Partnering With Food Pantries to Disseminate and Implement Eating Disorder Interventions

Food insecurity is associated with eating disorder psychopathology. This Spotlight describes why food pantries could be promising partners for disseminating and implementing eating disorder interventions.

Researchers are increasingly collaborating with community-based organizations to improve access to health interventions, because community-based organizations overcome structural barriers to traditional healthcare by being embedded physically in the communities they serve, convenient to visit, regularly frequented, and led by trusted community members.

We describe strategies we have identified with our partner to disseminate and implement our digital intervention for binge eating; we also discuss ways we support the pantry's needs to improve the mutuality of the partnership.

The potential benefits of partnerships with food pantries make this an area to explore further. Future research directions include deeply engaging with food pantries to determine how pantries benefit from disseminating and implementing eating disorder interventions and how to intervene in non-stigmatizing ways, what resources they need to sustainably support these efforts, what eating disorder intervention modalities guests are willing and able to engage with, what intervention adaptations are needed so individuals with food insecurity can meaningfully engage in eating disorder intervention, and what implementation strategies facilitate uptake to intervention sustainably over time.