Households may experience food insecurity when access to food is limited, inadequate, or unsafe. Food insecurity affects many families across the United States, including immigrant and refugee households. Collecting reliable data helps community organizations:
- Understand the needs of the families they serve
- Design better programs and services
- Strengthen funding applications Advance advocacy efforts
- Compare their community’s situation to state or national data
This toolkit provides practical, step-by-step guidance for practitioners (or service providers) to measure household food security within the communities they serve. Service providers can use this toolkit to help identify and monitor risks to household food security by collecting high-quality data that reflects client experiences. Measuring household food security can be helpful in individual case assessments to systematically identify households and families in need of support. Broader findings from community-level surveys can also be shared with partners, funders, policymakers, and local client communities to highlight opportunities to strengthen programs and policy.
Steps toward measuring household food security outlined in this toolkit include the following:
- Selecting a household food security measure
- Designing a short digital survey to measure household food security
- Selecting survey participants and collecting data
- Cleaning, scoring, and preparing data (using Excel)
- Basic data analysis, presentation, and visualization of findings (using Excel)
