WEST SPRINGFIELD – As part of the Mass in Motion program, West Springfield has partnered with the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission (PVPC) to conduct a food survey across the city.

The goal of the survey is to determine access to nutritious food in West Springfield. By responding to the survey, residents are helping the town identify any barriers that the city may face when it comes to being food secure.

“The survey itself is a part of a larger effort to create the West Springfield food security action plan,” said Corrin Meise-Munns, senior planner for the PVPC. “The action plan is a culmination of food assessment work that we have been partnering with the town of West Springfield on since about 2014 or 2015.”

Through the help of funding from the Massachusetts Department of Health’s Mass in Motion program, the PVPC and West Springfield have been able to conduct worthwhile food assessments throughout the entire city over these past five or six years. Out of every city in the Pioneer Valley, only West Springfield and Palmer have asked for food security plans to be conducted in their districts. Mass in Motion has also helped the city of West Springfield search for ways to encourage physical activity amongst its residents.

“The early years helped us produce walking maps for folks to use to be physically active,” said Jeanne Galloway, the Director of Public Health for West Springfield. “We did walking audits to locate and improve opportunities for students to travel to school by bike.”

According to Meise-Munns, Mass in Motion was pretty prescriptive with what kind of food assessments the PVPC would do. For example, they would provide the PVPC with what they would consider to be healthy foods based on the USDA food pyramid.

“Work that we might do would be going around local food stores and checking off boxes, and see how many of the small convenience stores or small ethnic food stores are selling ‘healthy food,’” Meise-Munns said.

As the years passed however, Mass in Motion started to become more receptive to West Springfield’s specific residential population. The city itself, according to a news report from New England Public Media, ranks fourth in the country for refugee resettlements. This, inherently, has created a more multi-cultural setting in West Springfield, thus making the prior food pyramid outdated.

“Mass in Motion has been very receptive about hearing that the USDA food pyramid and these healthy food fact sheets don’t reflect multi-cultural diets,” said Meise-Munns. “Over the course of the years that we’ve been working with West Springfield, we’ve really been trying to determine food access through a cultural perspective.”

Rather than dwell on a finite, and ultimately limited, list of food categories, the PVPC instead focused their attention on access to food, and whether or not certain markets and stores are selling culturally-appropriate food. Affordable cuisine, and fresh whole foods are also monitored with regard to access to healthy ingredients in the city.

“The goal of the plan is to ensure and enhance equitable access to healthy and culturally-relevant food where it’s most needed,” said Meise-Munns.

The survey allows residents to give their own perspective on whether or not they have proper access to healthy and nutritious food, particularly since, according to Meise-Munns, top down data, like census data, can be misleading at times.

“The answers that we got back on other surveys, we feel like we’ve gotten good responses to some specific questions, but not an overall picture of the population,” said Meise-Munns.

Meise-Munns hopes that this survey will provide up-to-date information from a more comprehensive view of food security.

The survey is still a work-in-progress at this very moment, according to Meise-Munns. PVPC is currently working on translations for the survey to reflect the varied cultural population in West Springfield. They currently have a Spanish translation, and they hope to have Napoli, Russian, and Arabic ones within the next couple of weeks.

The PVPC is also trying to see how people are answering the questions before officially implementing an expiration date for the survey.

“Based off of whenever we get those versions up (with different languages), then we will give the survey four to six weeks of being open,” said Meis-Munns.

The hope is that the survey can stay open for the holidays, but ultimately, Meis-Munns and the PVPC may keep it open longer if they feel that the responses are anemic.

“At the end of the survey, we will do a big review of the data, and incorporate that into the [food security] plan, and sort of mold the strategies that the plan will ultimately result in based off of what the survey respondents are giving us,” said Meis-Munn.

Survey respondents will also have the option to leave their name and contact information, so they can be entered into raffle for a chance to win one of four $25 gift certificates to Big Y supermarket. Winners will be announced following the expiration date of the survey, likely sometime in December, according to Meis-Munns.

The survey can be found online at https://forms.gle/XWKtcHWTssvDPVZP9. There are 24 questions in all.