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Abstract

Food security in the U.S. presents an enormous paradox: although we are the wealthiest country in the world, some 14.3 million U.S. households experience food insecurity annually. Food security in the U.S. has become a topic of increasing scholarly concern over the past few decades; however, there remain gaps between academic knowledge production and applied interventions to improve food security on the ground. Government and academic publications alike have called for more participatory, localized approaches that address the needs of specific communities. The present study employs a qualitative, community-based methodology to explore what residents envision as food security in their neighborhood and what this implies for potential interventions. I analyze 14 semi-structured interviews and one focus group (N=25) from the Meadows Park neighborhood in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I found residents envisioned food security as economic and physical access to healthy foods and neighborhood well-being, and I argue that the success of food security interventions hinges upon meeting this vision. In this study, I center participant perspectives to generate a resident-driven vision of food security that can inform proposed neighborhood interventions.

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