When Anabella Pinton was first looking into public health programs, she was drawn to Cornell’s unique epidemiology concentration. “The specific focus on infectious diseases was special and intriguing,” she remembers, especially with its emphasis on animals, agriculture, and the environment. She also appreciated the smaller program size “to make connections and get to know people,” and wanted to move to a “nature-oriented” area like Ithaca after living in a bigger city.
In her first year as an MPH student, Pinton landed a competitive summer internship with Corning Incorporated, a Fortune 500 Company, to develop their first COVID-19 dashboard. She wanted a taste of working with a private company. “It was really internal consulting,” she says, since she was analyzing data, making recommendations to Corning’s employees, and presenting her work to the company’s leadership. After that summer’s experience, Pinton soon landed a job as a healthcare consultant with Deloitte in New York City.
Before she could start her new role with Deloitte, Pinton still had one more semester and an MPH capstone project to complete. As an MPH student, she had always “wanted to dabble in a bit of everything.” With a background in medicine and epidemiology, and recent experience with the private sector, she wanted to use her capstone as an opportunity to explore interests in policy and government. After taking assistant professor Dr. Charley Willison’s public health policy course, Pinton was drawn to work with unhoused populations. “I was particularly interested in the intersection of public health and urban planning, including the built environment,” says Pinton, who notes the extreme negative health consequences of homelessness. According to her research, “there is limited access to hygiene and healthcare, a lack of feeling safe and secure, and often negative mental health outcomes.”
For her capstone, Pinton examined challenges Continuums of Care (CoCs) faced during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Northeastern United States, and made recommendations to “mitigate the negative impacts of COVID-19.” CoCs are planning and organizing bodies that coordinate services for unhoused people and families across agencies. One of her main findings was that many crucial stakeholders, such as law enforcement, healthcare, groups, public housing authorities, and educational entities, are missing from many CoCs in the Northeast. “This is really shocking because these are such basic, important services,” says Pinton. Other challenges she found include limited housing availability, limited funding, and staffing constraints across agencies. “This wasn’t very surprising,” Pinton says, since these were persistent problems before COVID-19—but the pandemic made these issues worse. With budgets reallocated to pressing needs such as masks, there has been even less funding available for CoCs, along with additional staff shortages.
After spending a semester analyzing CoC polices in the Northeast during the pandemic, Pinton made three primary recommendations. First, CoCs should prioritize and strengthen relationships with healthcare stakeholders, since they are needed now more than ever. Second, CoCs should increase staff and offer more trainings on how to optimize remote operations in “the new normal.” And third, CoCs should build and fortify partnerships with public health authorities, since more people than ever have been displaced during the pandemic.
“[The capstone] project will definitely be used in the real world,” says Pinton, whose secondary reviewer on the project was Dr. Katherine Levine Einstein, associate professor of political science at Boston University and a national expert in housing policy who conducts applied research on housing and homelessness. Pinton plans to publish her findings and recommendations with Dr. Willison and Dr. Einstein this fall.
Written by Audrey Baker