Food and AgriCultural Transformation — March 4, 2015

Navigating Ohio State’s Rich Collaborative Environment

When Michelle Kaiser, PhD, started as an assistant professor at The Ohio State University's College of Social Work in 2012, she was immediately welcomed into a vibrant transdisciplinary team of researchers who shared her primary academic interest: food security and the effort to make healthy food available for all.

She also agreed to take on a huge role: to serve as principal investigator on a long-desired food mapping project involving Columbus neighborhoods.

Colleagues in agriculture, nutrition, public health, geography, architecture, race and ethnic studies, medicine, public policy, and other areas were already collaborating on issues involving food security. With Kaiser's experience in food mapping at the University of Missouri-Columbia, she was identified as a natural leader for Ohio State's effort.

Food maps utilize surveys, census data and other information to visually depict areas in which fresh, nutritious food is readily available or hard to come by. After the project was funded by Ohio State's Food Innovation Center, which issues seed funding to university research teams collaborating on food-related projects, Kaiser found herself at the helm of a large-scale food mapping initiative that encompassed not only partnerships within one of the nation's most comprehensive universities, but also with multiple external organizations, including Columbus Public Health, Mid-Ohio Food Bank, the United Way of Central Ohio's Fresh Foods Here Healthy Corner Store Initiative, Local Matters, Franklinton Gardens and more.

The strong alignment with community groups was intentional. “My view of how research should be done in communities is that the point of view of the residents must be represented,” Kaiser says. “I worked in the nonprofit world a long time and know that often you know more on the ground than you do sitting in an office.”

Coordinating the effort was a daunting—but exciting—task for a new faculty member. “I chose Ohio State because of the important land grant mission and am excited to work with a community-university research team that strives to have meaningful work that will benefit the community's health and well-being.”

With so many disciplines and community organizations represented, early discussions among participants utilized Art of Hosting techniques—a conversational process that helps to harness a group's collective wisdom. These conversations enabled the group to think beyond traditional academic measures such as external funding and publications, allowing serious thought about how the project could effect change.

After selecting the area of Columbus to map, including the High Street corridor, Franklinton and the city's Near East Side, the group designed a survey and trained 25 Ohio State students to administer it with residents at various locations. The nearly 900 survey responses gathered from January through April 2014 provided critical information about where people obtain their food—including dollar stores, corner stores, grocery stores, supercenters, drug stores, ethnic food stores, gas stations, food pantries, fast food restaurants, dumpster diving—how often they shop, the kind of transportation they use to get there, whether they have access to a stove, their fruit and vegetable consumption, and more.

Researchers, including specialists affiliated with Ohio State's Data Analytics Collaborative, are currently working to analyze and geocode the information so it may be used to design interventions that impact food security. The ultimate goal: increasing health in Columbus communities.

“If you have healthy people, they are going to participate in activities and be more civically engaged,” Kaiser says. “We will have a thriving community and a healthy workforce.”

Highly collaborative projects like these are increasingly becoming the norm at Ohio State, thanks to Discovery Themes, Ohio State's unprecedented investment in areas in which the university can make an impact locally and globally. Resilient, Sustainable and Global Food Security for Health—one of seven first initiatives of the Discovery Themes—will bring together faculty like Kaiser with dozens of new faculty hires who share their commitment to eradicating hunger.