NS410 Unit 2 Pantry Needs Assessment Example

What the Line Told Us: A Unit 2 Community Needs Assessment for Families With Young Children at the Harrow Street Pantry

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

NS410: Integrative Nutrition Planning and Management

Unit 2 Community Needs Assessment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The pantry, the survey, the focus group and every local count are composite; the screening study, the reviews, the focus-group study and the national sources cited are real.

Purpose and Scope

This assessment asks one question raised in Unit 1: why do households at the Harrow Street pantry leave so much of the produce behind, and which households are most affected? It covers the pantry's distribution days from September through October and the families who use them. It does not try to describe food insecurity across the county, which would need data the pantry cannot collect. The findings will shape a program design in later units, so each section says what the data can support and where it stops.

What the Pantry Already Knew

The pantry's own records cost nothing to use and cover every household served, so they come first. The monthly sign-in sheets show about 410 households a month across Saturday and Tuesday distributions. Of those, 146 households, or 35.6 percent, record at least one child under five. Volunteers weighed the produce discard bin on every distribution day for four weeks in September and recorded 1,480 pounds discarded against 4,800 pounds received, a loss of 30.8 percent.

The records also have gaps. The sign-in sheet records household size and children's age bands but nothing about cooking equipment, food skills or why a family takes or leaves an item. The discard count did not separate produce that arrived spoiled from produce that was simply not taken. These two gaps defined the survey.

What We Had to Ask

The survey was designed to fill those gaps without slowing the line. On two Saturdays and two Tuesdays in October, a trained volunteer approached every household in line that reported a child under five. Six questions were read aloud in English or Spanish, and answers were written on a paper form. The first two questions were the Hunger Vital Sign, a two-item screen that, in a sample of more than 30,000 low-income families with young children, caught 97 percent of food-insecure households and correctly cleared 83 percent of the rest (Hager et al., 2010). The other four asked about a working stove and oven, produce taken but not prepared in the past month, WIC enrollment and the ages of children in the home. Of 71 households approached, 64 agreed, and seven declined.

Of the 64 households, 51 (79.7 percent) screened positive for food insecurity risk. Twenty-six (40.6 percent) had no working oven, though all but four had at least one working burner. Forty-one (64.1 percent) had taken produce in the past month that they did not know how to prepare. Twenty-three (35.9 percent) were enrolled in WIC.

The finding that matters most for program design is that nearly two in three parents had taken produce they did not know how to cook, which points to a skills and equipment gap rather than a shortage of food.

A further 19 households had a child of WIC age and reported income under the pantry's limit but were not enrolled. Because the pantry's income limit sits below WIC's ceiling of 185 percent of the federal poverty guideline, these households look eligible (U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, 2025). Eligibility is for the WIC agency to decide, so the assessment reports them as likely eligible and notes a possible referral opportunity rather than a confirmed gap.

What Parents Said

One evening focus group gave the reasons behind the numbers. Eight parents attended in the church fellowship hall, with childcare provided. Five took part through a Spanish interpreter. The facilitator asked what parents did with the produce they took, what they skipped, and what would help.

Three themes came through. First, parents skipped vegetables they had never cooked, such as kohlrabi, eggplant and winter squash, because a failed dish wasted food the family needed. One mother said she would rather take rice she knew than a squash she might ruin. Second, several parents had no working oven, and a whole squash or a tray of roasting vegetables seemed to require one. Third, parents of toddlers worried about what a young child could safely eat, especially raw vegetables cut too large. The themes match barriers named by pantry clients in a Houston study, which included a lack of kitchen equipment and a lack of nutrition skills alongside cost and time (Dave et al., 2017).

The Wider Picture

Outside figures appear once, for comparison. Feeding America's Map the Meal Gap estimates county food insecurity using a statistical model built from unemployment, poverty and other measures (Feeding America, 2025). That figure is a modeled estimate for the whole county, so it cannot be compared directly with a screening result in one pantry line. It does show that the pantry sits in a county where food insecurity is common. A systematic review of pantry users found diets low in fruit, vegetables, dairy and calcium across sixteen studies (Simmet et al., 2017), which suggests the pattern at Harrow Street is not unusual.

How the Findings Fit Together

Read side by side, the three sources explain each other. The records show how much produce is lost, the survey shows who is struggling to use it, and the focus group shows why. A family without an oven that takes a whole butternut squash has few options, and a parent who has never cooked kohlrabi has good reason not to risk it. The overlap also narrows the target group. Households with a young child make up about a third of those served, yet they reported the largest skills gap, and their children are at the age when eating patterns form. A program that reaches them reaches the households where unused produce costs the most.

Assets

The community has strengths a program could build on. A church kitchen sits one floor above the pantry and has two ranges, a large sink and a commercial refrigerator. The regional food bank delivers produce every Thursday at no charge to the pantry. An extension nutrition educator already visits once a month to hand out recipe cards, and she has offered to help with a cooking series. Several parents in the focus group said they would come to a session on a Saturday morning if childcare were provided.

Limitations

The survey reached only households in line on four chosen days and only those reporting a young child, so it misses families who come at other times or have stopped coming. Answers were self-reported and read aloud in a public line, which may have lowered honest reports of food insecurity. The focus group was small and self-selected. The discard count still does not separate spoiled produce from produce left behind. A future count should weigh produce at arrival and again at the end of each day.

Priority Need

Taken together, the data point to one need a program can address: households with young children take produce they do not know how to prepare, often without an oven, and much of it is either discarded at the pantry or wasted at home. A secondary need is WIC enrollment among families who appear eligible. The next unit will build a logic model for a program aimed at the first need, with a referral step for the second.

References

Dave, J. M., Thompson, D. I., Svendsen-Sanchez, A., & Cullen, K. W. (2017). Perspectives on barriers to eating healthy among food pantry clients. Health Equity, 1(1), 28-34. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2016.0009

Feeding America. (2025). Map the meal gap 2025: An analysis of county and congressional district food insecurity and county food cost in the United States in 2023. https://www.feedingamerica.org/research/map-the-meal-gap/by-county

Hager, E. R., Quigg, A. M., Black, M. M., Coleman, S. M., Heeren, T., Rose-Jacobs, R., Cook, J. T., de Cuba, S. A. E., Casey, P. H., Chilton, M., Cutts, D. B., Meyers, A. F., & Frank, D. A. (2010). Development and validity of a 2-item screen to identify families at risk for food insecurity. Pediatrics, 126(1), e26-e32. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2009-3146

Simmet, A., Depa, J., Tinnemann, P., & Stroebele-Benschop, N. (2017). The dietary quality of food pantry users: A systematic review of existing literature. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, 117(4), 563-576. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jand.2016.08.014

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service. (2025). WIC eligibility requirements. https://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/wic-eligibility-requirements