Connecting communities with kai during COVID-19

Doctoral candidate Kahurangi Dey (Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngaiterangi) is exploring emergent food networks that formed during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, the closure of food banks and other charitable food providers meant that access to food became a struggle for many, but two Lower Hutt organisations developed a new model of community-led food resilience that connected households with kai and aroha.

Doctoral candidate Kahurangi Dey (Ngāti Pūkenga, Ngaiterangi) is looking at the emergent food network that formed around the Common Unity Project and Kōkiri Marae as they received and redistributed resources in the Lower Hutt community during the COVID-19 lockdown from April to June 2020, in a project funded by the Health Research Council’s COVID-19 Equity Response grant.

Ms Dey says Common Unity was in a perfect position to respond to the needs of the community as it had an existing model that supported different ways of partnering with the community.

“Everything stopped when lockdown happened, but people still didn’t have food. Common Unity and Kōkiri Marae were able to fill that gap with an immediate response, which was a generative food resource for the community rather than a food bank,” she says.

“They were capable of receiving, preparing, and redistributing food from individuals, businesses, and other organisations, including the closed food banks.”

Of the 60,000 meals the project has provided to the community in six years, close to 20,000 were prepared and distributed during the COVID-19 lockdown. Ms Dey’s project aims to identify the different pathways that kai came to the network, will document the agile response from Common Unity, and evaluate the impact of these processes and actions on the wider community. From these findings, a plan and framework will be created to assist the community and others, negotiate disrupted food supplies, and ensure kai for all in a time of crisis.

Ms Dey is completing her PhD at the University, focusing on the Government’s Ka Ora, Ka Ako healthy school lunches initiative. Her research is motivated by a belief that, fundamentally, everyone has a right to sufficient, nutritious food.

“We live in a rich, democratic country and we are not currently meeting the right to food for everyone. Research has the ability to illuminate areas where we can be transformative in this space,” she says.