Summary
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Obesity and nutrition inequities remain critical public health challenges in Miami-Dade County, where 67% of adults are overweight or obese and 14% experience food insecurity. Independent grocery stores—often the primary food source in underserved neighborhoods—represent powerful yet underutilized venues for improving dietary behaviors. This project, Leveraging Independent Grocers as Community Health Hubs, adopts a transdisciplinary, community-based approach to enhance equitable access to healthy foods in five diverse Miami-Dade communities: Hialeah, Opa-locka, Liberty City, Little Haiti, and Little Havana. Guided by Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) frameworks, the team will collaborate with trusted community-based organizations to co-develop, implement, and evaluate a multi-component intervention. The study will: (1) improve store food environments through the creation of “Healthy Zones”; (2) develop and test culturally relevant, bilingual nutrition education campaigns; and (3) evaluate intervention impacts on consumer knowledge, behavior, and store practices. Using Nutrition Environment Measure Survey assessments, intercept surveys, and qualitative interviews, findings will inform sustainable models for health promotion through retail settings. This interdisciplinary collaboration—uniting sociology, behavioral medicine, and health communication—will generate pilot data, yield two peer-reviewed publications, and refine methods for future external funding. Through existing partnerships with the community-based organizations, the proposal promotes bidirectional knowledge exchange between academia and community. Collectively, these efforts advance U-LINK’s mission of fostering transdisciplinary education, team science, and community-engaged research to promote health equity and obesity prevention across South Florida. |
Team
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Hadis Elyaderani (Global Health Studies & Department of Sociology & Criminology), Sara StGeorge (Prevention Science & Community Health Division, Public Health Sciences Department), Rhonda Trust (Communication Studies, School of Communication)
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