Food Aid Agency Data

Food banks and food aid agencies help address food insecurity issues throughout the United States. This mission focused on understanding how critical infrastructure failures impact the function of food aid agencies and how the change in functioning changes food access. This research focused on five infrastructure systems -- transportation, electric power, communications, water, and the buildings or facilities utilized by food aid agencies to carry out their normal activities. The functioning of food aid agencies was broken down into three branches or domains that are critical for the operation of a food aid agencies. Specifically, food aid agencies need 1) people to help run the operation, 2) property or, more generally, a physical structure or structures, to house and conduct operations; 3) products or food stuffs to distribute. This mission includes five social science collections. The first two collections provide background on the planning and agenda for a focus group and the data collected from the focus group. The next three collections relate to an online survey of food aid agencies. These collections include the sample frame (a list of all active food aid agencies invited to participate in the survey), the primary (raw) data collected from the survey, and an example of a secondary (curated) dataset that focuses on critical infrastructure failures and changes in food aid agency functioning.