Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** qari has proposed a school-based…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.** qari has proposed a school-based community food project addressing food security needs for migrant and asylum-seeking families in new york city. Almost 20,000 migrant and asylum-seeking students started at new york public schools in the 2023-24 academic year. Many of their families have unstable housing and employment, which subsequently increases food insecurity. Qari, a community-based organization serving immigrants in NYC for the past 7 years, proposes to partner with 10 public elementary schools across high-needs bronx and queens school districts. Our goal is to reduce the language, informational, and financial barriers that migrant and asylum-seeking families face in accessing healthy food. Five activities will help US achieve this: (1) produce bags to 800 families through the snap-based fresh food box model; (2) providing 750 families with multilingual snap enrollment and recertification assistance; (3) providing esol classes for 150 student caregivers; (4) hosting 45 nutrition education events to share multilingual information about healthy eating and local resources in the school neighborhoods; (5) conducting a community needs assessment to inform the development of a pilot workforce readiness program for migrant and asylum-seeking adults. Our goals and activities strongly align with the cfpcgp program goals by focusing on multiple approaches to meet the immediate food needs of low-income migrant and asylum-seeking families, while helping them build their knowledge and language capacity to navigate their new food system and also laying the foundation for qari to provide future programming addressing economic and workforce needs as an upstream determinant of community food security.