ASU students train food bank leaders on new dashboard to address food insecurity

In partnership with St. Mary’s Food Bank, students and faculty from Arizona State University developed a dashboard to help food banks tackle food insecurity across the state.

The digital tool consists of a wide variety of data, including census demographics, grocery store locations and statistics on SNAP participation.

At a Feb. 9 workshop hosted by St. Mary’s, food bank officials had a chance to learn from a group of students how to navigate the service.

Assistant professor Aaron Flores says the goal is to visualize food insecurity to improve how to allocate resources.

“We actually all got together for several months, probably about once a week, and really worked hard on putting together as simple of a training that we could.” And we tried to keep in mind that many of these people have never worked with this type of software," he said.

Flores also says the dashboard showed one particular area with a food insecurity issue.

“Those aren't the only places where food insecurity is high, but it's pretty clear when you look at a map of Arizona that our tribal lands are experiencing high rates of food insecurity," he said.

According to Feeding America, over 1 million Arizonans — roughly 14% of the population — experienced food insecurity in 2023.