Designing a Model Community Food Security Collaborative in the Kāneʻohe Area
Partner organization: Maka‘alamihi Gardens
Team members: Devin Kachadoorian (Mechanical Engineering ’25), Ryan Malone (Mechanical Engineering ’25), Jeremiah Morgan (Biomedical Engineering ’25), Sahil Mirani (Mechanical Engineering ’25)
Download the team’s final presentation.
Food insecurity results from a variety of different factors such as poverty, high costs of healthcare, food, and housing. This condition occurs when individuals or households lack suitable physical, social, or economic access to sufficient and nutritious food. Food insecurity impacts millions of people around the globe. Hawai‘i is no exception, with reports indicating that 48% of families currently suffer from food insecurity in the state. Hawai‘i residents earn 15% more than those in the continental US, but food can cost 30% – 60% more than the national average, making it incredibly expensive for most residents. Additional reasons contribute to
Hawaiʻi’s issues with food insecurity. 87% of Hawaiian food is imported, making the state very susceptible to market fluctuations. Reports indicate that 26% of available food goes to waste–approximately $1.025 billion annually, or the equivalent of 502.5 billion calories making food waste a major issue in Hawaiʻi. Given the prominence of the food insecurity issue, our sponsors reached out to WPI’s Hawai‘i Project Center to propose a research project where students develop a model food security collaborative to help reduce the amount of food insecurity.
We are sponsored by Maka‘alamihi Gardens, a small public garden in the Kāneʻohe area. The gardens are located on Evensen family land dating back to 1897. The current family generation and our sponsors are Dr. Carl and Stacy Evensen. Based on the issues of both waste and access, our sponsors identified home-growers as a potential resource for reducing food insecurity in the Kāneʻohe region. Many homes in the Kāneʻohe area have home gardens with fruit-bearing trees, and if donated, unused fruit has the potential to reduce food insecurity on the island. For example, Makaʻalamihi Gardens has fruit trees that bear thousands of pounds of fruit every year. Of course, most home gardens will not have as many trees as the Makaʻalamihi Gardens, but even a small donation can go a long way in reducing food insecurity on the island. If Hawaiians dedicated around 6% of their land to agriculture and food growing, the entire population could be comfortably fed. Thus, our sponsors employ the help of a non-profit gleaning organization–Aloha Harvest–that gleans their trees for free and safely donates food to homeless shelters, churches, food banks, and more. Gleaning organizations collect excess food from grocery stores, restaurants, home-growers and more. The food is then transported directly to those affected by food insecurity. Therefore, we focused on improving the current food security model employed by Aloha Harvest to better reach out to home-growers, helping to reduce food waste and, consequently, food insecurity.
Kāneʻohe has a population of 33,540, many of whom have gardens that can be harvested to deliver food to those facing food insecurity. Thus, this project aims to develop a food security collaborative for the Kāneʻohe area. The system would work in tandem with our sponsor’s Makaʻalamihi Gardens, other home gardens in the area, and eventually throughout the island of Oʻahu. Overall, food will be collected and supplied to those with limited access. To achieve this goal, our team focused on five primary objectives:
- Determine and understand the causes and impacts of food insecurity on the global community.
- Define and understand current efforts to support food security in Makaʻalamihi Gardens and other local gardens.
- Develop a process while working with Aloha Harvest and other harvesting groups to harvest, collect, and deliver food from gardens to homeless shelters, churches, and more.
- Communicate the system structure to state representatives to popularize and extend the collaborative statewide and potentially nationwide.
- Develop and implement a seasonality chart of crops grown to support the effectiveness and efficiency of the designed process.
To achieve the first objective, we conducted secondary research on different island nations affected by food insecurity. Our research focused on island nations such as Puerto Rico, Japan, Pacific Island Countries, and Cuba. We focused our research on islands as they face similar causes of food insecurity to Hawai‘i. Therefore, understanding their techniques to combat food insecurity helps in understanding what solutions may work best for Hawai‘i. We also conducted secondary research on home gardens as a viable resource for reducing food insecurity. Using example case studies from Telangana, India, we learned how valuable home-growers can be in improving food insecurity for their friends and families–further highlighting the importance of this group to being established in a model food security collaborative.
To achieve the second and third objectives, we conducted surveys and interviews with different stakeholder groups in the current food security system. We focused on reaching out to employees of Aloha Harvest, community members who actively fight food insecurity, general community members (to get an unbiased perspective of efforts that locals believe can best suit the community), and distribution organizations. The stakeholder groups helped us understand the currently implemented solutions to fighting food insecurity. The group then shined light upon the gaps in the current system and helped us develop potential recommendations for creating an effective model food security collaborative.
To achieve the fourth objective, our sponsors scheduled a meeting with state legislators for our team to present our plans for the model food security collaborative. State legislators can help promote gleaning organizations to build rapport between organizations like Aloha Harvest and community members, making them a valuable resource in fighting food insecurity. State legislators can also garner support for combating food insecurity on a governmental level–promoting grants and increased governmental funding to reduce food insecurity.
Lastly, to achieve the fifth objective, our team conducted interviews to learn the distribution agencies’ most popular fruits to create a seasonality calendar. Home gardeners can use this seasonality chart to know when their trees are fruit-bearing, reducing food waste. Aloha Harvest can also use the seasonality chart to create an automated reminder system to reach out to home donors, informing them about the seasonality of their trees and reminding them to donate any extras.
Through our research, we learned about different potential solutions to reducing food insecurity. The secondary research from Objective 1 highlighted governmental changes that need to occur to help reduce food insecurity. Our research suggests that policies need to be placed to incentivize farmers to sell produce in local markets, helping Hawai‘i shift away from volatile import prices. These policies should also be accompanied by public workshops that teach community members how to substitute common imported foods with local produce. The secondary research for Objective 1 also showed how impactful home gardens can be in reducing food insecurity, further showing that it should be a stakeholder for our model food security collaborative.
Our interviews and surveys helped us find the gaps in the current food security system and create a model that tackles these issues. Interviewing Aloha Harvest’s Outreach, Volunteer, and Sustainability Coordinators provided insight into the issues faced by the gleaning organization. Through these interviews, we learned that communication with volunteers, marketing to home-growers, and lack of funding are the biggest issues faced by the organization.
Government funding can be very challenging to receive. Therefore, our model food security collaborative must be innovative in communicating with volunteers and marketing to community members. Our interview with the Sustainability Coordinator highlighted why the community lacks engagement from home-growers and stated that stigma against gleaning organizations prevents home-growers from reaching out. Home-growers can feel uncomfortable with strangers coming to their homes, which primarily causes the stigma. Community members also prefer giving their excess food to their friends and family, further contributing to the stigma. Thus, our marketing strategies should not only help advertise Aloha Harvest to a large group but also build trust within the community.
The marketing system can be improved to ensure that information reaches new audiences. Aloha Harvest primarily markets through “word-of-mouth,” as seen in our surveys, where 72% of respondents agree with that sentiment. If properly used, “word-of-mouth” marketing can attract the untapped stakeholder, university students. Our team interviewed many students, and we learned that community service opportunities are frequently pursued by students. Therefore, connecting the student body with Aloha Harvest can not only increase the number of volunteers in their system but also help promote the organization within the community and reduce stigma. The interviews also brought up possible connections with professors, as University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa offers “service-learning courses,” and creating
these connections can help further promote Aloha Harvest. Another marketing strategy can be using state legislator newsletters and local Hawaiian newspapers like MidWeek. In our interviews with Aloha Harvest, we learned that sending out flyers to a community can cost “ten (thousand dollars),” which is significantly higher than the cost of running an ad in the newspaper–$76.
According to our sponsors, many community members read the state legislator newsletter, so advertising Aloha Harvest through this can build rapport between the organization and Kāneʻohe residents. Lastly, decorative lawn signs and banners can be offered to home donors to build trust in the community further.
Through interviews and our team’s personal experience volunteering for a community harvest, we learned about Galaxy, the current communication system. This tedious system requires manual inputs from staff and volunteers. The communication system can be improved by using automated social media platforms such as Slack or Discord. These instant messaging systems can help coordinate between donors, home-growers, and volunteers, reducing the tedious work for Aloha Harvest’s staff and allowing them to focus on other efforts. These systems are free, thus reducing Aloha Harvest’s dependence on grants. The automated system can also be combined with the seasonality chart to remind home-growers to donate excess fruit.
Through our research, we have learned that reducing food waste directly helps in reducing food insecurity on the island. However, fruits like jackfruit are challenging to process, making them undesirable for distribution agencies. Therefore, our team recommends that Aloha Harvest implement a storage/processing center to reduce food waste further. Implementing this center can be very costly, so increased funding can greatly benefit Aloha Harvest. However, through our interviews with distribution agencies, we learned that these groups have certified commercial kitchens, which can be used to handle difficult-to-process foods. Our surveys also showed that 65% of home-growers feel their trees do not produce enough fruit; thus, these centers can also act as a drop-off point for excess fruit.
As a last recommendation, Aloha Harvest could also try using community gardens to grow fruit trees. These gardens can be used to reduce food insecurity and educate the public on ongoing services and programs that are fighting food insecurity on the island.
We then presented these findings and recommendations to state representatives, with our primary goal being to inform the legislators about ongoing efforts to fight food insecurity and possibly promote Aloha Harvest in their newsletter. The meeting had a very positive response from both the senator and the state representative, with both of them providing a multitude of various contacts to continue researching and building along the project. Additionally, the state representative expressed interest in working alongside the Evensens to expand and promote the project in the future.
Our team collected a large amount of information through our research; however, much more research can be done. We focused our research on home-growers as an untapped resource to help reduce food insecurity, but other resources, such as understanding the challenges of implementing a storage/processing center, connecting multiple organizations to Aloha Harvest’s network, and improving the marketing and communication tactics, also need to be researched.
Through our work, we created a model with many steps, and implementing each step can be very challenging and should be the focus of future project groups. The topic of food insecurity in the community constantly changes, and future teams will need to research and adjust the model accordingly to suit these changing situations.