Volunteer Assists Warehouses4Good with Site Selection Analysis

Inadequate, unaffordable, or non-existent warehouse space in rural counties limits both inbound deliveries of donated food and outbound transport of locally-produced, revenue-generating products. Rural counties make up 63% of the US total, but account for 78% of all counties experiencing high food insecurity. Regional food banks serving these communities with food donations are often 100 miles or more away, increasing cost and decreasing frequency of rural food relief. More daunting, warehouse space in these communities is either non-existent or not fit for this purpose. As a result, rural families have less access to fresh food, dairy, and high protein egg and meat products, compared to urban and suburban populations. Using advanced tools for site selection, planning, construction and operation, Warehouses4Good aims to build or buy/renovate facilities which will host hunger relief and food hub non-profits in these underserved rural communities.

GISCorps volunteer Megan Young from California was selected to help Warehouses4Good identify locations where warehouse space will have the most positive impact on communities across the country.

Megan used ArcGIS Pro to conduct the site suitability selection. The process began with incorporating updated datasets from Feeding America, USDA Economic Research Service, Census Bureau, and the LivingAtlas to identify the underserved counties. “Underserved” counties were defined as rural counties typified by persistent poverty that are located partially or entirely outside of a 60-mile radius of an existing Feeding America food bank member location. Megan geocoded the Feeding America Food Bank member address list and applied a 60-mile buffer to these locations. Feeding America assigns each member locations to serve specific counties, so Megan incorporated an additional dataset that accounts for this operational structure by cropping the buffers to the assigned counties for each location. Then, she joined county-level data from the Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap report and the USDA ERS County typology table to enrich a county shapefile layer. She selected the counties outside of the cropped buffers and filtered the results to find the underserved counties: rural (non-metro) counties experiencing persistent poverty that lay outside the 60-mile radius. This approach will help Warehouses4Good prioritize communities where adding food storage and distribution capacity will have the greatest impact.

Megan published the results to ArcGIS Online and built a web map for the Warehouses4Good website. She also generated tables that summarized which congressional districts and representatives cover the underserved counties and generated national/state level PDF maps for targeted lobbying efforts.

To enable Warehouses4Good to update the suitability analysis in the future, Megan coded a Python script tool that automates the entire workflow in a few clicks. The tool imports 4 spreadsheets and a shapefile into a geodatabase, runs the necessary spatial operations, and outputs a county layer with the results of the suitability analysis. She wrote documentation detailing instructions on running the tool and recorded a series of tutorial videos that walks the user through preparing the inputs, running the script, and handling the results to update the maps.

Megan set up a StoryMap outline that will be continued by future Warehouse4Good staff and volunteers. The StoryMap will explain the current situation in rural food access and philanthropy, visualize the results of the suitability analysis, and detail current Warehouses4Good projects and other advocacy efforts.

Project Complete