The Worcester Food Insecurity Story Archive was created to serve as a platform for gathering and storing stories of the Worcester community. The platform aims to give our community a permanent place to draw stories from so that they can be used to advocate for change in our Worcester food environment and at the state level when needed.
Food insecurity is a prevalent issue in Worcester. In 2020, 17.7% of Worcester residents were estimated to be food insecure according to the Worcester Regional Research Bureau (2022). These residents often struggle in silence, and deal with their hardships on their own.
The lived experiences of these Worcester residents are essential and valuable in understanding what changes are most needed and in informing future policies. Their stories are a powerful method for learning about individuals and families’ experiences with food access in Worcester, and they can help us convince stakeholders, policymakers, and elected officials to listen and take action.
Having these stories recorded and stored in a digital archive will make them easily accessible for public use and for sharing with stakeholders. The stories will highlight the experiences of real people in the Worcester community surrounding the four priority areas which are 1) Impacts of federal cuts, 2) Grocery closures and access, 3) SNAP grocery delivery, and 4) DTA access in Worcester
he Worcester Food Insecurity Story Archive was created collaboratively by the Worcester Center on Food Equity and the Coalition for a Healthy Greater Worcester, including team members:
- Casey Burns, Executive Director Coalition for a Healthy Greater Worcester, and Co-director of the Center on Food Equity
- Gina Plata-Nino, Co-director of the Center on Food Equity, Deputy Director for SNAP at the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC)
- Jillian Lang, Intern at the Center on Food Equity, Tufts University MS/MPH nutrition graduate student
- Deb Powers, Communications and Webmaster at the Center on Food Equity
Partner organizations throughout the Worcester community helped us recruit storytellers including Jeremiah’s Inn. Guidance was provided by UMass Medical School members.
In the summer of 2025, the process of creating a storytelling archive began with research on ethical storytelling and gathering. Once the storytelling project team felt confident about best practices for ethical story gathering, they began to refine their intended audience for the stories and think about what stories would best reach those audiences. Then, the team identified the story priority areas, which we felt were the most important areas to gather stories in for creating change in the Worcester food environment.
After the audience and story priority areas were identified, the team started recruiting participants. We created a google form for gathering interest in community participation in the project. Then, we called people who responded to the Google form, screened them, and scheduled storytelling sessions with them. Storytelling sessions were conducted, and then the stories were edited to short clips focused on the priority areas, and especially meaningful quotes were transcribed.
What you see here is the culmination of all of the above work, and we hope you will find it useful.
The Worcester Food Insecurity Story Archive will remain on the Center on Food Equity website to hopefully be used as a resource for the Worcester community to advocate for change in the Worcester food environment.
We hope the stories will be used to share the experiences of Worcester residents with change-makers in our community and to ignite action in them. These changemakers may include local organizational leaders, policy council members, legislators and inspired residents.
To learn more about the archive, or to ask questions, please contact:
- Jillian Lang, Story Archive Coordinator, at Jillian.Lang@tufts.edu or 774-303-9041
- Casey Burns, Storytelling Project Leader, at casey@healthygreaterworcester.org or 508-425-0729
Thank you to everyone who has helped us create the archive!