City Green awarded $200,000 from New Jersey Food Security Initiative (NJFSI) to grow Good Food Bucks

City Green is proud to be one of 5 grantees for the New Jersey Food Security Initiative, supported by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to combat hunger and improve health outcomes statewide across New Jersey.

Through this award, City Green aims to expand the statewide Good Food Bucks SNAP nutrition incentive program, making healthy fresh fruits and vegetables accessible to more New Jerseyans. By fostering connections between local farmers, grocers, and consumers with low incomes, the Good Food Bucks program helps make healthy food affordable. Every time a shopper uses their SNAP card at a participating Good Food Bucks farm market or grocery store, they receive a Good Food Bucks discount or coupon for fresh produce!

Nutrition incentive programs like Good Food Bucks are a recommended strategy in FRAC’s 2022 “Hunger and Its Solutions in New Jersey” report. Good Food Bucks uses cross-sector collaboration between the agricultural, private, nonprofit, and local government sectors to successfully connect households with SNAP to fresh food. The program loosens grocery budgets and allows consumers the opportunity to select more healthy, fresh food when doing their grocery shopping.

Bringing Good Food Bucks to more locations is a win for New Jersey residents, farmers, and communities.

Map of Good Food Buck farm market and grocery store partners in 2024. Dark green counties indicate higher rates of SNAP participation.

Over its 13 years of operating Good Food Bucks, City Green has proven that the Good Food Bucks program increases the consumption of healthy food for low-income New Jerseyans by addressing two barriers to connecting consumers to producers: affordability and accessibility.

With funding from NJFSI, City Green will be able to more equitably implement the Good Food Bucks program across New Jersey's 21 counties, with a focus on deepening the program’s reach in counties with a high concentration of communities designated as "food deserts" by the NJ Economic Development Authority: Essex, Passaic, Camden, Cumberland, Salem, and Atlantic. The project will also involve a targeted media and outreach campaign to communities with Good Food Buck retail sites to make more people aware that nutrition incentives are available to them.

NJFSI, which is a collaboration of community organizations and local and state agencies led by the Food Research & Action Center (FRAC), awarded $1.07 million in grants funding to support five projects aimed at driving transformation in practices, policies, systems, and environments, to boost food security and enhance nutrition for health equity in New Jersey. The funding is made possible by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF).

Learn more at https://njfsi.org/news/f/njfsi-awards-over-1-million-in-grants-to-combat-hunger-in-nj

For more information about the Good Food Bucks program, visit goodfoodbucks.com or contact us at goodfoodbucks@city-green.org.