This session will feature the increased health sector collaboration with food assistance providers during the pandemic. Speakers will describe solutions including repurposing a mobile dental van for food distributions, providing food assistance to those quarantined due to COVID, and distributing food at clinics.

Speakers:

• Sharon Arndt, Fairfax County Health Department

• Kate Garsson, Inova

Restaurants and food businesses were hit hard during COVID. According to the National Restaurant Association, 2020 restaurant sales were $240 million below pre-COVID projections. In this session, speakers will discuss initiatives that helped food businesses survive, kept people employed, and even fed those in need.

Speakers

• Dawn Hyman, One Fairfax

• Loreann Grimes, Frontier Kitchen

• Cheryl Bonenberger, Great American Restaurants

With schools closed, creative solutions were needed to bring food assistance directly to communities most in need. In this session, speakers will detail two solutions rapidly created at the start of the pandemic: one from a nonprofit that began food assistance for the first time, and another from one of the nation’s largest school systems.

Speakers

• Maralee Gutiérrez, Comunidad

• Maria Perrone, Fairfax County Public Schools

Both farmers markets and community and school gardens – two pivotal components of our county’s agricultural landscape – shut down during COVID. In this session, speakers reflect on how the Fairfax Food Council’s Urban Agriculture Work Group not only re-opened local gardens, but began to expand gardens and help people grow their own food. Speakers will also discuss how one Fairfax farm implemented new models of selling local produce.

Speakers

• Stacey Evers, Fairfax Food Council Urban Agriculture Work Group

• Hiu Newcomb, Potomac Vegetable Farms

As the nation shut down last spring, unemployment rates rose from 3.5% to 14.9% in just two months (February – April 2020). This rapid loss of employment forced many to use a food pantry for the first time. In this session, speakers will describe how food assistance providers worked with this population, and increased their capacity to meet a demand that was nearly 4x pre-pandemic levels.

Speakers

• Cynthia Singiser, Capital Area Food Bank

• Pamela Montesinos, Western Fairfax Christian Ministries