New Food Policy Chief Has A Full Plate

Joy Johannes said she helped people figure out how to end a famine in Africa. Now she’s looking to help figure out how to get healthful groceries to kids and seniors who don’t have enough to eat.

Johannes has begun that quest as the New Haven city government’s first-ever food system policy director.

Johannes has just begun at the new $73,400-a-year job, in which she’ll work with public and private groups ranging from the health department and not-for-profit agencies to restaurants.

The creation of her job builds on the work done by New Haven’s Food Policy Council, reflecting two trends: the ​“food justice” movement, which seeks a system built on more local, less polluted fare; and growing ​“food insecurity” — a.k.a. hunger. A newly released study by the Community Alliance for Research & Engagement (CARE) found that a full 35 percent of people in New Haven’s six lowest-income neighborhoods lacked enough food or money to buy food at some point over a 30-day period.

Among other ideas, Johannes is looking at the best ways to funnel still-fresh leftover restaurant food to soup kitchens and how to have more groceries delivered to homebound seniors.

Like another tiney department in city government, the cultural affairs division overseen by Andrew Wolf, Johannes will need to bring energy and original ideas to link up with lots of people already doing work in town.

“My main thing,” she said during an interview on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program, ​“is relationship building and coalition building.”

She said she has had practice at it. Specifically when it comes to food policy.

From Fashion To FISH

Johannes, who’s 53, originally went into fashion design. She opened shop in her native Champaign, Ill.. That lasted ​“seven years, seven months and seven days.” She found her heart was in the after-school program she ran on the side for public-housing kids. So she sold the business and ran the program full-time. She said it grew in two years from serving 40 kids with an after-school program to meeting the needs of over 3,000 families weekly. It became a community hub for families living in public housing.

She went back to the University of Illinois for a masters in urban & regional planning, and dived community development and policy work. While working on her masters she worked on a project manager on a collaborative project with several universities to teach farmers agricultural skills in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the intent to steer them away from growing poppy.

She worked as part of the staff creating a redevelopment plan to rebuild New Orleans’ Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina. She consulted the Mexico City government on squatter policies, helped a regional Nigerian government establish a regional plan for their city, and worked as long-range planning manager for the city of Cape Coral, Florida, until budget cuts eliminated her job.

Through the D.C. office of a not-for-profit group called Horn Relief, she helped advise an international effort to end a famine in Kenya and Somalia. ​“There was food there,” she recalled, ​“but not money to buy it.” She said a variety of solutions — including a cash program to help people buy food from farmers and a cash-for-work program during rainy seasons to move rocks down from mountains to create dams in the desert to feed shepherds’ flocks — helped end the famine in 2013.

A Christian dating site brought Johannes to Connecticut. She met New Haven Police Sgt. Raymond Johannes online. They fell in love and married, and she came here. She landed a job running FISH of Greater New Haven, a not-for-profit delivering emergency groceries to homebound people.

Johannes made some discoveries at FISH. For starters, the agency had far more requests for help each month than it could meet, to the tune of 900 to 1,000. She prioritized serving the homebound and those who have difficulty getting to the grocery store: the elderly, handicapped, those going through major medical treatments or who have children going through a major illness.

She also discovered that around 4,500 low-income seniors live alone in New Haven, according to the 2013 census; some 3,300 of them are female. Grocery shopping can be challenging for many of them, especially in the snow.

She leapt at the chance to serve in the new food policy post in the New Haven government, where she could tackle those challenges on a larger scale.

“Reclamation” Investigation

Johannes has some ideas about how to do that. Linking more seniors to community gardens, for instance, which builds on an idea she saw in practice in the Hill. She is also supporting the Food Assistance Working Groups suggestion to consider utilizing FISH of Greater New Haven to serve as a ​“main hub” for seniors food deliveries including the new Commodity Supplemental Food Program.

“We need to find a delivery system that’s going to work for the elderly,” Johannes said.

She spoke of adapting ideas from other cities to New Haven, including one that encourages more grocery stores to make home deliveries.

“Food reclamation” programs have caught her eye, too. In one such program, in D.C., leftover (and still fresh) food from restaurants goes to a central kitchen for soup kitchens. There, people in adult education or returning from prison train as chefs, preparing meals for soup kitchens throughout town. The program also links graduates of the training program to jobs in local restaurants.

In another food reclamation program, in Orange County, Ca., families who run out of food, say, at the end of the month, can use an app to connect with restaurants that have extra meals available to donate. Uber donates rides through the apps for the food delivery.

Johannes said the pediatrician who invented that app is coming to New Haven next month to participate in a food policy symposium. Meanwhile, the city has enlisted a Quinnipiac University student to work on a program this summer to examine how a food reclamation program might work best here. At FISH, Johannes learned that sometimes it’s not so simple to make use of leftover restaurant food; it can go bad quickly. The details of the program are important. She’s now up and running on figuring out those details, along with the vision, of how a food system policy would work in New Haven.

Click on or download the above sound file to hear the full interview with Johannes on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.