CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

Lynchburg-area woman working to help low-income families get needed nutrition

News & Advance - 3/7/2017

For low-income Virginians, finding places to buy healthy food can be just as difficult as affording it.

To bring more fresh food options to customers who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits - more commonly known as food stamps - Virginia Cooperative Extension has hired Liza Dobson as the healthy food retail coordinator to support programs that provide more choices to low-income consumers around the state.

From her office on the outskirts of Lynchburg, the newly hired Dobson is just beginning her work to coordinate programs that will bring more fresh food into areas called food deserts, where finding affordable, fresh food to buy is difficult.

"The idea is that I'm going to be looking at food deserts to see how folks are doing their shopping and how we can support more healthy food retail in those food desert areas. Right now, when you go to a low-income, low food access area with high SNAP enrollment, the only thing you can find are heavily processed, low-nutrient and calorie-dense processed foods with a high shelf life."

Originally from Kentucky, Dobson moved to Virginia to earn her bachelor's degree in mathematics at Virginia Tech with the hopes of becoming a math teacher. After realizing halfway through school she wanted to change her path, Dobson picked up a concentration in civil engineering and a minor in green engineering, which increased her interest in the environment and where our food comes from.

After graduation in 2012, she took an AmeriCorps volunteer position in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, working in the local schools to teach kids how to tend a garden, wash their produce and cook meals with what they grew. In the summer months, she worked the school's garden and gave the food to people in need.

While people often associate food deserts with inner cities, working in Appalachia, Dobson witnessed residents in the rural area struggling to find fresh food in the far-flung areas of the county.

"It was the first time I was face to face with food access issues," she said. "I would hear residents say, 'I can't really buy much fresh produce because I can't go shopping more than once a month because it's an hour drive to the grocery store.'"

In order to cope with the lack of grocery stores in their area, Dobson said residents took to home gardening in order to have regular access to fresh food.

After learning about gardening as a solution to food deserts, Dobson took a position with the nonprofit Garden-Raised Bounty in Olympia, Washington. While there, she helped install home gardens for people who identified as food insecure in both rural and urban areas as the Backyard Gardens Coordinator for the Kitchen Gardens Project.

"It was really exciting to empower people who were food insecure," she said. "I fell in love with home gardening and the potential for home gardening to mitigate issues of food insecurity as well as build community around this act of empowerment."

After a year on the West Coast, she went back to Virginia Tech to get her master's degree in horticulture. For her coursework, she worked with a food pantry in rural Grayson County to distribute container gardens and seeds to seniors living on Social Security, food stamp recipients and people with children in the home.

She developed research questions and then talked with those who received the gardens at the end of the first growing season to learn about what would help their access to fresh food. This research process sparked an interest in how food systems work and solutions for communities to bring more produce to more people.

"My graduate research got me more deeply interested in food security," Dobson said. "My passion has always been gardening but I became really, really interested in trying to understand how food deserts form and how we can work to change the food landscape."

After graduating in May 2016, Dobson wanted to find a job that would allow her to work on food access issues in Virginia.

Although she works for Virginia Cooperative Extension, headquartered in Blacksburg, Dobson was placed here in Lynchburg so she could learn from the wide variety of healthy food access projects happening in the city and around the region.

Meredith Ledlie Johnson, coordinator of the Food Access and Availability Initiative with Virginia Cooperative Extension's Family Nutrition Program, said Dobson was specifically hired for the position because of her experience working on food insecurity issues in rural areas.

"Liza has a really interesting background and she has worked specifically with low-income people," Ledlie Johnson said. "That's a really interesting background for us because lots of people who study food insecurity study urban areas, but she has worked with rural areas instead. We want the program to be able to work with a variety people."

Dobson has only been on the job for a month and most of it has been spent on the road traveling to different offices, nonprofits and universities to learn about successful projects so she can develop a plan for more healthy food retail options.

"It feels like I'm back in grad school, how I'm floundering and reading as much as I can and learning as much as I can to figure out the direction I want to go in," she said. "It can be overwhelming but it's also really exciting but it doesn't feel like work because I love what I'm doing."