For Student Consultants on Food Security, a Place at the Table.
At a meeting of the Let’s Get Healthy Boston working group of food access organizations, the consultant team pauses in its presentation.
“We acknowledge that this is a very lofty goal,” Anna Larson Williams says. Her colleagues—Emily Rheaume, Anna Tanasijevic, and Emily Villas—nod. “We hope that just proposing it will lead to some discussion.”
The four consultants are students at the School of Public Health, and their presentation is the result of a semester-long project in MC802: Implementing Community Health Initiatives: A Practice-Based Course in Leadership and Consultation, co-taught by Lois McCloskey, associate professor of community health sciences, and Joan Bragar, adjunct clinical associate professor.
MC802 is built around such projects, with six student teams serving as consultants for a range of community organizations around Boston over the fall semester.
This student team worked with the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) to investigate the “threshold population.” Coined by BPHC, the term refers to individuals earning more than $1,276 per month—the cut-off for federal food assistance programs like SNAP—but far less than the Boston living wage of $2,203 per month, rendering them food insecure yet ineligible for support.
The team was charged with creating a strategy to identify and track the threshold population, assess the scope of its food insecurity, examine best practices, and make recommendations to locate and address needs going forward.
The students conducted a literature review and spoke with stakeholders, and found there was another gap compounding the problem: a gap between aid programs. “We saw all of these data sources that existed in Boston for identifying people who are food insecure,” Rheaume explains, “but we saw that none of these data were being aggregated.”
“Organizations are doing really great work,” Villas agrees, “but we found that they aren’t necessarily speaking to each other. If we found a way to bring them all together then that would be really helpful to access this population.”
“It’s really a question of how to best increase utilization of the existing food access initiatives,” says Tanasijevic.
That was the goal of the team’s final deliverable: a framework for a composite index that could find and track the threshold population. BPHC could create such an index by pooling data from local food security organizations, the students argued. With that information, BPHC could identify the problem—and get a better idea of how to help.
The students admit creating such an index would be a tremendous undertaking—“but,” Rheaume says, “important nonetheless.”
BPHC seemed to think so.
The students’ presentation to their client in December was a hit, and BPHC invited the team to share their work at the Let’s Get Healthy Boston working group quarterly meeting this January—and share their proposal with the very organizations that would create the composite index.
After the Let’s Get Healthy Boston presentation, McCloskey congratulated her students. “It was a pro job,” she said. “Your presentation led to a lively discussion and a brand new idea emerged.” She noted that the students adapted their presentation to the room, acknowledging the work of those organizations, their concerns about pooling their data, and their particular goals and interests. “That’s the idea, right? It’s putting it in context for your client organizations.”
Sustained, real-world experience as consultants was tremendously valuable, the students say, especially with the added bonus of presenting to a meeting of Boston’s food security organizations—getting a seat at the table to discuss food security.
McCloskey estimates that 80 percent of sites implement the student-consultants’ products and act on at least some of their recommendations. Projects can also lead to more for the students. McCloskey points out that Nicole Ferraro (’14), the BPHC project manager who introduced the team at this meeting, was hired herself after her MC802 project with the commission.
“This,” Larson Williams agrees, “is not just your typical group work assignment.”