Food and healing: an urban community food security assessment for the North End of Winnipeg

The North End of Winnipeg is an urban Canadian community, which is affected by poverty and food insecurity. A community food security assessment is used here as a model to understand the complexities of food security issues, which are generally embedded in cultural and socio-demographic attributes of a society. Interviews with key informants and focus group discussions were conducted with the North End Women's Healing Group to address the objective of finding the link between urban issues and food security. Through these activities, a diversity of themes relating to food security were covered, and the findings revealed an important nexus connecting nutritional state, emotional well-being, food security issues and community programming. We recommend policy and programming that can address the unique challenges found in urban settings and suggest a participatory approach to reveal such challenges.