Emory University



Urban Health InitiativeActivities to address Food Insecurity in NW AtlantaYoung Agricultural Entrepreneur Program, which was funded through a USDA-NIFA Community Food Project Grant. We work with youth in middle- and high-school in a three-pronged program to help them to develop knowledge and skills in: a) agriculture, b) business, and c) leadership. This 3-year-old program has been very successful and has helped many youth to obtain jobs or develop businesses, especially for some of the older youth who had dropped out of school. These youth have particularly benefitted from the soft skills they have learned from this program, such as effective communication skills and increased self-esteem. Our community partner, Cruz’s Fishermen, Inc., a local NPO that deals with at-risk youth, has been a tremendous resource for referring youth to this program who are the most likely to benefit from it. Nutrition and Garden Workshops. We have had an average of 4 workshops/year over the past four years on various aspects of gardening and nutrition, including cooking demonstrations and information / assistance for participation in Federally assisted nutrition programs. Our affiliation with the Rollins School of Public Health is a tremendous resource for this, as we utilize our graduate public health students to help lead these workshops. We also have worked closely with our local (Fulton County) County Extension Office and have utilized our extension agents and Master Gardeners to help teach these workshops in the past. Read to Me (R2M) Program. Over the years that we have worked in this community, it has become painfully obvious that many of the youth in our programs are reading at well below their grade level. Data on the number of kids reading at below grade level when they reach third grade is an important indicator not only of whether or not they will graduate high school, but also of how many prison beds will be needed in the future. To help to advance our efforts to combat food insecurity in these communities and at the same time to help with literacy, we have started our “Read to Me” program, where bi-weekly one of our volunteers reads to the kids. The targeted age is K-5rd grade but all children will be welcome, as many kids will come with their older or younger siblings. The featured reading material is garden-related, and following the book-reading, the kids will have a garden-related craft activity to reinforce the learning from the book reading. At the end of the session, the kids can choose a book (of a topic of their choice) to take home with them to keep. This program addressess gardening education and literacy. We have collected several hundred new and gently-used donated books, and any funding we receive for this program will go to buy additional books if needed and craft supplies and snacks. Healthcare Provider Training on Food Insecurity. It is important for the current and future healthcare providers who provide care for these communities to understand the social determinants that impact the health of their patients, including food insecurity. Since Emory/UHI is closely affiliated with the Medical School, Nursing School and School of Public Health, we encourage our students and medical residents and fellows to do hands-on work and participation in the communities in which they work. Our first-year medical students participate in a program at a local low-income senior independent living home in which they give presentations monthly on health-related topics chosen by the senior citizen residents. Our medical residents spend time in these communities working in our community gardens and getting to know the community members during their rotation to learn about food insecurity. We inform the community members that we want them to help us to “mold” these young professionals into the kinds of healthcare providers they would want to take care of themselves and their family members, and they take this role very seriously by informing these young medical professionals about the barriers to healthcare that they experience. This training for healthcare providers will also benefit approximately 50 unique senior citizens in the targeted community.Building Capacity within the Communities. In addition to the programs we run to address food access and food insecurity, our goal is to affect long-term solutions and increase the resilience of communities. For building capacity within the NW Atlanta communities, our projects include:Proposal-Writing Workshops: Two of our key personnel have given grant-writing workshops to community organizations on several occasions during the past couple of years to help them be successful in obtaining funding for their community food projects. Community Seed Grant Program. We have provided Seed Grants of $2500 to five community organizations and $1000 to five community organizations who wish to further or expand the reach of the projects that we are doing. As part of our Seed Grant Program, we also provide advisory support. Being an academic institution, we frequently get requests from community organizations to assist with monitoring & evaluation of their projects or technical assistance with community gardens.Including Community Members on Publications and Conference Presentations. One of our goals is to help develop leaders from within the communities, so we help them to develop their credentials by involving them from the start in project planning and implementation, and including them in the dissemination of the results. Each of the projects listed here have had active involvement from the start by members of the community in which we work. We propose to provide scholarships for our community members to attend and present at conferences.Legislative Advocacy Training. During the Spring 2019 semester, our UHI Leadership Team piloted a for-credit graduate course on legislative advocacy for interprofessional graduate students at Emory. The successful pilot was taught again in the Spring 2020 semester. We utilized the format of the interprofessional training to develop a community-focused “train-the-trainer” course to develop a cadre of community-based advocates who will collaborate with our ongoing training of academic professionals. The purpose of this training is to develop the skills and collaborations necessary to successfully approach legislators as well as executive branch bureaucrats and deliver concise messages, i.e., “elevator pitches,” regarding issues of governmental importance that affect their community. The curriculum basics include:The legislative process, e.g, how a bill is passedExecutive branch functioning and how to influence executive branch departmentsCollaboration as a key model for successfully achieving advocacy goals.Additional training or coaching on delivering testimony before a legislative committee or how to develop a policy brief to succinctly analyze various prospective bills can be provided if requested. ................
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