Practicum Profile

When I started at the Mailman School, my interests in environmental public health ranged from maternal exposures and asthma to epigenetics. I considered my appreciation of good food and love of nutritional information unrelated to environmental health concerns. However, through my coursework last year, I realized what really sparked my academic interests and passions were the issues surrounding food access, policy, and nutrition education—especially in young children. I realized that a full understanding of the environment an individual inhabits must include all built and natural resources.

Through a fellow EHS colleague, I secured a summer internship with Public Health Solutions (PHS), a large nonprofit located in Manhattan. Through this experience, I further explored the possibilities of working in the field of food access. I was working, and continue to work, within the Food and Nutrition Programs Unit, which focuses on the nine Women Infant and Children (WIC) centers under their management in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. Federally funded, WIC is founded on the research that maternal nutrition surrounding pregnancy and in young children can have lifelong effects, thereby justifying food budget supplementation and providing education during this critical period.

My primary project at PHS was to perform community asset-map in Queens and promote farmers markets around each WIC center. The goal of the community asset mapping was to systematically gather field data to get a better sense of the resources that are locally available, and eventually provide staff with this tool in order to make specific recommendations during visits. As part of a team of eight interns, we canvassed Corona and Jackson Heights, mostly during late June and early July. Over 2,800 site types were recorded and we covered 68 census tracts (this data will be the focus of my GIS coursework for my final project). The next phase of mapping is taking place in Jamaica, Queens. Along with two other interns, we recently provided a orientation session for new additions to the team. 

Not only was this experience beneficial for my future career in a technical aspect, it was also culturally enriching. Being in the diverse neighborhoods, talking with the eager moms, and seeing the dilapidated corner stores, I was able to grasp the gravity of the public health problems that exist in these communities and hundreds like them.

The power of outreach education efforts and peer counselors making connections with participants reinforced my ideas that stricter public health policies can better frame these multi-faceted programs from nonprofits such as Public Health Solutions. Policies regarding equitable access to affordable and nutritious food are essential in markets where a low-income population might take never demand such resources. While community-level programming and educational initiatives are effective to inform human behavior to a certain extent, my overall practicum experience leads me to conclude that policy-level decisions have the opportunity to impact the way these programs work.