Best Practices in Providing Technical Assistance to Rural Grocery Stores

Rural grocery stores often seek help from outside the store to support various business, marketing, and community outreach activities to both support the store’s bottom line and enable it to access and take advantage of existing grants, loans, and supporting efforts (e.g., KHFI, FINI, USDA RD, etc.), and numerous efforts in Kansas and beyond include working with rural grocery stores as a means of expanding food access in rural areas and/or supporting complementary efforts (e.g., nutrition education, produce distribution, double up bucks). This panel is still useful for grocers since we include a variety of resources available, but is particularly useful for foundations to think about why and how to build in TA for grocers to their grants, and for local organizations (e.g., economic development directors, extension agents, WIC, nonprofits, etc.) to learn more from local, state, and national experts familiar with working with a wide variety of rural food retailers about how best to work with rural grocery stores and provide needed resources that meet their business goals too.