Strategies

Include healthy food access as an important component of local governments’ overall infrastructure and transportation planning.

Install and maintain sidewalks, metered crosswalks, and bike paths on routes that provide access to stores, hunger relief programs, farmers markets, community gardens, and other food sources.

Put bus routes near community food sources and coordinate bus schedules with those sources’ open hours.

Ensure food stores and farmers markets are located in places easily reached by bus, bike, or foot.

Create volunteer carpool networks for people who need rides to healthy food sources near where they live.

Transportation is a critical link to ensuring opportunity for all-connecting us to jobs, schools, housing, health care, and grocery stores.
– PolicyLink, 2013

Deliver healthy food grown at nearby farms to neighborhood drop-off sites.

Establish affordable food-delivery services that bring food from local stores and farmers’ markets to seniors, individuals with mobility issues, and people without transportation.

Ensure ongoing, adequate support for existing food-delivery options, such as Meals on Wheels and free or reduced cost delivery services.

State agencies offer many resources—information, grants, and partnerships—to help increase healthy food access for Minnesotans.
The Minnesota Food Charter will ensure we have healthy, affordable and safe food, building a legacy of health for future generations.

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The Minnesota Food Charter Network is supported by the Center for Prevention at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture, the Minnesota Department of Health, University of Minnesota Extension, and the General Mills Foundation. This material was funded in part by USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – SNAP – with funds received from and through the Minnesota Department of Human Services. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. The Minnesota Food Charter Network is hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute.