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative (NJFDC) undertook an ambitious effort not only to explore these systems, but to invite those stakeholders to the table to collaborate on a comprehensive framing of food and agricultural issues in New Jersey. The result was a statewide process bringing together residents, food system stakeholders, and cross-sector partners to ensure lived experience and current realities were reflected in a shared understanding of the food system challenges and opportunities. The product was NJ Roadmap for Food System Resilience, a comprehensive report highlighting insights, recommendations, and priorities to address critical issues including food access and equity, climate resilience, economic justice, and sustainable food systems.
"The report highlighted both challenges stakeholders face in accessing this information, as well as how critical it is to identify needs, gaps, and opportunities for meaningful change," Sara Elnakib, PhD, MPH, RDN, of Rutgers Cooperative Extension. "One of the key opportunities for action the report produced included improving knowledge and assessment of the food system and increasing data transparency. To do that, we worked with focus groups across the food system and community organizations to identify what key data they use in their day-to-day operations to make datadriven decision making."
Elnakib, co-author of NJ Roadmap for Food System Resilience, and New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative Network Facilitation Team Member, partnered with the NJFDC to apply for a REACH grant to address this need. They set out to co-develop a solution that would improve access to critical food system data by building a tool that reflects real-world needs—focusing on the data points most relevant to day-to-day operations, resource allocation, and data-driven decision-making.
“This project was really in the works —in our minds and our plans for what we knew the New Jersey food system needed and what stakeholders needed to advance their work—for many years,” said Jeanine Cava, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative. “So when this opportunity came along to partner with Rutgers Cooperative Extension to build and materialize a food system dashboard for New Jersey, we jumped at the chance and we’re grateful to have helped co-design and co-develop this tool.”
The team worked closely with partners in Newark, Camden, and New Brunswick, gathering input from government agencies, researchers, community-based organizations, and advocates across all sectors of the food system.
“This is a clear example of a highly productive academic and community partnership that gives us great hope because the university has decided to invest dollars to keep the dashboard going and updated,” said Denise Rodgers, REACH Founding Principal Investigator. “I believe this is the kind of project that can have a very beneficial impact on food access in the state of New Jersey, as we give more community-based organizations the capacity to apply for and secure grants to more effectively address this issue.”
The New Jersey Food System Dashboard organizes information into four key areas:
Food and Nutrition Security
Agriculture and Land Use
Food System Economy
Food and Climate
Across these categories, the dashboard brings together publicly available data into a centralized, easy-to-navigate platform. Users can explore interactive visuals, compare indicators across regions, and access localized insights that were previously difficult to find or fragmented across sources. By making data more accessible and actionable, the dashboard supports organizations in identifying gaps, tracking progress, and strengthening proposals for federal and state funding.
“This website makes it much more streamlined and less time-consuming to find and share important information about projects and issues of importance to nonprofits and other community-based food access and food system organizations,” said Cava.
Launched in June 2024, the dashboard represents a significant step forward in advancing transparency and collaboration across New Jersey’s food system. Elnakib, co-author of NJ Roadmap for Food System Resilience, and New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative Network Facilitation Team Member, encourages stakeholders to “explore the food system dashboard and use it as a tool for data-driven decision-making in your organization, as well as to support the development of competitive proposals for federal and state funding.”
Congratulations to the team on this impactful achievement.
Visit the dashboard: https://njfooddashboard.rutgers.edu/
Watch the video to learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqTia6hb90
