I always have flashbacks to Wayne's world whenever we do that. So hello everybody, it is wonderful to see all of you this afternoon. We are here as the Health and Human Services Committee. I am joined by my colleagues, Council Member Sales and Lutki and we are here to get an update on the Office of Food System Resilience's Strategic Plan to Encholved Hunger. I have to say that I have been singing your all's praises. We all have. Many of us had the opportunity to attend the exciting event in partnership with Instacart, which is just another example of some really terrific progress that we are making. We know that we were not able to fund everything we wanted to fund in this year's operating budget, but that is not because we don't think the work is important or that this is a priority. We just had a lot of competing interests in our school system understandably came in with a very big request again this year. So but we will continue to do our best to make sure you all have the resources that you need. But we look forward to receiving today's update just a quick housekeeping note. Councilor Lutke has to leave around three o'clock to attend to a family matter. But since this is just a briefing, if we're not done by then, we can continue. And she's got her team here, and this is all videotaped. So she will be able to follow up on anything that she misses. So with that, Ms. Clemens Johnson, I will turn it over to you to tee this up at a high level and then we will turn it over to Miss Bruskin. Thank you and good afternoon chair and members of the committee. As you noted, this is an update on the Office of Food System Resilience and the Strategic Plant in Childhood Hunger. I want to thank Heather Gruskin and her staff for providing the information and detail for the packet. I will let her talk about the updates, but I did want to highlight that DHHS provided an update on the service consolidation hubs, including performance data for FY 24. So this work session is largely about the OFSR, but I thought it would be helpful for us to include information about the hubs, being that they are a large food provider in our county. So if there is any question specifically about the hubs, I can address that or take it back to HHS. And with that I will finish up. Thank you. Thank you. Ms. Preskin. Well, good afternoon. Thank you all so much for the opportunity to be here with you today and for your partnership in this important work. I'm Heather Preskin, the director of the Office of Food Systems Resilience. and we're going to take an opportunity to share some of the highlights of the past year's worth of work that our team has undertaken, as well as share updates from the initiatives funded through the special appropriation in the very end of last year. And so, I guess we'll get started. It's a little legislative mandate. Thank you. So even though we have recapped the legislative mandates of our office previously, I thought it would be helpful to start with these just as a reminder of what we are created and established to achieve. And it is a robust list of responsibilities. And first and foremost, it's connecting all of the county's agencies and efforts related to food, but also making sure that they're aligned with the work of our community. And that includes initiatives like strategic planning, data collection analysis on both issues as well as the impact of our strategies to address those issues, and being an active partner in food systems networks throughout the region and beyond. And so I think we can say that we have a lot to be proud of and we have been actively pursuing all of these mandates and that's due in large part to our incredible team and you'll get to hear from both Juan and Catherine in a bit as well as Deanna Tatóonic Tashu is not with us today but it's a it's a small team that works incredibly hard in partnership with many many agency and community partners. So I think this is a collective impact that we're highlighting today. Also, I want to take a moment to recap our priorities, which we've had the chance to highlight for council previously. But you'll see that all of these are reflected in the initiatives of our office, as well as how we implement our legislative mandates. So we strive to invest in initiatives that deeply connect with broader priorities in our community, but we're also making sure to regularly evaluate the issues and the effectiveness of our strategies. We know that there's limited local financial resources to work on food system resilience and so we need to maximize funding from a wide variety of other sources and then ultimately make sure that we're building a stronger food system to be resilient, not just in blue sky times but also in future crises and so that is the entire life cycle of food from production to protecting our natural resources. The landscape within which we do our work is also constantly shifting, and a lot of these are due to factors beyond our control. And so that requires that our work is both aware of the environment around us and constantly adapting to these shifts. And so the challenges that we're seeing currently in Montgomery County are reflected in communities nationwide. In particular, trend is that food insecurity is on the rise, and that's particularly likely among families with middle incomes. And so that is illustrated both in a recent USDA report that was released a couple of weeks ago, where food insecurity has increased nationally to 13.5% over the previous year, which had been arise from the year before that. And the Capital Area Food Bank also just released their hunger report, which highlights an estimated 34% for food insecurity levels in Montgomery County. And again, those increases are most sharp in households that are living in the self-sufficiency gap. There are some good news that's coming from federal programs. We're finding that the change in the federal landscape of resources is really what's driving these increases in food insecurity. So change is like the child tax credit, the SNAP emergency allotments and universal meals. But there is a new program called Sunbucks and that was launched by the USDA this spring. And this takes the place of the pandemic EBT program and we also had a summer SNAP program in Maryland in previous years, even before the pandemic. But this new Sunbucks program, which Maryland chose to activate, and we were very excited to see how that brings $40 per month, per school-aged child, so it does not support children who are pre-school-aged or younger, but it gives them ultimately $120 during the summer to make purchases on an EBT card that's administered just like SNAP, so they can go to retailers and spend those dollars but the cost of the state is the same in administering this program as it have been in the previous iterations of summer funding for families with children but the cost of the county is now zero where previously we had been required to make investments for the operation of that program. But the impact is 10 times greater. And so in previous summer SNAP programs, it had been about 9.5 million in funds that were administered. And this is statewide. The county data is not yet available. This past summer it was $71 million. And so when you think about the scale of federal investments locally, it really underscores when those shifts, how difficult it is for us locally to close those gaps. An unfortunate development is that the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program received fewer dollars at a federal level. For this year, last year, two schools and MCPS had been allocated funds. This year, unfortunately, no schools and MCPS will get to participate in that program. That's administered by MSDE, but that's based on the amount of money that they get from the federal government. And then closing the updates on good news. Just last week, the U.S. EPA announced $117 million and new grants that are available to advance recycling infrastructure and prevent wasted food. So we're looking forward to digging into those releases to see where there might be some funds that we can potentially connect to our work here. So this slide is probably familiar. We've had the chance to present this strategic framework to council a number of times previously. It's an annualized structure that both maintains our solid foundation of regular food assistance services in the community while layering on top of that new specialized programs that meet the unique needs of specific populations and harness unique opportunities as well. So I'm pleased to share that we've successfully navigated through the first third, so the first year of this framework. It's due, as I shared previously, in large part to the dedication of our team. It is a challenging level of effort that has been required, and I'll note that our FY25 budget reflected a 33% increase in personnel and a 1,754% increase in operating funds. So it has been a significant shift for us that has long-term considerations. But we now find ourselves in the second phase where the focus is really on establishing the contracts. There were 20 contracts that were shifted from HHS over to our office, phasing into a grant-based allocation process for staples funds and supporting food assistance providers, and evaluating and refining our FY24 grant programs for reissue this year. So today we'll get to walk through the highlights of each of these layers and talk about what this will look like in FY26 as well. As highlighted, our interagency collaboration is a key piece of our mandates. And to achieve that goal, we have been convening both virtually and in person a wide range of agencies and partners over the past 10 months. We've met eight times with the goal of increasing the visibility of food-related issues and opportunities across Montgomery County government, building cross-sector relationships to make sure that our food system work is really guided by a wide range of perspectives and areas of expertise, and also build awareness among agencies what food-related work may be happening even under their own umbrella and then working together to develop an emergency food system response plan that will guide our collective work in crises to come. 34 different agencies and so this does include partners from other public institutions like MCPS and park and planning. We regularly have guest presenters to give our agency partners a chance to showcase the work that they're doing across other agencies. Also get to highlight the challenges and opportunities related to federal funds and how that impacts our local work and work together to establish a variety of landscape analyses on risks as well as opportunities. And so a couple examples of the work are in the next two slides. The first is we've conducted a comprehensive food data landscape where the food data that is housed within each of the agencies has been identified so that we can make sure that that's built into our program planning as well as our evaluation of our overall health of our food system. And we also have conducted a food policy landscape. So that's big P and little P policy really looking at what are the commitments that we as a county have made related to food system investments in this ranges on and everything from economic development to agriculture and food production as well as climate change and land use. So this is a very solid foundation to inform the commitments that we've made and make sure our future work is aligned with them. So this collaborative work even beyond the inter- agency meetings is really where I think some of the most meaningful work happens related to food and our partnerships. So a great example of that is the new Good Food Purchasing Program partnership that our office has with the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the Department of Environmental Protection. So this is the Good Food Purchasing Program. It's a national initiative that conducts a comprehensive analysis of a public institution's food purchasing and food services operations across a wide range of values. And then in the end of this analysis, you get a summary report that provides recommendations on where enhancements can be made on everything from labor to sustainability and animal welfare. So I think there's a lot of different considerations that we'll have information on at the end of this partnership and we're incredibly grateful to DOCR for their proactive engagement in this work and their're strong desire to really take a look at the work that they're doing in fine ways to grow. DEP is providing the funding for this work and actively engaging in the work too. So I think it's a great partnership that hopefully can lay some foundations for other agencies to participate. We also have monthly meetings with a lot of the agencies that are listed here so that we can make sure that we're reducing redundancies and agency operations. We're doing creative brainstorming, having better communication and just making sure that one hand of the county knows what the other one is doing across all these different areas that are often cross cutting. We also had the chance to partner with agencies at the state and federal level on a regular basis, including an upcoming co-hosted event, looking at challenges in kosher and Hullol food access in our community with the USDA's Office of Community and Neighborhood Partnerships. And we're also working with Office of Community Partnerships in looking at faith community space in terms of commercial kitchen space within our own county. And then finally, as we talk about our grant programs, I think it's important to recognize that we've had 21 reviewers from seven different agency who volunteered and shared their time as reviewers. So we're making sure that they're both aware of the initiatives that are happening in our community, but also their unique perspectives are informing the decisions that our county is making related to investments. And then just a couple pictures here of what our work looks like beyond county borders. We spend a significant amount of time working both formally and informally at collaboratives and committees at the state, regional, and federal levels, as well as doing conference presentations at a variety of settings to showcase the unique work that's happening here in the county, highlight our successes, and also learn best practices to make sure that we can connect what's working in other jurisdictions and replicate them here. That also recognizes the fact that the issues that we're working on are generally not going to be solved exclusively within our borders. And it allows us to facilitate collaboration and coordination with other agencies so that we can leverage unique resources. And also make sure that Montgomery County is an active partner in implementing those solutions. So as Heather mentioned, collaboration with Montgomery County Public Schools has been essential to the success of the new programs aligned with the strategic plan to end childhood hunger. The most obvious example of that is our school-based Food Assistance Grant Program. This program aligns with two recommendations of the Strategic Plan within the School and Child Care Adjacent sections, specifically the Community School Food Distributions and Pantry's recommendation and the expansion of Weekend Bad Programs. Through this program, we are supporting organizations that co-locate food assistance services at MCPS sites, which increases the accessibility of food resources to families and mitigates the transportation barriers that often accompany food insecurity. We developed a survey in tandem with the MCPS offices of student services and student and family support and engagement that was distributed both for the FY 24 program and FY 25 program to all MCPS school sites to identify food assistance needs of each school community. Simultaneously we launched a grant program to solicit applications from community-based food assistance providers that had experience with school-based food access programs. And we made awards based on the ability of applicants to meet school needs as communicated through that survey. We're now in our second round of this grant program, and to date, we've awarded over $1.7 million to 12 unique organizations, supporting more than 60 total MCPS school sites in the 2023 to 2024 school year, and this coming school year through 2025. We are seeing a continuing trend that the value of services requested by schools and the amount of funds requested by applicants as far outpacing the available grant funds. We've received data and feedback from FY24, School Based Food Assistance Grant Program awardees that helps to contextualize the impact of this funding. There are constant shifts, as Heather mentioned, in food assistance support outside of this grant program, and also in school based food programming due to organizational capacity, staff capacity at the school, or the needs of the community. This program is helping to fill the gaps in an efficient, dignified way, with flexibility for students and family to access foods that they enjoy and that are familiar to them. Here's a snapshot of the FY24 School-based Food Assistance Grant Program. We received applications from 10 organizations and responses to the survey I mentioned earlier from more than 100 schools. 53 of those schools indicated a need for food assistance services on-site. And with the available funding, we were able to award eight organizations with approximately $480,000 total in grants and connected the successful grantees with 40 school sites. Close to 14,000 students were served over the course of the FY24 program, more than 1,400 children under the age of five were served, and over 11,000 total households received food through this initiative. About a third of the food distributed to families was sourced directly from county-based farms. We are now in the final stages of executing grant agreements for the FY25 iteration of this grant program, which was launched in July, and we are starting to send out finalized agreements to organizations this week. We received 13 applications totaling more than $2.4 million in funding requests. 62 schools requested food assistance services through the survey and the value of services requested by those schools was approximately $2,744,000. We've awarded 11 organizations that are going to support 61 total MCPS sites, leveraging $1.25 million from our program's budget. And we've been working closely with all of the involved partners, both schools and organizations, to have services up and running within the next several weeks. The services will continue through the end of the school year as the program period goes through June 30th of 2025. The strategic plan also outlines strategies to address youth and family health challenges that sit at the root of food insecurity. And we are collaborating with the local health care sector to initiate innovative food is medicine programming across the county. The Food as Medicine grant program launched in April of this year to increase access to culturally relevant nutrient dense food for children and families experiencing food insecurity, who are also accessing pediatric health care services at clinics and health centers throughout the county. Similar to the school-based program, this initiative promotes convenience, choice, and efficiency for families that have to contend with time and transportation barriers that impact food access. The interventions offered by the funded organizations through this program range from co-located food distributions at the health care site, home deliveries of fresh produce, or even stipends to shop from local farmers at the Crossroads Farmers Market. Nearly $450,000 in grant funds were distributed through the initial round of this grant program, supporting two hospital systems, one healthcare clinic, and two food assistance providers that are working with four school-based health and wellness centers. Numerous county farmers are also engaged through the Food as Medicine program. We just passed the midpoint of the grant performance period and the data reported by Grantees indicates that 1182 children were screened for food insecurity, coming from just over 300 total households. 421 of the children that screened positive are receiving regular food assistance and 214 households are participating in nutrition and food education programs offered by the grantees. More than 90% of the food provided to participants in this program is locally sourced. And so this is all a big investment of resources and again much appreciation to Council for your partnership in making that work possible. We also know that with limited resources we need to stretch these dollars as far as we can. And so the priority of other programs is to see what we can do to leverage both federal as well as private sector funds. And so a couple examples of that from the past year are cold storage infrastructure grants. There have been $200,000 and the OFSR budget to make investments in farms, food businesses, and non-profit sector partners to have cold storage. And we ultimately were able to award $352,000 because we had almost a million dollars in requests through partnership with the Morningstar Foundation. And so they had very generously stepped in and asked if there were opportunities to partner to support a greater number of the applicants. And so I think this is a really good example of how grant programs can be foothold for partnerships with the private sector where you can collaborate to leverage additional resources with the same amount of staff investment and administrative work. We also want to showcase a partnership that is primarily shepherded by the Food Council and the Office of Agriculture, bringing cold storage to the Ag History Farm Park. There was a $39,000 grant that was awarded a couple of years ago to the food council through the food for Montgomery Greater Washington Community Foundation, funds coming from Washington Gas to invest a cold storage facility that will probably hold up to 300,000 pounds of produce every year, potentially valued at close to a million dollars. And this commercial grade walk-in cold storage has is now officially in place at the Egg History Farm Park. And there are there is I believe a celebration coming up to showcase the impact of this new cold storage opportunity to be shared amongst the agricultural producers and potentially even to look into its co-located uses with a commercial kitchen that's at that Hagg History Farm Park. And so I think it's a perfect example of an investment made in a nonprofit partner that is lifting up our entire community and that agencies can be helpful in making sure that resource is stewarded as effectively as possible. So. And then finally, the Maryland Market Money Program, the county significantly invested our expanded our investment in this program during the pandemic. So this is a matching double double dollars program just like at Crossroads Farmers Market where this program began and just yesterday they announced their one millionth fresh check. So that means over two million dollars that has been invested and purchases at that market. And so by making investments in Maryland market money, we are able to leverage an existing state program that provides the mechanism and the staffing support. But they take the dollars that we invest in a contract through our office to support seven different markets. And over 6,000 purchases have been made with that Maryland market money and that is doubling the federal dollars that supporting them these residents through Snap, WIC and the Farmers Market Nutrition Program. Also want to showcase the impact of efforts to increase enrollment in SnapAP by county residents. We had the opportunity to award five of our community benefit organizations, our community based organizations that are designated as such by the state of Maryland. And so we awarded just over $200,000 to these organizations for a year-long grant period, where we hope that that $200,000 that's invested in supporting their work in outreach and enrollment in SNAP will expand into $1.5 million in new benefits that are federally funded to over a thousand households, potentially, ultimately investing over $2.5 million in our local economy because it's estimated that every dollar in SNAP that it supports a dollar of $79 in local economic activity. So this grant program is not quite halfway through. It's its cycle, but we are already looking at other ways to build on top of these relationships to also connect residents with other resources beyond SNAP participation as well. We've also had the opportunity to highlight the MC Groceries program through the launch event last year, but this is the Retail Food Access program that was funded through the Special Appropriation last year. We know that we have many residents who for a variety of reasons are not able to receive federal benefits like SNAP. Most often it's because they are falling in the SNAP gap. So these are working households that make too much to qualify for benefits like SNAP, but don't make nearly enough to cover their entire cost of living. And so we worked with the Department of Health and Human Services to identify 2,000 households that met the criteria for participation. So that's their household income is at or below 400% of the federal poverty level, which is based on the self-sufficiency standard for a family of four in our county. They have at least one child age 0 to 18. They don't have an active SNAP case and they are connected in some way to an income-qualified DHHS program. So we worked with Child and Adolescent School and Community-Based Services, team as well as the Navigation Team and the DHHS Planning Accountability and Customer Service team to reach out to these families and get them enrolled in this program, which is building on the Fresh Funds platform, which is unique to Instacart. And it allows these residents to spend up to $100 per child per month, capped out at $400 per month, to shop at the retail provider of their choice, and have that either picked up or delivered at their home so that they can get at the time and transportation barriers that households with children experience. We did do a pre-survey of participants to get a better understanding of who's being supported through this program and we found that these are working families and again this confirms the data that's been released recently that its middle income households that are really struggling to put food on the table in our county. So 94% of the participants are either employed or actively looking for jobs. And 87% of them were actively experiencing food insecurity at the time of their enrollment in the program. I also want to note that we get a list of every single item that's purchased through this program and we can both conduct careful data analysis, building on FONs, talents to identify that fresh foods and vegetables are the top two food purchases made through this program. Those are often the most expensive items and our families know that that's what they want to feed their children, but those are cost prohibited. And so those are the purchases that they're making. And when you look at the total list, it looks just like mine as a mom doing grocery shopping. It's protein, it's milk, it's meat and fresh fruits and vegetables. And I think it underscores how critical it is to help these families not have to decide between paying their rent or feeding their family. This is also just a little snapshot of what the Fresh Funds platform looks like. So there are items that are marked as eligible for purchases through MC groceries right on the platform. It's clearly labeled and it's a wide variety of foods and beverages. And there are 20 different retail banners representing over 80 stores in Montgomery County that they can choose from. And in just the first two months, $150,000 in purchases were made over 1,400 transactions. And so this does represent the largest Instacart Health partnership with a government partner today, and we're very excited to take it into its next phase to see how we can potentially reach more families and take a deeper look at the data that we're able to pull in through the program. I want to take just a moment to showcase one of the 20 contracts that the OFSR has with community partners, Manifood Centers Community Food Rescue Program is operated in our county connecting over 45 different partner organizations. So these are food assistance providers with food that's recovered from over 100 different donors in our county with edible food that otherwise would have gone to waste and distributing that throughout the county's food assistance network to residents who are experiencing food insecurity. There's also efforts made to increase the donors who are participating and find ways that we can reduce the environmental impact of the inedible food that is generated naturally through systems like this. So not only is our work building the capacity of our local food system to connect more residents directly with food, but also with economic opportunities and resources to support food sovereignty. We managed the Farm to Food Bank contract with Manifood Center, a program that was initiated during the pandemic and has grown exponentially since its inception. This past summer alone more than 78,000 pounds of county grown food was connected to food assistance providers through Farm to Food Bank. The greatest volume of crops was in sweet corn, water melon, tomatoes, and summer squash, and the program also prioritizes culturally relevant crops, herbs, and proteins. More than 26 county farms are engaged in this initiative as are close to 40 food assistance providers. We've worked with the Manna team over the past few months to launch an innovative, collaborative funding mechanism for farm to food bank partners, which functions similarly to a contract growing agreement. We've awarded $133,431 to 10 food producing farm to food bank partners to build the capacity of their operations through equipment, infrastructure, and tools that will allow them to grow and donate more crops to farm to food bank in the coming year. Awarded farms agree to repay 80% or more of the value of their allocated funding in farm to food bank contributions over about an 18-month period. This creative funding arrangement has the dual purpose of investing in our agricultural sector while also ensuring greater access to local produce within the Food Assistance Network and for residents. The OFSR also has a contract with the Charles Coiner Center for Urban Farming to support agriculture education and food access through an urban farm at Lloyderman Middle School in Aspen Hill. Students have the opportunity to engage in hands-on environmental science and food education opportunities right outside of their school building, and the food that is grown on site will be connected with school community members that are experiencing food insecurity. Our resident and community gardening grant program is another pandemic era initiative that has shape shifted to continue meeting the needs of our community. The FY24 round of this grant program generated $618,954 in total funding requests from 15 organizations. We awarded $200,000 to seven successful applicants to implement or expand projects that are connecting nearly 2,000 residents, including many youth participants to culturally proficient, health-minded food production and education opportunities in their own neighborhoods and communities. We had a chance to visit the cheer community gardens into Koma Park last week and highlight the perspectives and experiences of the residents that are growing diverse vibrant crops in six small residential plots. This initiative demonstrates the value of leveraging private land for food production and the impact that collective action can have on community-level food security. We wanted to make sure that we also gave an update on the transition of the Staples program into that foundation of food assistance partnerships that we hope to continue and plan to continue into the future in addition to these new specialized grant programs. the pandemic as an effort to get at both food supply disruptions that were happening as a result of value chain challenges and the pandemic as well as reducing the administrative burden on organizations who were stepping in to provide food assistance during that time of crisis. However, that pandemic era program couldn't continue in its current form into the future. And so it is a time of transition for these 73 partner organizations. And so over the past year, the FY24 and 25 budgets have had additional resources included in them to support these organizations in their current work while also paving a pathway for a long-term, annualized process. And so in addition to allocated support for the Mana Food Center and Capital Area Food Bank partners, much appreciation to both of those two organizations for supporting such a large number of other community organizations in accessing both shelf stable products as well as produce and proteins and other items. But in addition to the allocations made directly to the organizations, we also, with some of the funds from the special appropriation, we're able to partner with Capital Area Food Bank to secure an additional supply of frozen proteins, shelf stable foods, produce pallets, and other items that have been made available to their partner network free of charge for Montgomery County organizations during this transitional period. So there were both allocations directly to organizations as well as backup supply, as we know that there's increasing demand for services while these resources in some cases are winding down. So I know that we share a lot of data in these slides and that's a critical important, a critically important part of our work. However, the voices of both our participants, our partners, our agency partners is also important to capture and so wanted to make sure I don't need to read through all of them but I just want to make sure that we also share the narratives and the qualitative data that is collected through a variety of strategies. And I also wanted to just verbally share some feedback that we got from an MC Groceries program partner. It's a grandmother who takes care of her grandson and uses these benefits to feed their family, which I think also speaks to the intergenerational nature of a lot of the households that we're supporting. But she shared that her grandson upon their first delivery of food, shared how that was the most food that he'd ever seen in their home, and where did all this food come from. And I think it really illustrates how even the youngest children that we're striving to support through these programs see firsthand what this looks like in their families and also just on their plates. And so I want to make sure that we take a second to highlight all of the different appreciations of the cultural relevance of the food that's being offered, as well as the unique challenges that each household experiences because we speak in tens of thousands when we're talking about our food and secure families, but each one has its own story. And that takes us to the next phase of this Staples Program, which is the Community Food Assistance Grant Program. And so this is the long-term strategy for continuing to support these partners who are providing critical services in our community and have been for many years, even if they started during the pandemic. Unfortunately, you know, we're at many years of further operations at this point. So in a lot of ways, it's very similar to the Staples program. It allows applicants to request direct funding for food purchases, Staples credits, and where some funds up to 15% for operational costs. It is open to a broader assortment of applicants beyond the Staples program, which did have set participant lists. But there are requirements that it must be an organization that's been providing regularly scheduled, at least monthly food assistance services in Montgomery County for at least monthly food assistance services in Montgomery County for at least two years, so that does sort of establish a defined population for these resources. And this is intended to really maintain a solid foundation of support to the residents who have been going to these distributions or accessing these services over time. There is a more intentional data collection and reporting component to this with this data collection requirement tiered based on the amount of funds that will be granted. So if you're getting a smaller amount of funds, the what you're required to report on your participation or your participant community is more limited than if you're getting the maximum, which is $300,000 grants. And so it is a broad range and we know that it's not enough resources to cover current operations as they are. And so initially seven million dollars had been recommended in the budget, 3.5 million was included in the resulting budget. And so we have had to encourage our applicants to shape their applications as only maintaining existing levels of services. There's no expansion, no new strategies, but rather just making sure that we can maintain that foundation with the resources that we have. I will say that we had the application process closed on Monday and I'm sorry, back one more. There we go. The application is closed on Monday and we ultimately had 55 applicants requesting just under $7.5 million. So we know that we will have some very difficult decisions to make. And we will have to limit our investments and the operational capacity of our community partners and focus on the food distribution components as much as possible. But we will do what we can with the reviewers that we have recruited to make decisions and support these organizations with the funds available. And we do know that our food assistance provider community is going through a tremendous shift and a lot of these organizations, especially those that started during the pandemic, are on accustomed to grant processes, data collection and reporting. However, they provide services that are residents are depending on and we want to strengthen their operational foundations to ensure that they can operate well into the future. And so we've been providing a wide range of assistance to these organizations, both things like one-on-one support for, we did close to 50, 15-minute sessions with prospective community food assistance grant applicants, as well as data office hours for staples, partners twice a month over the past months, as well as group trainings, and consulting sessions, as well as peer-to-peer assistance to try to build our partner's capacity and implement best practices in their services. We also want to make sure that we're hearing from them about what's working, what challenges are they experiencing and their service delivery. How can we shape this road ahead with their input in ways that align with their strengths and provide support to strengthen where needed. We're about to launch the next iteration of the Food Assistance Provider Survey. So this is an opportunity to gather data from organizations not just on where their services are, so we can feed that into the food council's food assistance resource directory, but also we can understand trends in service models. We're hoping to incentivize choice models where possible and more sustainability practices and food assistance provider models. We're also conducting listening sessions, community lunches, making our team accessible to break down some of the barriers that can exist between government and the community. I can say that I alone attended over 80 different meetings, over 800 different meetings last year. So there's a lot of engagement that's happening with the community and that is something that we plan to only expand into the coming year as well as more site visits so that we not only can see into the coming year, as well as more site visits, so that we not only can see on the ground what this work looks like to inform our work, but so that we can showcase it for our government leaders and our community partners to learn from each other too. Good morning. My name is Juan Cruz. I am the performance management analyst for the Office of Food Systems Facilings. And I want to tell you a little bit about our data strategies to evaluate our impact. So as you know, our legislative mandate is to collect and update the food system data needed to support the strategic decisions. And so I wanted to tell you about this evaluation framework, which you might have seen before, about probably about a year ago when I was on my first week of in the job. And so this evaluation framework guides our data collection strategy and outcomes based reporting. As you can see, we begin with assessing the resources available for data collection, establishing partnerships, and identifying any places where technical support is needed. This step has been important for our Effective Data Collection reporting. Next we develop service metrics to track the performance of these services and whether they meet our initial goals. Once we have a robust service metrics, we look for impact on community outcomes. Here we want to ensure that the initiatives we fund are not just operationally efficient, but are driving positive changes in participants. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, we examine social inequity outcomes. This allows us to make sure that our funding decisions are creating inclusive solutions that address inequalities in our communities. The entire process ensures that we don't just look at quantitative data, but that our decisions are aligned with long-term goals, participants, or community feedback when possible, and that they create equitable outcomes. So next I'd like to discuss how this evaluation framework ties into our grant performance goals. We start by setting evaluation metrics that align with the specific objectives of each grant. This is done in partnership with the Office of Grants Management and these metrics guide how we measure the success of grantee initiatives. Following this, we formalize our data collection plan through grantee agreements. These agreements ensure that our partners understand the expectations and reporting requirements. Once the agreements are in place, we work to create the reporting platforms and socialize a platform through info sessions. This collaboration is key to ensuring that the data being reported is accurately, accurate, timely, and relevant to our goals. It is our goal that grantees, no matter their level of experience or access, feel supported and equipped when working with our grants. Finally, we implement automated reports, which streamline the reporting process, minimize administrative burden, and allows us to more easily track progress. These reports gives us the real time inside needed to make ongoing strategic announcements. Now I'd like to turn to what we've been learning by implementing our data collection framework. Our approach to data collection is centered on learning from the residents' perspectives and experiences. Rather than just focusing on top-down metrics, we aim to understand the lift experiences of those directly affected by our funded initiatives. This ensures that our funding not only meets technical success metrics but also resonates with the people in it is intended to help. By collecting qualitative data and listening to community feedback, we're better equipped to align our strategies with actual community needs. This ongoing community center approach helps us make more informed equitable decisions. Below are a couple of examples of this work. Alright, we'll go to the next slide. Next we wanted to show you a practical example of how we're leveraging geographic data to inform our funding decisions. By mapping out areas of need, we can visualize where our resources will have the most significant impact. In partnership with the Office of Agriculture and the Montgomery County Food Council, we created a cold storage map. This map visualizes a survey of cold storage assets throughout the county, farms, and food assistance providers. This information is important in our office infrastructure strategies. Geographic data helps us to identify underfunded areas, track disparities in service availability, and direct resources to communities that may otherwise be overlooked. Through this data, we can ensure that our funding aligns with actual demographic and geographic disparities, allowing us to make decisions that foster a more equitable distribution of resources across regions. Lastly, this slide showcases an example of the data collection reporting platform, or if a start created that is used by our grantee partners. We believe that transparency and collaboration are key to successful grant programs. This data is not only used internally, but also will be shared with our partners to create accountability and mutual learning opportunities. These reports contain insights on performance, community impact, and how well grantees are meeting their established goals. This collaborative sharing of information ensures that all parties involved have the tools to adjust their strategies, share best practices, and continue improving community outcomes. Thank you, Juan. So I think you've all probably heard me say this before, but I am Incredibly grateful for the opportunity to get to do this work and also call this place my home. I think the ability to Approach all of these different strategies and apply them so quickly after the creation of our office is due to everybody's contributions and leadership and the vision that I think we collectively share for the type of community that we want ourselves and our residents to to live in. And so first of all just huge appreciation to everybody within the Montgomery County Government Council for being our partner and for your visionary leadership in pursuing these strategies and to our community partners who are doing this work day in and day out. So we also need to take a moment and say, where are we going after this? Because I think as we've shared, there's a lot of information that's coming in, both about how our programs are working effectively and where there could be gaps in populations that are being addressed or geographic communities being reached. And so we have an ambitious team that has a lot of things that we're always hoping to work on as an next frontier. So some examples of what we anticipate will be on our plate for the coming year is local food aggregation and processing. A key to next step in building our local food production is the ability for our smaller producers to reach larger markets. And that is by combining their production volumes to be able to access institutional buyers. And this does require both the aggregation capacity as well as value chain coordination. And so we have recently launched a partnership with the USDA Market Design Project. We're able to effectively secure their complimentary services and designing what this could look like in our community and also pursuing and looking into different state-level resources specifically for local food, farm and fish food aggregation grants and other types of program resources that we potentially could tap into. We're also coming on the end of that community food rescue five-year contract and so those funds will need to be recompeted in the coming year and so we're actively looking at how we want to shape the vision for the next round of those funds starting in the next fiscal year. We also are looking at how we can work with the Office of Grants Management, the Food Council, and other partners to ensure that our nonprofit sector is stable and secure, because that's a key piece to our overall resilience. And so we need to build data collection and reporting strategies and best practices, as well as help them transition into spaces where they are working on their own food sourcing operations. We also want to make sure that we are taking a look at all this information that's coming in and analyzing it to refine our recommendations for the FY26 budget process and the implementation of FY25 funds. And as part of that conversation, we know that local resources is limited. And there are a lot of competing priorities for those funds. And I've said before, food is in my title. These are the strategies that our office pursues. But there are a lot of ways of supporting our residents and ensuring their success and their health and their overall self-sufficiency. And so we need to make sure that we're advocating for sufficient federal and state investment in these priorities both directly related to food and beyond as well as programming strategies like SNAP outreach that will increase the number of federal dollars that are being invested in our local economy. And we hope that that's something that are being invested in our local economy. And we hope that that's something that we can increase in the coming year. And then finally, I think we need to make sure that our values are being reflected in all of the grant programs that we're running. And so you'll see this for example, in the Community Food Assistance Grant Program that local sourcing, choice models, food waste analysis and management are incentivized components of proposals for the organizations that we choose to award funds to so that we are getting at all of our priorities when we're investing in partnerships. And I think the success of that is really reflected when Catherine shared that over 90% of our grant funded or our food is medicine programs are distributing local food. And so I think it shows that these approaches can work and we need to lean into that success. And so that concludes our presentation. We're happy to take questions, welcome your feedback and suggestions as well. Great, thank you all so much. I'll jump in and I will to take questions, would welcome your feedback and suggestions as well. Great, thank you all so much. I'll jump in and I will just ask a couple of questions and then yield to Councilmember Luki because I know she's got a head out soon and of course Councilmember Salesman sure has questions and thoughts as well. So first, very impressive. Obviously the Capital Area Food Bank report was a gut punch because we know it's consistent with what we're seeing across the region. And I just, we talked about this last year, but the measures that they use are more global, right? And so we're now in a better position than we were to better understand the more specific needs of Montgomery County. So as you look at the increased needs, which we know are real, how do you connect that to or overlay that with what we're seeing and the more granular data that we're collecting? And obviously it's going to unquestionably put us in a better position to address those issues, but how do you reconcile what they're tracking and what we're tracking? Absolutely. So thank you for that question. And I would say first, the analogy that I like to use for understanding the dynamics around food security levels and funding that's invested in that work. If you think about it as a bucket that has a hole in the bottom, and you think about all the federal funds that are suddenly falling out of this support network that our residents are depending on, we can pour additional resources in the top, but it doesn't change the baseline if we can't address some of the root causes of hunger as well as stabilize the federal sources that are complementing our work and really supplementing that work. So that's where making sure that we're not missing out on snap dollars that our residents can depend on. The $60,000 that we could potentially invest in building umbrella organizations to pull community partners into snap outreach would turn into millions invest in building umbrella organizations to book poll community partners and to snap outreach would turn into millions of dollars that are invested in our local economy. So I think we both need to make sure that we're maintaining the federal resources as much as possible and also encouraging those investments to grow through programs like the Sunbuck's initiative. There is no direct measurement of food insecurity at the local level, and that's certainly something that we have been actively looking into. We worked with a team at Georgetown University this past year to help us even understand the different measurements that might be out there. That's not a challenge that's unique to Montgomery County. But we are working with the Capitolary Food Bank and Juan has recently requested their Montgomery County specific data. It is a representative sample size, but it is a small sample size. So I think when we're talking about trying to reach a population of potentially up to 300,000 people, you can survey one, you know, or a small percentage of them, but it won't tell the whole story of who's being reached. And so that's why we're really focused on evaluating directly the effectiveness of our programs and seeing where there might be gaps particularly in which populations are being supported through which strategies. And so that does still require a careful balance of not asking for too much information or putting the burden of the evaluation on our residents. But that's also where we're looking into surveys on our council fellow this summer did some suggestions and research on ways that we can do direct measurement in our county to better understand What the landscape looks like not relying on federal census data and other sources like that Awesome, I'll get myself back in the queue, but I will yield to customer Luke keep all my council members sales Thank you, and and my apologies for for needing to scoot out at three. So and thank you. I was taking copious notes in case you were wondering what I was doing up here, but it's alarming, of course, that needs keep growing and the evaluations are showing that. And I appreciate the slide that you had that showed the different things you're trying to evaluate in sort of wrapping arms around all of this. I guess my question is how are we determining what things we currently have are working and what are not or what might need to be modified, what in the landscape of the multiple different pieces that we currently have are not working or not working as intended or envisioned and what might we do about that. Yeah, thank you for that question. I think one of the ways we're looking at it is first by establishing metrics across all of the programs and then some that are individual to those particular programs and then knowing that the measure of success is housed within the grantees and the program participants and then evaluating those across time. So our hope is that as we continue to have rounds of reporting and those reports are coming in, we're able to start to see that. So one example of that was in our food as medicine, we began to see that some grantees were where we're screening folks for food insecurity, but then the referrals were not looking like they were the same as the positives. And so we wanted to, you know, make sure that that performance was working. So if an example, if I have, you know, a large number of positive food insecurity, those referrals should probably be close to that, right? And so is there a break at a communication? So we can follow up with that. And so that's one way that we're able to see what's working, what's not working, and also as being able to gather best practices, to then be able to share that with all the other grantees. And so those infosessions, those interagency meetings, all those are our way to also share best practices across not just our agency, but all of our other partners that touch on food. So thank you for that answer. I know it definitely explains sort of grant, grantee objective, grantee performance, connection, and what might be better done in that sense. I think what I'm, what I'm trying to get at is, have you identified when you're allocating the funding to the different programs? This is what we're allocating. This is what we're hoping to achieve. This is what we're allocating. This is what we're hoping to achieve. This is how we will measure what we have achieved. And it's gonna vary based on different program, right? There are different things that are going to have different metrics, but I'm trying to find a way to reconcile, you know, again, we have to have different things that fit different buckets, right? And the point you made about the food is medicine, and if they're simultaneously being screened for food insecurity, why isn't there a positive one-to-one correlation on referral for those other services? But, you know, have those metrics been in place, or is there a metric for each individual program by which you are gauging success? Not just did the grantees say they do the things they set out to do, but success in the we are reducing. Like, how do we get to reducing the reliance and getting better at the self-sufficiency so that we are again not having ever increasing needs within this landscape, but we're finding ways to have balance so that because nobody wants to live in this state, right? So how do we get that? Yes, so I think the short answer is every single program both contracts as well as grant strategies have specifically designated metrics that are predefined, to find in their proposal, what they anticipate achieving halfway through the grant period by the end of the grant period. So we do have benchmarks for progress against those metrics. And then there are platforms in which they can, they are required to report their achievement towards those goals at the midpoint and that they end and that can visualize that data for us. And there are crosswalked metrics across all of the programs that allow us to capture both the collective impact as well as the individual program. So I think that is very intentional. I think frankly it's somewhat unique in the intentionality that we put behind the performance goals because I think we both want to understand what's happening in the moment with the dollars that we're investing but what are the potential long-term impacts as well, which is critically important. And I think in food, in a lot of systems, but certainly in food, we are operating within a broken system while trying to shift the system at the same time. And so you'll see that in the short and the long-term values of the investments that we're making. And the long-term ones may take some time to show impact and so that's why we always ask the question, yes we're feeding people in the moment, but what is the impact of this in the long-term as well for our climate, for our economy, for our job security? Because ultimately those solutions are an exclusively coming through food, but we have a responsibility to contribute to the progress that needs to be made in those spaces. We also have pre and post surveys for participants to make sure that we're hearing from them directly on how did this improve your health? How did this improve your food security? I think there's also complicated questions around if you are accessing food through any means other than exactly the way you design, go into the grocery store with your own money, purchasing food, would you still identify as food insecure or not? So I think there's some difficult data questions that are well beyond Montgomery County as well. But I think we're also making intentional efforts to crosswalk our grant programs and our programs overall to make sure is there a population that's not being served effectively? And if not, how can we close that gap through new partnerships in the next grant round, or with a different program, and how are we connecting each of these programs intentionally? So if we are investing in snap outreach, those organizations are also identifying families who can't participate in snap. Unfortunately, I think it's 60 to 70% of applications often are not successful. How can we build on the investments that we're making in those snap-out reach organizations to make sure that we're then intentionally connecting those families to the programs that are designed to support folks who can't be on snap or the food assistance programs that are conveniently located for them? So I think of it as value added more than double dipping, but I think the intention is that we are meaning on the investments that we're making to provide multiple impacts for our residents. And you noted that transportation of course is often a barrier. And you know in thinking about that, I think a lot of times people could say it's car no car, which is not necessarily accurate, particularly in this context. And so I wondered if you could speak to that a little bit about what exactly those transportation barriers are and how they vary based on what part of the county you're in in terms of food insecurity. So the pre-survey data for the MC Groceries program indicated that 20% of the participants in that program use the bus to get food. I think that speaks for itself in terms of the challenges of doing grocery shopping for an entire family while using bus transportation. There also was a data point of over 50% of the participants in the program had to go shopping more than once because they couldn't carry everything or bring it all home at one time. And so that's where a program like MC Groceries is designed to support families in particular that are transportation challenged. And so that is one of our goals is to better understand how to make sure that we're tailoring program referral to the unique challenges of a family. But I think it also underscores that if 50% of them were having trouble doing their grocery shopping because of transportation, putting them in a program where they can choose to get a delivered to their home is an important intervention. And so I think that's the information that we're just starting to collect and will refine our referral processes as we continue. And certainly make sure that we're not saying this is the strategy, we're gonna stick to this and perpetuity, but maybe there are other retail access strategies that could help those who do have a car or do have access to a shared car that they can do their shopping on their own. And I think, you know, understanding that better, particularly understanding how it affects different regions of the county, too, is both useful for your work, but it's also useful for us in understanding transportation barriers as a bigger broader topic in that transportation, whether publicly available or not, it's just not equal around the county. And yet there's need or demand or requests, but we don't have that. And so it feeds into the entire cycle of where can I work? What are my jobs? When can I work? Because if I can't get there, but I don't have a car and I need public transit. And certainly I can say, I know I could not grocery shop on a bus for six people, right? It's just not possible. And nor is it practical to say, well, then you're going to have to go every day or every other day on the bus while you're doing all the other things in order to help keeping bringing back supplies. So thank you for that. And I think, you know, anything that you can bring to us in the future to just sort of dive into that topic specifically a little bit better would be great. And I appreciate that you mentioned, you know, the need to leverage federal funds. And you mentioned, of course, the termination of certain federal programs and other ones have popped up. And so, and I'm not expecting you to answer this on the fly today, but I think it would be useful for all of us to know, too. What were the cutoff points on those federal programs that created the increased impact in need in our local community? And then what other things may have been coming online, contemporaneous with either at the state level or the federal level that are different now. So because it's been a very shifting landscape since spring of 2023 and created a lot of challenges, but I think having sort of a timeline like that would be very helpful to us. And I'm going to commend you again on your lovely slides because you always show up at the best slide deck and I am a huge fan of the swim lane slides as I call them which show progress over time. So it's a great way to visualize things. This would help for that piece too. And with that, I turn it back. Thank you. Council on her sales. Thank you, Mr. Chair and thank you to Heather and her team and to Tara for always putting together an easy to follow packet. Always excited to see the office of who systems resilience come before us to share the progress that you've been making since getting the new funding and you know, we're what, four years out of the pandemic and with the loss of the federal funding, it's good to see that you are swiftly making inroads in addressing the ongoing needs of our neediest families. You did, I did a, I guess I was a bit surprised to see the data about some of our families, as you mentioned in the presentation, most families accessing food services work part or full time. So I'm glad to see that the choice market has opened as a resource and as a model that empowers and dignifies our residents in need. I this is the second one. There's one and the one in Bethesda and then Manage Choice is similar. Yes, I think all of the hubs are moving towards the choice model if they're not there already. I don't want to misspeak. But it is increasingly implemented throughout the network. So more to come in the pipeline. Okay. All right. And you've presented a lot of data and you know I was enjoying asking about the numbers and how that's impacting the work you do. Did anything stand out to you from the data you've started to collect in regards to how you're going to use this data collection to increase effectiveness of the program? Yes, thank you. So I think it's important to revisit very early data collection space and other organizations are using QR codes and check ins at distributions and so I think that is part of the challenge even getting a customer of a loot case question about transportation and specific locations is that this is our opportunity to really establish our baseline. And so while I wished that we had more specific information about individual zip codes, we are now in the place where we can finally start to receive that and also build the capacity of our partner organization so our food assistance provider survey, which was conducted last year and will be revisiting this year, will hopefully help us understand what growth has happened in the past year in the ability to understand who's being served at your food assistance site. And so I think that was both surprising and not surprising of the variability in operational models and in data collection strategies. And so there are challenges in building the capacity of organizations, but I hope through the community food assistance grant program, which does have for the first time much more standardized reporting requirements, we will be able to start to have a better understanding of the picture of not just where is a distribution located, but the people who are going to that distribution, where do they live? And what are the unique dynamics and factors of their families to understand how we can get at the transportation barriers, not just of people who are shopping on their own, but also who are seeking food assistance services on site. Good, okay, so I know that during the pandemic, we weren't collecting any data from the users. Are we starting to collect data at the hubs? And I see that we're getting information from our partners. Can you tell us more how we're using that and how we're collecting information from our users? So I can't speak to the hubs reporting just because they're under HHS, although some of the hubs do receive grants through us, and so you know can speak to that. But each of the notice of funding opportunities, which includes the Community Food Assistance Grant Program, outlines what data is required to be reported by grantees. And so for example, the Community Food Assistance Grant program for organizations that are receiving a very small grant. The requirement is they're reporting that how many people are in a household, how many, what are the home zip codes, or are they counting residents? So I think smaller providers, has a, or at least smaller funded providers, have a lower benchmark to have to meet in terms of reporting. The organizations that are receiving a higher level of funding also need to report on things like household size, the ages of the people in the households that are being supported. There are challenges around asking questions related to race and ethnicity, employment, income verification. And so that will be telling to us on the feedback that we get from participants when they need to start asking more questions of the folks who were coming to their distributions. But our hope is that we can establish best practices and provide trainings to help make it a little bit easier to ask for that information and also navigate the challenging conversations that might come up when you start asking those questions. Yes, yes, because we want to continue to serve the neediest among us. and as resources become even more limited, we're going to have to make even harder decisions and more targeted investments where they're needed. So I look forward to hearing more about how we're going to collect that data and how we're going to start talking with our partner organizations about that data collection process. And you mentioned the capital area of food bank, citing that food insecurity particularly affects our marginalized communities and increased percentage of middle income and highly educated residents. Wanted to know if there's any efforts to work with, expand our partnerships to work with some of our restaurants. You know, food waste has been a huge issue and I know Manna has an app that they've created to help with spreading the word about resources available. The good-to-go app is also another app that connects our consumers to a surplus of food. And so is there any opportunity that we could model something like that in the county to bridge the gap as we are looking at other ways to connect our residents to food, especially culturally appropriate food and healthier food. You mentioned all of the different ways that you know we don't just want people to access food but we want to help them access food that's healthy for them and nutrient appropriate. So. Yeah, so in FY26, we will be reissuing the competition for the food recovery funding that's available through the county. And so that is on a five year cycle. And so that will when that is opened up, that will provide an opportunity to identify what strategies are in place, what opportunities there are for strengthening that network because certainly food waste is a key component of the challenges that exist in our food system and edible food recovery is an important strategy. And we also have to keep in mind what the impacts are environmentally in terms of the percentage of the food that's recovered that ultimately is not able to be redistributed in the community. And so that is a challenge for food recovery organizations that we're actively looking into with some other community partners on how we can implement potentially even building on some of the federal grants that are available infrastructure to help these organizations both comply with state requirements around food waste management as well as make sure that it's not having negative financial impacts on the organizations that are conducting food recovery of how they manage with that food waste that results if we lean into and increase our work in that area. All right. And I was glad to hear you mention the federal grant opportunity. I'm glad that you are already being proactive in looking for other resources outside of the county and with the upcoming general assembly session about to resume. Are there any priorities that we can assist with or any policies that we should be on the lookout for? There is a universal meals bill that is likely to be brought up again this this coming session. It was not successful last year. The state is challenged with you know the same fiscal issues that we experience locally and so I think that is a barrier to success around strategies like that. Universal meals are exceptionally costly. And there, but certainly any opportunity that there is to cover those costs with state dollars, even if not federal dollars, means that those families are having, especially those that are in the middle incomes that are being impacted with self-sufficiency gaps. If their kids are fed two to three times a day at school, that will free up dollars that they can then use to cover the costs in other places of their budget. All right. That's good to hear. Anything else comes on your radar. Please let me know. Thank you. Thank you. Great questions. Great comments from both of my colleagues. I want to just piggyback a little bit off of Council Member Sales just now because I had a similar thought with the Universal Meals. Minnesota figured this out. Governor Walts has been talking about this actively with his new national profile, which is particularly exciting. And while, yes, things are stretched, this is such an important investment, not just morally, but will unlock so much more. So I would love to see how we as a legislative party can partner with the executive, because there are a lot of folks who are very interested in this, and see how we can get this over the goal line because I think that will be important and then any other legislation that you all are tracking this year in anapolis that you think should be on our radar screen please let us know so that we can use whatever leverage and influence we have to Educator colleagues in anapolis about bills that are important to us as a community, which I think would be great. And I really appreciate everyone's efforts. I know that the work continues. And with this thought, so I did have an opportunity to check out the resident community garden program last week. And which struck me the most about that program was in addition to the beautiful and high quality food that's being produced, the real intentionality in connecting to the community and creating the sense of place among the growers and the recipients of the program. Because it gets to the heart of what both Councilman Rusell and Councilmember Luki were talking about, which is addressing those underlying issues that are leading to food insecurity in the first place. And sometimes that's just not having a broader sense of connections within a community to be able to find out about resources that may be available. And I mean, I can just think about all the times my neighborhood has stepped up to help our family in various circumstances and we've helped them and others. So I think that will be important. But I thank you all so much. We look forward to the ongoing conversation. We'll prepare for the FY26 budget and hopefully have more resources to work with. But I want to end by thanking all of our providers in the community and the community leaders who are in the audience, both present and virtual. So I think that's it. So with that, we are adjourned.