Policy Brief Assignment Gives Rise to New Collaboration
Columbia Nursing students are working with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Food Policy (MOFP) to put an innovative plan for addressing food insecurity into action, just a few months after they started brainstorming it as a policy brief for a class.
Hannah Apostol, Jonathon Kitchens, and Chanwoo “CJ” Jang—students in Columbia’s Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program—have proposed an interim solution to bring fresh, healthy food to eligible New Yorkers living in food deserts: subsidized grocery deliveries.
Along with Health and Social Policy faculty Lisa Iannacci-Manasia, MS ’89, a primary care nurse practitioner, the students met with MOFP Policy Advisor Lauren Drumgold on December 4, 2024. They will meet again for further discussion in 2025.
Focus on food deserts
Health and Social Policy, a first-semester requirement for DNP students, prepares advanced-level providers to develop policies to promote health equity across policy sectors. Working in small groups, students analyze a problem, develop a solution, and present a brief to the target audience with their recommendations for change.
Apostol and Kitchens, who are in the Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP) Program, joined forces with Jang, who is in the Psychiatric Mental Health (PMH) Nurse Practitioner Program, and focused on food deserts in New York City. They decided to recommend supplementing an existing program run through the City, Food Retail to Support Health (FRESH), which is supporting the construction of dozens of grocery stores in historically underserved neighborhoods.
People who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh foods, increasing their reliance on less healthy processed foods that are often more readily available.
“We were proposing, ‘OK, in the time that it takes to get a grocery store, people still need to eat,’” Kitchens says. The team designed a streamlined system in which people with benefits could use their card each month to order from farther-away grocery stores, which would then deliver to a central neighborhood location.
Meeting with the Mayor’s Office
As they worked on their proposal, Kitchens reached out to MOFP through an online form. Within three days, Drumgold got in touch. “She was very interested in speaking with us about our process and what we had come up with,” says Kitchens. The students met with Drumgold on Zoom and had a second Zoom meeting with Drumgold and Iannacci-Manasia, eventually leading to December’s in-person meeting with Drumgold.
While their Health and Social Policy class has ended, Apostol, Kitchens, and Jang are excited to keep working with the Mayor’s Office to develop their proposal and build a relationship between Columbia Nursing and MOFP.
“It was definitely surreal for the three of us to be taking our picture in front of the Mayor’s Office, having been officially asked to come and speak with a representative of the office,” Kitchens says. “That was pretty amazing.”
Helping patients access resources
The students’ commitment to the project is more than an academic exercise. Kitchens experienced food and housing insecurity himself while growing up and witnessed the effects of food insecurity on patients during his work as an emergency and critical medicine nurse.
“It’s always been something, as far as going into practice, that I wanted to tackle with my patients,” he says. Those new to the system face many challenges to getting help, or even being aware of these resources, let alone understanding what they qualify for based on where they live, their income, and changes in income status. “Then on top of that there is the psychological impact of being food insecure, and you feel so helpless,” Kitchens adds.
His goal as an FNP, he says, will be to connect his patients with the resources they need to access healthy food and other assistance related to social determinants of health. His classmates have the same goal for their future work.
Helping patients to address food insecurity by pointing them toward the right resources “doesn’t take any time at all,” Kitchens says. “There’s no skin off my back, and you can really help somebody—not just in their life, but also to develop a trusting relationship with their provider, showing that they care about them and their well-being and health. Only good can come of that.”