MEM Project Sheds Light on the Problem of Food Insecurity at Dartmouth

2024 Conrades Distinguished Fellows (l to r): Derek Sohn, Manasa Murali, Harshitha Rayapati, and Sandile Dube '19 Th'20. (Photo by Vikrant Vaze)

We asked Rayapati and Dube about how they decided to work together and about the project, called "Food for Thought," that evolved from their partnership. 

How did this collaboration begin?

Dube: Lots of converging things brought us together to work on this project. We came into the MEM interested in different things—me, operations and manufacturing, and Harshitha, technology and product management. But then we saw there was a lot of similarity and intersection in other work we had done in the social impact space, working on improving outcomes for underserved communities. 

So we thought about the Conrades Fellowship and asked, what is a problem that exists at Dartmouth that we could actually have an impact on during the nine months of the fellowship? And food insecurity came up as something that's both prevalent and pernicious in that we don't talk about it. There's a lot of stigma and you don't necessarily think that an institution like Dartmouth could have people who are struggling to get access to food. 

We both thought, how can we, one, raise awareness about the problem, and two, do something to challenge some of the structural elements that contribute to the problem? So we applied for and ended up receiving the fellowship. 

How did you begin to work on the problem?

Rayapati: The first thing was a deep dive to see if we could find a quick solution. We noticed the problem of food waste is also widespread, so we worked with Dining Services to understand—is there a way we can bridge this food waste problem with students who are in need of timely nutritious food? 

We quickly realized it's not just access to a meal. Student food insecurity results from a lack of access to transportation, or not having enough time for a meal in a busy schedule—there was this whole array of causative factors that we didn't consider. We spoke with faculty as well as admins on the food insecurity committee who know and understand that this is a problem, but didn't know what the student insights were from a ground-level perspective.

That's when we pivoted and dove into the research to get the full picture of what student life looks like surrounding food. We began surveying students and conducting in-depth interviews with people both in and outside of Dartmouth— people in the community and people running food banks, what programs and initiatives they had, how they were modeling them, and what systems they had in place.

Dube: Naturally, when people think about this problem, they often think about quantity, but it is also about access to the right kind of food. And in many ways, Dartmouth or Hanover can be a food desert for students who may be under-resourced whether in terms of money, time, or skill.

Early on, we participated in the National Science Foundation I-Corps entrepreneurship program where we had four weeks of instruction with Professor Laura Ray at Thayer and Caroline Cannon at Tuck. They guided us through the user discovery process, which is when we had that big pivot where we stopped focusing on the duality of food waste and food insecurity and focused more on the structural issues that drive food insecurity, like college policy, which is why our overall focus was on graduate students, because undergraduate students are required to have a meal plan while graduate students are not.

What was the biggest takeaway from your research?

Rayapati: Looking at the problem from a broad-based perspective was one of the great things we were able to do with the fellowship because it gave us the flexibility to go and experiment in different ways. And the takeaway from that was that the problem of food insecurity looks very different for different student populations. 

In other words, how it manifests in a master's student versus how it manifests in a PhD student can look vastly different, and we need different solutions for each of them. So over eight months, we started with an original plan, but took a very different journey and realized we were only scratching the surface of a much bigger problem that would require a multi-year initiative.

Dube: We learned that a simple matter of how the college structures its policy directly contributes to accessibility of food for some students. Just to throw out some numbers, across the US, about 37% of students report some level of food insecurity. And this is more pronounced among graduate students more obviously because of the many structural issues, but also, less obviously, because of cultural issues like the belief that grad school should be difficult, and hunger being accepted as a normal part of the experience.

Rayapati: Within our MEM cohort, since we had closely interviewed and surveyed our peers, we found that this actually led to a shift in culture. Students were well-equipped with the understanding of what food insecurity is, and had built an awareness and gotten past any stigma around it. 

How did you decide to pass the baton?

Rayapati: When we asked, how can we pass all this data on in order to help find more long-term solutions? We saw our next cohort of MEMs. We wanted to see what ideas we could bounce around with them in terms of potential solutions, which is when we decided to hold an 'MEM Social Innovation Hackathon' with the theme of food insecurity this past November. It was a great way to have the next set of students be equipped with the data we already have and say, "Jump off from that point."

What happened during the hackathon?

Rayapati: We put together a problem statement along with all of our data and some guidance around areas to investigate and pitfalls to avoid, and we circulated it to all students who were interested in social entrepreneurship. We had four teams sign up and had their proposals and canvases judged by some of our mentors in the Magnuson Center and in DIAD [Design Initiative at Dartmouth]. 

We did designate a winner who we're still working with, but mainly we wanted this awareness we'd built to carry on to the next group, and there are several teams that have taken enough interest in the problem that they might also be submitting Conrades Fellowship proposals. 

So the story continues.