Food for Change

The Issue

Food insecurity is a multidimensional problem, driven by access to housing, healthcare, and employment. Families struggling with living expenses often have to make budget tradeoffs, tending to cut out nutritious food to pay for other, more rigid needs such as rent. When families turn to more affordable foods that are less nutritious, they risk higher healthcare costs and employment struggles due to chronic health conditions, further contributing to the cycle of poverty. As living costs rise, more families have to make these difficult decisions. Traditional food banks focus on bridging the gap between the existing need for food and amount of surplus food, without addressing the underlying factors that contribute to food insecurity. Houston Food Bank has been serving more people and providing more food over the past forty years, but hunger has not decreased.

The Intervention

Food for Change is an initiative that aims to help people struggling with hunger find a path out of poverty and towards long-term stability. Houston Food Bank partners with colleges and universities to identify potentially food-insecure students to enroll in the Food Scholarship. The Food Scholarship distributes up to 120 pounds of groceries from Food for Change markets to students facing food insecurity. The goal of the program is to lower the financial stress of students’ grocery costs so that they are better equipped to get the education they need to achieve financial independence. However, currently only 31.5% of enrolled students never visit a pantry in their first semester of enrollment, with 24% only visiting once.

Research Question

• What is the impact of a text-message-based engagement strategy on student's participation in the Food Scholarship program?
• Does text messaging increase the use of a food pantry/market?
• Will texts lead to increased benefits utilization, leading to improved academic outcomes such as GPA, credit hours, and enrollment?

Intended Outcomes

• LEO and Houston Food Bank are partnering to evaluate the impact of text message nudges on visits to Food For Change Markets, specifically on increased visits for each student and larger shares of students visiting at least once.
• Researchers also plan to measure academic outcomes such as GPA, enrollment status, as well as financial stability, food security, and overall measures of financial wellbeing, including credit scores.

 

Research Study Design

LEO plans to perform a randomized control trial (RCT) to evaluate the impact of a text nudge on participation on Houston Food Bank’s Food for Change Program. Any student enrolled at University of Houston, University of Houston Downtown, and Houston City College are eligible for participation in the Food for Change Program. At the outset of the program, in spring 2025, there were approximately 4600 students enrolled across the three colleges.

In order to receive food from the food bank, students are directed towards an initial application to collect baseline information and create a user profile. Once a student creates a user profile, they are randomly assigned to one of 8 arms: the first group will receive a proactive text only at the program outset, the second group will receive a reactive text after not visiting for 21 days, the third will receive both types of texts, and the fourth is the control group, that will receive no texts. The secondary arms include individuals offered money to complete a quality of life survey and those not offered money to complete the survey.

LEO and Houston Food Bank hope to determine the impact of text nudges on participation in the food bank, and secondarily, on academic outcomes of those enrolled in the study.

 

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