Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health

Across New Jersey, community-based organizations are doing the work that keeps residents fed, housed, resourced, and connected, often with a fraction of the staff and resources needed to sustain it. As needs grow, so does the pressure to expand services and secure the funding to do so which often depends on grant writing, a specialized, time-intensive skill few smaller organizations have the staff to dedicate to it. 

To close that gap, the Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health (REACH) funded Cara Cuite, PhD, Associate Director of Community and Student Engagement at the New Jersey Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health and Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Human Ecology, to partner with the New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative (NJFDC) on a project to build grant-writing capacity for local food organizations in Camden, New Brunswick, and Newark.  

At Rutgers Health, Joachim D. Sackey, PhD, has been working to address food insecurity among students since arriving in 2017. In the five years since the Rutgers Health Food Pantry opened, he says it has distributed 680,000 pounds of food. But food insecurity is not just about quantity, it’s also about the quality of the food provided, and Sackey wants to know what it takes to help students eat well. 

Instead of information living in remote locations, school-specific databases, personal spreadsheets, or archived websites, Collaboratory brings it into one university-wide, searchable resource that supports collaboration, storytelling and future opportunities for funding and partnership. Through in-depth documentation, mapping, and reporting it creates a shared record of community-engaged work across all chancellor-led units, giving that work greater visibility, strengthening partnerships, and supporting the expansion of community-centered initiatives.  

Pamela Rothpletz-Puglia’s REACH project, Dismantling the “Kids’ Food” Archetype, took just such an approach to the issue of ultra-processed kids’ food, which is heavily marketed in cities with low-income and minority residents. “This targeted marketing encourages diets with limited variety, which creates resistance to new food, ultimately increasing lifetime risks of obesity and chronic disease,” says Rothpletz-Puglia. 

The Hope Village Garden Club reflects a sustainable, community-based model of programming built through phased investment, cross-sector partnership, and ongoing community input. At its core, the initiative demonstrates the importance of listening to community needs and responding through collaborative, service-driven programming that can adapt and grow over time. 

Sara Elnakib, PhD, MPH, RDN, of Rutgers Cooperative Extension, 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.