RAPID: Improving Transportation Equity to Enhance Food Security for Families Vulnerable to COVID-19

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This COVID-19 RAPID research program will investigate, and begin to develop mechanisms to address, the lack of access to food (i.e. food insecurity) associated with COVID-19 and the role of transportation challenges leading to food insecurity. The pandemic has exposed some of the underlying inequities in health outcomes in our society. The lack of smartphone and internet access has cut off some families from food delivery services. Consequently, these households are at higher risk of exposure to the virus due to more frequent trips to the grocery store, often by public transit. The research objectives address food insecurity at both the local level and nationwide. The research team will provide research and technical assistance to the City of Detroit’s pilot program to deliver school lunches to vulnerable families. At a national level, the team aims to identify the geographical areas and people most affected by both food and transportation insecurity. The research results will be made available to the public via a nationwide website and database that captures COVID-19 related food insecurity mitigation strategies and best practices.This project aims to enable data driven discovery and practical insights by linking the available data on food security with information about when, where, how, and why people travel. The team will accomplish this by ingesting the Food Security Index, and related information scraped from tagged content on the Internet, into the teams’ Transportation Equity Open Knowledge Network (OKN) developed under Convergence Accelerator Phase I Pilot project 1936884. The OKN allows stored data, its relationship to other data and to real-world objects and concepts to be understood at a semantic level. This integration will support the development and evaluation of the previously mentioned school lunch delivery program, as well as the identification of people and places most at risk of food insecurity due to a lack of access to transportation. The results are expected to contribute to the response to the current COVID-19 pandemic and any future outbreaks.This RAPID award is made by the Convergence Accelerator program in the Office of Integrative Activities and is associated with the Convergence Accelerator Track A: Open Knowledge Network.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.