Just a little housekeeping before we start.

There's a sign-in sheet at the table for public comment.

We will be taking it at the end.

So if you wish to talk about this or anything else, please feel free to sign the public comment sheet on the table.

I call to order the Toledo City Council Housing and Community Development Committee meeting of Thursday, June 25th, 2026.

The purpose of this meeting is to discuss the food policy update.

Clerk, please call the roll.

Jones, Gaddis here, Kramer, Martinez, McPherson, Meldon, Williams.

One present.

Thank you.

And I'm sure the others will roll in as the meeting goes along.

So, when you're ready, if you could say your name and who you are for the record and dive right in.

Yes, thank you so much, Mayor Mominy.

I am the food policy manager for the city and here to share some updates.

So I guess I'll dive right in, presenting more so to you all, but thank you for being here, Councilmember Gaddis.

Today we are here to talk about just the need for a coordinated local effort to address food policy issues.

We know that, you know, federal food and security support systems are rapidly changing.

Grocery prices are rising due to gas prices and inflation.

We're seeing or hearing anecdotally rather that our pantry demands are going up, especially for first-time pantry visitors.

So I was hired to help with this strategy, and with the help of many community partners, we have uh kind of taken the first step in completing this food policy audit, which I'm very excited to share about today.

So we determined that we need to know how we're performing currently before we decide where we should be striving to go, where we need to go next.

Today I'll be sharing first my carrot audit findings, uh, a little bit of progress to date, and then some next steps, and be I'll be happy to field any questions that might come up from uh you or any of the audience members.

So overall, really want this to lay the foundation for building towards the food policy council, which is coming next, as well as a food action plan that ideally will ensure all Toledoans have the food that they need to be well.

Um, so I'll dive right in.

Uh I didn't know coming into this position that there are several ways to do a food policy audit, but there are.

So in doing research, came across the carrot tool and determined that this was the best way forward.

Uh Carrot stands for community and agricultural resilience audit tool, and it was developed by a very uh robust team of researchers, extension agents across the country, kind of spearheaded by the North American Food Systems Network.

So overall, CARET allows your community to develop a baseline, shared language, shared metrics to measure food systems strength and um, you know, chances of being able to weather a crisis or whatnot.

So uh I really liked that it emphasizes a team approach.

So the more contributors you have in the process of doing the audit, the stronger your outcome will be.

I actually had the chance of working with an awesome team, some of which are here today.

Uh Amy Ebodili from the Health Department, Caleb Brown from the Ebide Center, and Jill Bungie from United Way.

So they really helped me tackle this whole process, which was no small undertaking.

We kind of developed five themes that were important to our stakeholders.

So everything from public participation in the policy process to growing the food, distributing it, customers accessing it all the way to food waste, and all of those themes map very nicely onto the care audit tool itself.

So a little bit more about the tool.

It has 101 indicator questions across seven themes.

Themes from natural resource management, looking at are we taking care of our soil and are we preserving farmland, all the way to community health and well-being that looks at social determinants of health questions, all the way to food sovereignty and distributive and democratic leadership.

So is your, well, first of all, do you have a food policy council?

Is that council representative of your community and all the sectors within the food system?

So I mentioned my team.

We did uh have the opportunity of applying and getting accepted into the national cohort that was conducting this audit together.

So Toledo is one of 12 communities across the United States going through this process as a group, and that was just awesome for peer-to-peer learning, hearing what they're doing, you know, in other states to collect the data.

So we actually went for a mixed methods approach, which I think is probably the only way to do this.

We started with a deep dive into the research to see what we could gather as a team first, and then we dove into one-on-one interviews with uh kind of like topical experts, people in the field doing doing a lot of this work.

Uh we had one-off calls and emails, and even conducted a few focus groups with um we then let us present to the Sustainability Commission, we went to the junction coalition, we uh presented to the Eat Fresh Live Well Committee that's hosted by the Health Department and Amy, and we also formed if you remember the March farmer gathering that we had a couple months back.

We really were intentional about forming that to fill in gaps with a lot of farmer input.

So overall, we had 43 contributors, individuals who were interviewed or you know, called, emailed, plus those four focus groups.

And if I had to estimate just the numbers of all of those groups, I would say about 100 people probably touched the audit in some way or another.

So thank you to everybody who did contribute, and thank you to Chief Clemens and Deputy Director Ali for just all of their guidance along the way.

So a little bit about the scoring key.

So 101 indicators, all of the indicators were worded in a way that said, do you have a program policy or practice related to XYZ?

And so we came up with a scoring metric where three means yes, a program policy practice exists, it's implemented and it's enforced.

Two means something exists, but there are gaps in coverage and/or funding.

One points to there's an early stage initiative just emerging, and zero means no efforts are happening.

So overall, we gave our team a score for Toledo at 53%.

So 160 points out of a total of 303 possible points.

So I think this is positive.

I think it points to all of the amazing work happening in the community, but just huge opportunity to grow and get better in each of these seven themes.

So some high scores were across themes three and seven, which I'll say there's a lot of overlap between these themes.