While training in social sciences in college, Dr. Karla Hanson knew she was interested in engaged learning—“except we didn’t even have the language for it at that time,” she remembers. After a job writing grant proposals for a community health center, she went back to school for a PhD in health policy. “Healthcare started to feel like a last resort,” she says.

Her policy focus gradually shifted toward food security and access to healthy food. “Food is so foundational to health,” says Hanson, who spent nearly two decades as a researcher and professor of practice in Cornell’s Division of Nutritional Sciences before joining the MPH Program faculty.

Hanson’s community-engaged research centers on questions of how food policies can impact low-income families and children. For the past six years, she and her students have worked with farms and families across New York, North Carolina, Vermont, and Washington, through a study funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They want to understand the potential impacts on dietary behaviors, food security, and health outcomes of subsidizing Community Supported Agriculture programs (CSAs)—in which families subscribe to a weekly share of locally grown fruits and vegetables—for low-income families. An outcome paper from this randomized controlled trial is currently under review. “I try to bring students into everything I do,” says Hanson, who brings together MPH students and other Cornell students, as well as students from other universities.

In the MPH classroom, Hanson and Dr. Lorraine Francis co-lead the Monitoring and Evaluation Methods course, in which students work directly with community partners to develop real-world evaluation plans for different projects and programs, many of which focus on the food system. “I’m trying to get students to marry what stakeholders tell them and what they learn from the community, with rigorous tools of social science research.”

One of her most recent community partners is Mutual Aid Tompkins, a network that formed to connect Tompkins County neighbors with each other to share resources and information during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hanson and her students support Mutual Aid’s evaluation of food sharing cabinets, which volunteers build out of wood and paint blue, in front of homes and bus stops in April 2020. A network of volunteers has regularly stocked them with free foods for those in need, ever since. “It’s an amazing blossoming of volunteers from so many walks of life, just driven to feed their neighbors,” says Hanson. There are now about 50 food sharing cabinets in operation across the county.

“Our project is just bringing the tools of data and analysis to what they’re already doing, in hopes they can leverage that information to attract more funding and volunteers,” says Hanson. This project has funding from Cornell’s Office of Engagement Initiatives (OEI) and the Cornell Institute for Social Sciences to pay students for research activities and to support Mutual Aid.

Written by Audrey Baker