Articles by Christina Goette

Teamwork makes the dream work

by | Dec 11, 2023 | Uncategorized

By Christina Goette

It’s the time of year when we reflect back and look ahead. Daily, I strive to keep gratitude at the forefront, recognizing that we live in the midst of pain and suffering, both here in SF and across the globe. For me, it makes it even more important to seize those opportunities for which to be grateful. Seeing magic in a clear drop of rain resting on a leaf or feeling joy when a stranger smiles and scoots over so you can sit down after a long day… these are the little moments that sustain me. On another level, my heart expands when I look back at what we have accomplished together in 15 years. For me it started in 2006, when a small team in DPH, led by Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s current Secretary of Health and Human Services, developed the first nexus study to ascertain the impact of sugary drinks on health. In the community, with the Bay Area Nutrition and Physical Activity Collaborative, Shape Up SF embarked on the first Bay Area Regional Soda Free Summer campaign in 2008 – our first public foray into the world of sugary drinks. In the intervening decade and a half, we worked together to take on the mighty sugary drink industry. But who is “we”? “We” is community based organizations, scientists, community organizers, health parity advocates, policy makers, community members, researchers, city departments, parents, health advocacy organizations, students, political consultants, PTAs… to name a smattering of those who bonded over the fight for health. “We” is us, united for health.

Last month, we celebrated FIVE YEARS of the SF Soda Tax. San Francisco is one of only four jurisdictions in California to successfully take on the industry and pass a fee, so we celebrated! The Department of Public Health’s Healthy Eating Active Living team led a series of events to mark the occasion: Marianne Szeto led the overall effort and partnered with Blythe Young at the American Heart Association and co-lead of Shape Up SF’s Policy, Systems, Environments Action Team (PSEAT) on the policy panel. Kim Wong organized the kick off event with the Florence Fang Community Farm and many of our soda tax funded partners. Melinda Martin convened the Medical Grand Rounds at Zuckerberg General Hospital with Dr. Dean Schillenger and team. Avi Rose orchestrated our school-based event with our SFUSD partners, Urban Sprouts, and June Jordan School for Equity. I am immensely grateful for this incredible team: dedicated, collaborative and SO MUCH FUN to work with. And I want to extend my deep gratitude to all who organized and participated last month and over the past couple of decades. It may be cliched, but it’s definitely true: Teamwork makes the dream work! 

Keep reading the blog this week to get the highlights of these beautifully orchestrated events celebrating our success as a community committed to health equity. The HEAL Team will post a new blog post each day!

Click below to read the posts:

“Bringing together community in celebration: five years of soda tax success” by Kim Wong

“Results of a community-public health-academic partnership” by Melinda Martin

“Centering youth empowerment: a celebration of 5 Years of SF soda tax in partnership with Urban Sprouts and June Jordan School for Equity” by Avi Rose

“Policy panelists speak from the heart about the power of community” by Marianne Szeto

Get Involved with Soda Tax Budget Recommendations!

by | Jan 17, 2023 | Uncategorized

Happy New Year! 2023 marks the 5-year anniversary of San Francisco’s soda tax.

With COVID-19 here to stay, 2022 brought new challenges to face as a society, like inflation. When time and money are tight, buying cheap food or drinks seems like a smart thing to do to stretch the dollar. But there’s more to deciding what to eat. In her book, How the Other Half Eats, Dr. Priya Fielding Singh explores how and why we eat the way we do. For example, some parents with limited incomes want to feel like they can give their children something special. While they may have to say “no” to a laptop or a trip to Great America, they can afford to say “yes” to a candy bar, a fast food meal or a soda. But the issue is more complicated than “just saying no”, especially when inflation plays a role. Did you know that San Francisco has programs that teach families how to make healthy foods with limited time and budget? The SF Soda Tax funds some of these programs.

SFDPH has heard from the community that they don’t know what the soda tax has funded and who is benefiting from the funding. To address this knowledge gap, our evaluation partners, Raimi + Associates, are developing a data dashboard with online maps and charts that describe how the soda tax funds are serving SF by race/ethnicity, income, neighborhood, and select health outcomes. These data will be regularly updated and will be available to the public.

2022 was a busy year for the Sugary Drinks Distributor Tax Advisory Committee (SDDTAC). This year, the revenue from the tax in Fiscal Year 2022-23 was $13,740,000. After mandated set-asides, the SDDTAC will be making recommendations for $11 million for the Fiscal Year 2023-24 and 2024-25. The Committee always wants to hear from community members; you can attend their online meetings to comment on their recommendations – their meeting information can be found here. The committee is using the Aliah Think Tool to streamline the decision-making process. Once the SDDTAC sends their final recommendations to the Mayor’s Office and the Board of Supervisors, the work isn’t done! The next phase is to meet with policymakers and educate them about the SDDTAC’s process and encourage them to support the recommendations.

Since 2018, soda tax champions like SPUR and the Shape Up SF Coalition have organized these meetings with the Board of Supervisors. If you are interested in joining SPUR, Shape Up SF, and SDDTAC members to promote the 2023 recommendations, reach out to Paloma Sisneros-Lobato or Blythe Young.

We hope that the meetings with the Board of Supervisors and the new maps and data will help show the impact that the soda tax is having in San Francisco.

What’s happened since the Soda Tax went into effect

by | May 23, 2022 | Uncategorized

Four and a half years after the hard-fought SF soda tax was implemented, the results are in: the tax is working as scientists had predicted. In the two years after the tax was implemented, UC researchers* reported a statistically significant decrease in the amount of sugary beverages purchased in San Francisco, compared to Richmond, CA. The researchers found a 20% decrease in sugary drinks bought in SF compared to Richmond; they also found that purchases of sugary drinks at supermarkets in San Francisco decreased by more than 50%. But that is just the beginning; these numbers don’t tell the complete story.

With that, we welcome you to the SF Soda Tax Blog. This blog will keep you posted on the latest SF soda tax news, stories and results from funded organizations, sugary drink science, and more. We’ll have monthly blogs, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less frequently. If you have a topic you want to hear about let us know!

The Soda Tax is officially called the Sugary Drinks Distributor Tax (SDDT) because it covers non-alcoholic drinks with more than 25 calories of added sugar in a 12 ounce serving, but we’re using Soda Tax for short. There’s also the Sugary Drinks Distributor Tax Advisory Committee (SDDTAC) which we’ll refer to as the Committee.

In this first blog, we’ll review what’s happened since the Soda Tax went into effect; these findings come from the 2019-20 Evaluation Report and the 2020-21 Evaluation Report developed by our evaluation partners Raimi+Associates. You’ll find even more info on this newly updated website. 

Most soda tax grantees received their funding in July 2019; half a year before our lives were irrevocably changed in ways unimaginable. Grantees were just getting their programs running when they pivoted to a whole new shelter-in-place world. COVID-19 magnified the inequities that systemic racism has perpetuated; adding yet another layer of injustice. Luckily Soda Tax funding helped strengthen relationships between SFDPH and community-embedded organizations, enabling those organizations to quickly deploy emergency food assistance to community members hardest hit by the pandemic and related economic impacts. 

During Fiscal Year 2020-2021, more than 40,100 people participated in Soda Tax funded grant programs like sealants on elementary kids’ teeth, healthy snack champs at SFUSD, wellness and healing programs in the community, free fresh fruits and veggies, doulas for pregnant Latinx, Black/African Americans and Pacific Islanders; nutrition education, and lots of opportunities to get physically active! 

Most of the participants in Soda Tax funded programs were Black/African American and Latinx. These are the populations often targeted by the industry and subsequently also have the highest prevalence of diet-related diseases. Additionally, the majority of people were under 25 years old; and more than 3,000 were pregnant when they participated.

Eighty-eight percent of Soda Tax funded staff were people of color and 77% were SF residents: these numbers align with the Committee’s desire to pay people in the priority populations to do the work. And the majority of soda tax funded program participants and program staff lived in Bayview Hunters Point, Civic Center/the Tenderloin, the Excelsior, the Mission, Potrero Hill, and Visitacion Valley.

Lastly, several research projects identified the SF Soda Tax and the Committee as effective in addressing health disparities resulting from the consumption of sugary drinks as well as addressing long-standing inequities. Specifically, the Committee’s values ensured that Soda Tax funded programming focuses on and effectively engages communities most burdened by inequities. And organizations and agencies used Soda Tax funding to help communities experiencing the worst health and economic impacts of the pandemic meet basic needs while simultaneously supporting the structural changes necessary to promote equity.

Those are a few highlights from the past several years. As I wrap up this inaugural blog, I’d like to share that I had the incredible honor and privilege to work with our city leadership to help draft the Soda Tax legislation. To get to help implement the Soda Tax revenue is truly the ultimate dream come true for a public health groupie like me. To witness the incredible good that the Soda Tax has supported and see its potential gives me great hope in an era that is so often beset by pain and despair. 

I raise a tall glass of San Francisco tap water in honor of our Soda Tax-funded organizations for taking this important public health work to the next level! 

Cheers!

Christina Goette
Healthy Eating/Active Living Program Manager
SDDTAC Backbone and SDDT Grants Program
SF Department of Public Health

*This research was conducted by Justin White and Dean Schillinger at the University of California, San Francisco, Sofia Villas-Boas and Kristine Madsen at the University of California, Berkeley, Scott Kaplan at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Sanjay Basu at Waymark Health. These findings have been submitted to a journal for publication and were in the peer-review process when this evaluation report was finalized in February 2022.