Research, Service Design
Designing a Framework for Student Food Insecurity
A toolkit to ensure the most out of food insecurity programming and service offerings for students on college campuses.
problem
By employing creative research methods, my team and I produced insights and proposed solutions for the problem we identified: food insecurity at Drexel University. Through extensive research with stakeholders, we produced a prototyped toolkit for university leadership that emphasizes the special attention on student needs when considering food insecurity programming.
This project went on to win seed-funding two others and I undertook a 10-week entrepreneurship bootcamp at the Social Impact Innovation Hub at Baiada Institute.
Timeline
My Role
project Team
Tools and MEthods
10 weeks
Researcher, Strategist, Designer
Serena Joury, Mary Kahle, Sam Kipp, Eva Schaiden
Concept Development, Ecosystem Mapping, Figma, Illustrator, Interviews, Miro, Otter
Desiring to undertake a project with a positive local social impact, our team investigated various topics like homelessness, drug addiction, and food insecurity. Considering this project’s limited scope, we decided to keep within our sphere of influence as Drexel students and to focus on solving for how college students might have easier access to nutritional food.
Food insecurity is “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” [1]
29%
of four-year students are food insecure nationwide[2]
23%
of four-year students are food insecure in Philadelphia[2]
47%
of food insecure students are less likely to graduate[3]
After identifying this problem space, it was crucial to define an actionable problem statement to ensure our project’s positive impact. Our immediate aims were to define our guiding principle and configure a clear opportunity statement. To accomplish this, each team member conducted preliminary research on the causes and effects of food insecurity. Reconvening, we summarized our initial findings.
intitial findings
- There is a generational, demographic, and geographic history to food insecurity.
- There is a stigmatization surrounding food insecurity.
- There are challenges in communication between those in need and those capable of helping.
- There is a lack of awareness from people who are capable of helping.
- There is a mismatch of needs to what can be offered.
We want to solve for food insecurity through community approaches, because nutritious food access is a fundamental human right.
After establishing our guiding principle, we generated 25 opportunity statements as a group. Through extensive discussion and debate, we agreed to focus on solving at the highest level. Food insecurity is a systemic issue, and in order to make the biggest change, we would need to focus on where decisions are made for coordinating service offerings and programming. We understood that this would be challenging, but our desire to create a holistic solution for a human rights issue guided us forward.
A session pulling concepts from our research to narrow down on an opportunity statement.
opportunity Statement
How might we equip decision makers with an equity-centered framework to collaboratively improve services for university student food insecurity?
- Decisions makers — people holding positions of authority to decide in organizations.
- Equity-centered framework — a structure that captures and identifies the needs of community members.
Before beginning our research, we needed to understand who is impacted by food insecurity. Whether they are impacted directly or indirectly, or whether they are an individual or an organization, we mapped each stakeholder we thought was impacted by the issue. In total, we identified 52 decision makers, staff, local communities, and students. We used this map to strategically plan and track our interviews throughout our research phase and it evolved as we learned more.
Stakeholder map of participants we identified for interviewing (in red).
Who we interviewed
- Student advocates
- Drexel administrators
- Drexel food services
- Drexel student organizations
- Drexel food insecurity resource departments
- Local Philadelphia food access organizations
Interviewing the stakeholders we identified was useful for understanding the needs, functions, viewpoints, and relationships between stakeholders. In total, we performed ten 30-60 minute interview sessions and consolidated our interview transcripts in Miro.
"You need both hands [community and admin] to hold it up."
— Department Director at Drexel
In addition to interviewing stakeholders, it was important to conduct an audit of services and programs available to students. Through online searching and exploring student information websites, I found that food programs and services are difficult to locate although they do exist.
As a student looking for assistance, it is difficult to find food resources online.
Insights from research
- There are many organizations, programs, and local services that serve the issue of food insecurity on campus, however these efforts are disjointed and difficult to find online.
- There is a stigma surrounding food insecurity which makes it challenging to reach out to and serve food insecure students.
- There is a lack of user-centric research on food insecure students, and if data is collected, it is not being used fully.
- Online digital resources on available food services are difficult to find, faulty, and decentralized.
- Organic/unstructured engagement with students facilitates the understanding of their experiences, but relaying these student experiences to administration is challenging.
We facilitated our SMEs to prioritize which directions seemed most important to pursue.
Before developing concepts, we wanted to ensure we were focusing on the most urgent needs of this issue. We did this by meeting again with our SMEs to rank and prioritize the possible directions we have extracted through our research.
possible Directions
- Gain more understanding of student experiences.
- Increase food access for students.
- Reduce food waste.
- Centralize food insecurity resources.
- Facilitate trauma-informed student administration communication.
- Increase opportunities for exploring culinary experiences and food health resources for students.
- Visually story tell the student community experience.
“Before you make these decisions, you need to know exactly what the problem is, who is experiencing the issue, and what you can do to solve the problem.”
— Department Director at Drexel
Moving to concept development, we generated a total of 87 ideas for all themes, prioritizing the ones ranked the highest. To down-select, we plotted all 87 ideas on an Impact – Difficulty matrix where we evaluated the level of impact an idea would have over how difficult it would be to implement. We highlighted the ideas with the highest impact and the lowest difficulty for implementation.
Generating ideas for each theme, prioritizing the ones ranked the highest by our SMEs.
Evaluating ideas by impact and difficulty to implement, highlighting ideas to pursue.
This is where we realized as a group that we may have bitten off more than we could chew. Food insecurity is a large issue to solve, and evaluating our ideas based on impact and implementation did not ensure our ideas would holistically address the challenges we’ve discovered through research.
To address this, we wanted to understand where our selected ideas stood within the ecosystem of food insecurity on campus. Placing the student at the center, I led the team to create an ecosystem map of the People, Places, Organizations, and Channels, and Communications to see where our ideas influenced the landscape. The result showed the purpose and function of each idea and how they worked in unison.
Mapping the ecosystem of food insecurity revealed where solutions are needed most.
Seeing where our concepts sit in relation to the student, we noticed that they served three functions for holistically addressing the challenges surrounding food insecurity:
(1) Access, (2) Visibility, and (3) Engagement.
Identifying these main components resulted in a framework to approach food insecurity.
Prototyped framework for food security
Access:
- Prompts us to think about the channels that connect food insecure individuals with food and resources: touchpoints, digital and physical resources, etc.
- Prompts us to consider inclusivity across the student population.
Visibility:
- Visibility of the issue: How are we seeing the issue? How are we reducing the stigma of the issue?
- Visibility of resources for students: How do students see/find resources that are available?
Engagement:
- Refers to the relationship between decision makers and the individuals experiencing food insecurity.
- Refers to how information from student experiences inform decision-maker solutions.
Assumptions/Validation:
- Refers to recognizing assumptions surrounding the access, visibility, and engagement of the current situation: What are the existing hunches we have for solving this?
- Prompts us to explore data and student/community engagement for validating or invalidating assumptions: How does new data validate or invalidate our assumptions?
Prototyped framework cards for considering Access, Visibility, and Engagement surrounding food insecurity.
In addition to a holistic framework to guide decision makers to evaluate existing programs and implementing new ones, our team conceptualized an immediate solution to address the problem of not having enough student data on food insecurity. A diary study would aim to collect student experiences and illustrate what student interactions are like with the services and programs provided to them. This data would be useful in improving current offerings and planning for new ones that serve student needs.
A prototyped diary study plan to capture data on student experiencing interaction with service programs.
The biggest challenge was recruiting food insecure students for our project. Due to the sensitive nature of the project, identifying and interviewing food insecure students would require IRB-approval. Considering the timeframe of this project, gaining approval in such limited time was not possible. To address this, we leveraged our connections to faculty members who have served these students directly. Interviewing our connections, they relayed to us anonymous information food insecure students have shared with them through organic and unstructured interactions.
By our project deadline, we invited department leaders, administration, and local members from various Philadelphia food organizations to our final presentation. Our research and proposed solutions initiated thoughtful discussion between all members of the community. Our project was well received and a member from a local organization asked to use our framework as training material for their organization.
A few months later, two team members and I submitted our work to the Social Impact Innovation Hub at Baiada Institute. Being 1 of 7 teams selected out of 25 applications, we participated in a 10-week B-Corp certification entrepreneurship bootcamp.
B-Corp certification ensures ethical, equitable and sustainable business practices. It’s a designation that a business is meeting high standards of verified performance, accountability, and transparency on factors from employee benefits and charitable giving to supply chain practices and input materials.
Our project developed into the idea for a web-based service that offers free materials like our framework and toolkit, as well as a workshop and training service for student peer-to-peer training.
The outcome of this bootcamp was primarily educational, however, the work we accomplished during it was passed down to students and organizations within Drexel to continue onward.
References
- USDA ERS - Definitions of Food Security. (2023, October 25).
- Koppisch, D., Dahl, S., Magnelia, S., Goldrick-Rab, S., Coca, V., & Gill, J. (2021). Securing the Basic Needs of Philadelphia-Area College Students During a Pandemic: A #RealCollegePHL Report. The Hope Center for College, Community, and Justice. Philadelphia, PA.
- Wolfson, J. A., Insolera, N., Cohen, A., & Leung, C. W. (2022). The effect of food insecurity during college on graduation and type of degree attained: Evidence from a nationally representative longitudinal survey. Public Health Nutrition, 25(2), 389–397.