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Developing a Support Application for Food Pantries (SAFPAS) to Improve Client Access to Healthy Foods & Enhance Emergency Preparedness
Sponsor: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Summary
Food pantries face many challenges, including recruitment and training of staff/volunteers, communications with staff/volunteers and clients, providing client choice, and emergency preparedness. The investigators will develop, implement, and evaluate the Support Application for Food Pantries (SAFPAS), a mobile application to address these concerns under normal and emergency operations, and assess its impact on 20 Baltimore food pantries, and on the healthiness of foods received by 360 food pantry clients using a randomized controlled trial design. If successful, the tested and refined app will support local food assistance programs throughout the United States.
Key Details
Gender
All
Age Range
18 Years - Any
Study Type
INTERVENTIONAL
Enrollment
537
Start Date
2023-06-14
Completion Date
2026-11-30
Last Updated
2025-12-17
Healthy Volunteers
Yes
Conditions
Interventions
Support Application for Food PAntrieS (SAFPAS) - A mobile app that helps food pantries recruit, train and schedule volunteers, offer choice safely, and provides multilevel communications
The primary intervention is a mobile application (app) which supports food pantries to recruit, train and schedule volunteers; provide a safe, remote form of client choice; and provides a means of sharing real-time status information with clients, pantries, food banks, and emergency operation centers. Following formative work, user centered design, and usability testing, the SAFPAS app will be implemented in three stages, where each stage introduces new features. Pantry clients will be encouraged to download the app and learn its key features at the end of baseline data collection. During the first weeks of each stage, training of participating food pantry directors/staff and Maryland Food Bank (MFB) staff will take place - focusing on use of any new features. Initial training will be follow up by proficiency testing.
Locations (1)
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, Maryland, United States