SEFA Launches New Website

The Southeast Food Access Coalition (SEFA), a Bayview Hunters Point-based project of the Shape Up San Francisco initiative, launched a new website at www.SoutheastFoodAccess.org. The new site highlights the work of SEFA and the Food Guardians, and features a section on where to find healthy food in the Bayviewat local stores and food pantries; community gardens and gardening resources; and community-based organizations that offer nutrition education. The website provides ratings of 20 corner stores and small markets and 4 larger food markets located in the Bayview, with information about the types of healthy food available at each store.

SEFA is a collaborative of residents, community based organizations, city agencies, and others working on food access and food systems. SEFA's goal is to leverage similar efforts and encourage partnerships and collaboration in order to achieve a vibrant and robust food system for all in Bayview Hunters Point. The SEFA Food Guardians are a group of BayviewHunters Point residents who educate, advocate, and mobilize to address community food security and justice, promote nutrition education and awareness, and support urban agriculture in their community.

The Food Divide

From the SF Bay Guardian,

Under the weight of recession and double-digit unemployment, San Francisco's chronic food divide has grown deeper and wider. From regions of the city like Bayview, Excelsior, and other Southeast neighborhoods, to seniors surviving on marginal fixed incomes, to the city's swelling unemployed and underemployed who rely on food pantries, access to fresh food is a daily geographic and economic battle.

Roughly one in five San Franciscans each day has no reliable source of adequate sustenance and must scramble for food from soup kitchens, food pantries, or other "emergency" supplies that have become a structural part of the city's food system, according to the San Francisco Food Bank.

Read more at the SF Bay Guardian