Applying Systems Thinking to Advance Nutrition and Health Equity in the Charitable Food System: Case Examples From...

Food banking operates as a complex subsystem within the wider national and international food system, encompassing food sourcing and timely food distribution among communities varying widely in their social support, culture and socioeconomic status, thus presenting both opportunities and challenges when designing equitable food, nutrition and health strategies.

Three case examples demonstrate the value of systems thinking across multidisciplinary efforts focused on nutrition and health equity initiatives within Virginia's charitable food system (CFS). A Use Case Diagram (UCD) was used to develop a cloud-based platform, Nourish, to operationalise food ranking in food bank systems. Principles of Group Model Building (GMB) were applied to the process of developing a statewide health equity plan for Virginia's CFS, while also adapting a visual model to represent system disruption. A Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) was designed to visualise the individual, policy, systems and environmental impacts of sourcing more nutritious food.

Systems thinking tools such as UCD, GMB and CLD were instrumental in analysing the complex internal and external factors of Virginia's CFS and determining strategies and solutions to improve nutritious food sourcing, food distribution and health equity goals.

The multidisciplinary nature of this collective work allowed collaborators to draw on a rich set of systems tools and expand the applicability of systems thinking approaches.