Entrepreneurial businesses and non-profit organizations are addressing the gap in service delivery in low-income urban areas through the innovative use of mobile infrastructure. The challenges presented by the long-term disinvestment in urban areas include a lack of access to healthy, affordable foods, health care services, and other resources that higher-income areas take for granted. Establishing new, permanent health care facilities, full-service grocery stores, and farmers market requires large capital investments, time, and commitment. By putting these services on wheels, organizations across the country are providing an intermediate step to reinvestment in urban communities.
Health care providers from Boston to New Orleans are providing a range of health care services through mobile delivery, including education; prevention services; and testing for hypertension, glaucoma, pregnancy, cholesterol, and HIV/AIDS. Serving primarily the uninsured in Washington DC, the Washington on Wheels Mobile Health Clinic is staffed by a doctor and a nurse practitioner who conduct regularly-scheduled visits to set locations around the District. Boston’s Family Van helped 2,322 patients identify previously undiagnosed conditions in 2010 and has assisted 50 percent of its regular clients to control their chronic conditions. To learn more about mobile health project across the country, www.mobilehealthmap.org provides information on over 450 projects as well as links to additional resources and data.
Mobile delivery opportunities extend beyond health care to the local food movement. In upstate New York, the Capital District Community Gardens’ Veggie Mobile (shown in "hyperdrive" in the video to the right) has operated since 2007 as a “produce-market-on-wheels that sells wholesale fruits and vegetables to low-income communities and independent senior living communities.” Operating out of a converted delivery truck topped with solar panels, this mobile service works with local farmers to provide access to seasonal produce at an affordable rate. Other mobile food truck projects include Farm to Family and the Real Food Farm’s Mobile Farmers Market.
In a recent interview with On Being’s Krista Tippet, international conflict mediator John Paul Lederach shared a haiku inspired by his work in Nepal:
Don’t ask the mountain
to move. Just bring a pebble
Each time you visit.
This eloquent idea can help urban planners frame innovative concepts for improving the range of services available in urban areas: mobile service delivery offers an opportunity to prove demand for and viability of services, opening the door to opportunities for future community investment in permanent bricks and mortar institutions.
Guest Contributor: Kate Bird
Kate, your blog post was very insightful and presents a relatively new method of service delivery that has not yet received much attention. Your idea of “mobility” of services was very helpful for my group’s final project on service delivery. I, too, focused on the mobility of the local food movement in mobile food pantries in both urban Richmond and rural Appalachia in our presentation.
Mobility has proved to be an effective solution to bringing the services directly to doorsteps of the neediest. The poor, in both urban and rural settings, oftentimes lack reliable transportation and public transportation infrastructure to take them to these services. Thus, mobile solutions, for health care delivery and food service delivery.
My only critique is that I am afraid that these mobile solutions are just temporary fixes to and do not solve the heart of the problem: the limits of access and faulty transportation. While innovations in methods of service delivery is necessary because of the very good reasons you present of the high investment, cost, time, and commitment of stable health clinics or grocery stores I still think establishing stable locations or strengthening transportation systems must not be overlooked.
Mobile community services that go directly into impoverished neighborhoods are definitely a necessary, but temporary solution. However, in order to solve the problem of access,a focus on solving the problem of unreliable transportation and the inability of the poor to move freely cannot be forgotten. “A vision of the future of transportation, in which all people will be able to transport themselves in a fast, convenient, and environmentally friendly way, using multiple modes of transportation” is a vision that the University of Michigan’s SMART program has developed.
The following article, in which you can learn more about the SMART program, talks about the necessity of mobile social services. However, it also talks about the overall term “mobility” as the actual mobility of the poor which allows them to move freely without depending on mobile services:
Why Mobility is Key in Helping the Urban Poor: http://sustainablecitiescollective.com/embarq/37352/mobiprize-moving-minds-moving-urban-poor
Again, thank you for your insightful piece! I think there will be lots of innovative strategies for mobile service delivery and it leaves me to wonder what other services, besides healthcare and food delivery, can benefit from mobile initiatives.
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