Addressing Food Insecurity during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Intervention Outcomes and Lessons Learned from a Collaborative Food Delivery Response in South Florida's Underserved Households.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted underlying disparities in health, healthcare access, and other social factors that have been documented for racial/ethnic minorities. The social-distancing mandate exacerbated the impact of social determinants of health, such as unemployment and food insecurity, particularly among underserved minority populations. We highlight intervention outcomes and lessons learned from the Florida International University (FIU) Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM) NeighborhoodHELP's response to pandemic-related food insecurity among Miami Dade County's underserved population. METHODS: Following the stay-at-home mandate, a weekly needs assessment of program households was conducted by the NeighborhoodHELP team, during which food insecurity emerged as a pandemic-related urgent need, rising from three percent of program Households in March 2020 to 36.9 percent six months later. Consequently, the program staff collaborated with another FIU department, community partners, and a benefactor to develop a food donation and delivery project. RESULTS: Fifteen hundred and forty-three culturally appropriate food boxes were delivered to 289 participating households, comprising 898 household members, over a 14-month period. CONCLUSION: This project underscores the importance of leveraging community assets to address their needs during a crisis and the significance of sustained community engagement for researchers and service providers who work in underserved communities.

COVID-19 doesn't change anything: Neoliberalism, generation-ism, academic library buildings, and lazy rivers.

Does COVID-19 challen04ge the persistence of neoliberalism? The pandemic and popular resistance to globalization seem to coincide, and there considerable discussion of neoliberalism within LIS now. First, this paper defines the centrality of the market as neoliberalism. With that in place, the remaining parts of the paper will explore and document phenomena in and related to academic libraries that instantiate how neoliberalism stubbornly persists. Second, the continuing reliance on generational cohorts to characterize incoming students - generation-ism- is a manifestation of categories of consumption and marketing. The influence of generation-ism on academic libraries is significant in the form of design pressures on space and to market the college experience. Third, where neoliberalism does tend to drive higher education investments in facilities, it results in the "lazy river" trend. This will be examined in direct contrast to the finance/space pressures on academic libraries. The paper concludes with a short discussion of these factors and what this analysis can tell us about academic libraries going forward into a post-COVID-19 era.