Document Type
Article
Abstract
Community engagement is well established as a key to improving public health. Prior food environment research has largely studied community engagement as an intervention component, leaving much unknown about how food retailers may already engage in this work. The purpose of this study was to explore the community engagement activities employed by neighborhood food retailers located in lower-income communities with explicit health missions to understand the ways stores involve and work with their communities. A multiple case study methodology was utilized among seven retailers in urban U.S. settings, which collected multiple sources of data at each retailer, including in-depth interviews, store manager sales reports, store observations using the Nutrition Environment Measures Survey for Stores, public documents, and websites. Across-case analysis was performed following Stake’s multiple case study approach. Results indicated that retailers employed a wide variety of forms of community engagement within their communities, including Outreach, Building Relationships through Customer Relations, Giving Back, Partnering with Community Coalitions, and Promoting Community Representation and Inclusiveness. Strategies that built relationships through customer relations were most common across stores; whereas few stores demonstrated community inclusiveness where members participated in store decision making. Findings provide a more comprehensive view of the ways local food retailers aim to develop and sustain authentic community relationships. Additional research is needed to evaluate the impact of community engagement activities on improving community health.
Disciplines
Advertising and Promotion Management | Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics | Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations | Food Security | Food Studies | Health Policy | Public Policy | Urban Studies | Urban Studies and Planning
Recommended Citation
Kaur, R., Winkler, M. R., John, S., DeAngelo, J., Dombrowski, R. D., Hickson, A., ... Hill, A. B. … & Leone, L. A. (2022). Forms of Community Engagement in Neighborhood Food Retail: Healthy Community Stores Case Study Project. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 19(12), 6986. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19126986
Included in
Advertising and Promotion Management Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons, Food Security Commons, Food Studies Commons, Health Policy Commons, Public Policy Commons, Urban Studies Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons
Comments
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), and indicate if changes were made (no changes were made).