In 2020, the Walmart Foundation awarded grants to 11 community-based projects offering innovative approaches to supporting healthy food access. The grants focused on initiatives that improve access to fresh foods for regions and populations experiencing disproportionately high rates of food insecurity. Investments supported a wide range of communities and strategies, including tribal communities in Northern Michigan and the Chickasaw Nation, immigrant communities in Maine and Minnesota, food banks experimenting with online ordering and home delivery in Illinois and Florida, projects to connect low-income families with healthy meal kits in North Carolina and Florida, and programs connecting households with produce through clinic partnerships, produce prescriptions, and farmers market incentives in Mississippi, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Overall, these funded initiatives run by local organizations aimed to address specific food access barriers relevant to communities that are typically not reached or well-served by existing programs.

In this brief, we take a closer look at four ways in which policies can help the scaling of promising local innovations focused on connecting people in need with healthy foods:

1. expanding and sustaining investments in programs that help people purchase healthy foods,
2. building the evidence for integrating healthy food access into health care programs and bridging the silos between food and health policy,
3. bolstering the role of child care in addressing food insecurity and healthy food access, and
4. supporting tribal sovereignty through efforts to increase Native communities’ access to healthy foods.

Connecting practice and policy improvements is a critical part of maximizing the potential of community innovation to disrupt food insecurity and improve public health. The upcoming expiration of laws governing an array of nutrition assistance programs provides a key policy window for advancing some of these changes. In the long-term, the policy improvements listed above require more intentional bridging between the USDA, federal health agencies, and Congress to integrate food policy into health care and public health. All of them require a stronger commitment to changing the narrative of persistent food insecurity and health disparities in the US.