Welcome back to this weekly meeting of the Health and Safety Committee with Denver City Council.

Coverage of the Health and Safety Committee starts now.

Good morning.

Today's August 26th.

This is the Health and Safety Committee meeting.

My name is Daryl Watson.

I'm honored to be the chair of this committee as well as a city council member representing all of the fine district nine.

We have one briefing this morning, Healthy Food for Denver Kids Annual Update.

But before we go to the presentation, why don't we turn it over to City Council members for brief introductions with start on our right?

Good morning, Amanda Sanovan, Northwest Denver District 1.

Good morning, Paul Cashman, South Denver District 6.

Forest, West Denver District 3.

And it looks like we've got some city council members online.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you.

And is President Romero Campbell on online as well?

I see at this time.

Well, with that, um, very excited to turn it over to uh Lauren Howe and Amber Stenson from our DDPH department uh to introduce themselves and uh their guests at the table and turn over to presentation.

Well, before we do that, we have another council member right on time.

Good morning, Flora Midris with Lucky District 7.

Thanks, Councilwoman Albivaris.

So now I'll turn it over to uh Lauren and um Amber to introduce yourselves and guests at your table.

And if there are folks in the audience that you'd like folks to know better here.

Um I'll turn it over for your presentation.

Excellent.

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

Lauren Howe, she, her pronouns, Healthy Food for Denver's Kids Program Supervisor out of the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment.

I'll pass it over to Amber.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Amber Stenson.

I'm the grants administrator at Denver Department of Public Health and Environment.

She or her pronouns.

Nice to be here with you all today.

Uh Jason Torres, uh the executive director of the Denver Inner City Parish.

Morning.

Do you want to introduce any of your other friends in the audience?

We have our team, um, Genesis Crump, Jess Murrison, Michaela Mullins, and Emma Welty, who are all on the Healthy Food for Denver's kids team at DDPAG.

Well, thank you all for being here, and I want to welcome President uh Romero Campbell, and then the floor is yours.

Excellent, thank you.

Um, so we like to start our DDPHE presentations um by grounding everyone in our departmental public health framework.

Um, we know that healthy food access and food security are in and of themselves social determinants of health, um, but they're also very collected to uh connected to other social determinants of health as well, including economic stability, education, health care, built environment, and community context.

Um, this work also fits squarely within DDBH's community health assessment work in the area of systemic racism, as well as various other departmental priorities.

Um, and we know the public health impacts of food security better mental, physical, and community health.

So, this is an overview of what we're gonna be touching uh on during today's annual briefing.

Um, we're gonna give a quick uh recap of the current state of food insecurity in Denver before jumping into more background on the Healthy Food for Denver's kids or HFDK program and commission.

Um, we'll share a bit about the impact and overview of the funding.

Um, we have a grantee spotlight, we have uh partners here from Denver Inner City Parish joining us to share a couple of minutes about what this work looks like in their community before I pass it over to Amber to talk about our seventh annual funding opportunity application process and contracts.

We'll touch on financials and then briefly close out with some information on sunset.

So, in terms of food insecurity in Denver, uh in 2025, DDPHE ran a survey that reached over 3,000 Denverites across all 11 city council districts, and it asked folks in the last year did you or someone in your family have to cut the size of or skip a meal due to not having enough money for food.

Uh those results showed that more than one in three, uh about 35% of Denverites said yes to that question and are food insecure.

That includes about one in five children having meals cut or skipped, and 68% of all survey respondents said food is too expensive as the number one barrier.

We know that food insecurity is likely to continue to rise due to inflation, um, federal changes to SNAP and Medicaid, and overall decreases in funding available for food access work.

And we know that this is an issue not only locally but nationally, and our city really has an opportunity to leave in this area.

We know that healthy food is essential for all to thrive, and food insecurity is a clear indicator of our city's affordability crisis.

Survey results from last year's data indicated that families are having to make tough economic trade-offs to afford food.

So they are cutting paying for utilities, health care, transportation, or housing costs.

And these trade-offs are having ripple effects on other areas.

We know skipping medication can lead to worse health outcomes, and skipping rent might lead to housing instability.

I wanted to share one quotation from our community partner, Kaizen Food Rescue, that hunger is rarely caused by lack of food alone.