The Tufts Institute for Innovation (TII) hosted a three-day Human Health Hack, the second annual event of its kind, this past weekend at 574 Boston Ave. The event, which focused on nutritional food access for low-income households and communities, attracted a variety of participants, including undergraduate students and graduate students from the School of Medicine and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
Beginning on Friday afternoon, the hackathon opened with a symposium featuring four speakers, who each presented their perspectives on food access, poverty and nutrition. The speakers were Parke Wilde, associate professor at the Friedman School; Ona Balkus, senior clinical fellow at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic; Christina Economos, associate professor at the Friedman School; and Alicia McCabe, the Massachusetts state director of Share Our Strength, an organization that works to end child hunger in the United States. Each speaker gave a 30-minute-long presentation to introduce participants to topics related to food access.
“We really wanted to get a wide range of speakers,” Fogarasi said. “Not just academics, but community activists, people who work for non-governmental organizations [and] people with business expertise.”
At the event, Wilde spoke about the importance of finding a solution that works along with other anti-poverty efforts, rather than competing with them.
“This probably means moving beyond just a food-centered diagnosis of community problems and recognizing the full breadth in employment, health and crime—everything else that is a challenge for low-income communities,” he said.
In her presentation, Balkus said that food is being wasted based on arbitrary expiration dates, contributing to the lack of food access.
“Most expiration dates on the vast majority of food are a business's best guess, a very conservative guess, at when that food is going to maintain its peak quality,” she said. “It has nothing to do with food safety, but 90 percent of Americans are throwing away food at or before the sell-by date because they think the dates are about food safety.”
Economos spoke about efforts to reduce childhood obesity and the importance of community engagement, specifically the role that engagement plays in designing sustainable strategies that are effective.
McCabe advised participants to focus on one specific problem within the scope of the issues at hand, rather than the broad topics of food access and poverty.
“Pick a battle that is important enough to matter, but small enough to win,” she said.
After the opening symposium, participants were given 60 seconds to pitch a specific problem to their peers. They then split up into small teams to search for a potential solution to their chosen problem. The organizers encouraged participants to build multidisciplinary teams comprised of a combination of undergraduates, graduates and experts.
“If you can get students at the beginning of their education process to realize the value of team-based multidisciplinary problem-based work, then you’ve taught them early,” Linton said to the Daily. “It’s part of our mission, to spread that ideology.”
Throughout the rest of the hackathon, participants worked on devising solutions in teams and attended various workshops focusing on topics such as creating business models, health and obesity, food access and working with community members to solve problems.
All teams pitched their final concepts to a panel of judges from a variety of disciplines, including nonprofit organizations, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and TII.
The winning team was comprised of Tariana Little and Malika Hodge, students at the School of Medicine, and seniors Jordin Metz and Anna Kaplan. The concept that the team worked on was an app called Food Finder Instantly, also known as FooFii.
“FooFii is an app that centralizes food sources by location, and it’s free and easy to navigate,” Little said. “It really targets low-income mothers, particularly living in Roxbury, but could be extended to families in Boston and, down the line, nationwide.”
The winning team said that the diverse skills and areas of expertise of its members were important in developing their app.
“We come from a lot of different backgrounds academically, professionally and personally, so we were able to bring a lot of different skill sets,” Metz said.
The team was given a $1,000 seed grant from TII to continue to develop the concept. The team hopes to continue its work with FooFii using the seed money.
“This activity…was so illustrative of what TII hopes to achieve,” Linton said in her closing remarks on Sunday. “Tufts is such a perfect place to found this institute and there is no better proof of this than you, the students.”
The first Human Health Hack was organized last year by seniorJordan Klein under the name "Global Health Hack" and was brought to TII to administer this year.
“I was amazed last year at the hack,” Linton said. “I had never been part of a hack before, and I was just floored by it. I couldn’t wait to do one.”
CORRECTION: The print version of this article misspelled Roxbury, MA and Christina Fogarasi's title within the Tufts Institute for Innovation. The article has been updated accordingly.
According to Deputy Director of TII Dr. Lauren Linton, she and TII Project Administrator Christina Fogarasi, who works in student engagement and community outreach, organized the event.
Beginning on Friday afternoon, the hackathon opened with a symposium featuring four speakers, who each presented their perspectives on food access, poverty and nutrition. The speakers were Parke Wilde, associate professor at the Friedman School; Ona Balkus, senior clinical fellow at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic; Christina Economos, associate professor at the Friedman School; and Alicia McCabe, the Massachusetts state director of Share Our Strength, an organization that works to end child hunger in the United States. Each speaker gave a 30-minute-long presentation to introduce participants to topics related to food access.
“We really wanted to get a wide range of speakers,” Fogarasi said. “Not just academics, but community activists, people who work for non-governmental organizations [and] people with business expertise.”
At the event, Wilde spoke about the importance of finding a solution that works along with other anti-poverty efforts, rather than competing with them.
“This probably means moving beyond just a food-centered diagnosis of community problems and recognizing the full breadth in employment, health and crime—everything else that is a challenge for low-income communities,” he said.
In her presentation, Balkus said that food is being wasted based on arbitrary expiration dates, contributing to the lack of food access.
“Most expiration dates on the vast majority of food are a business's best guess, a very conservative guess, at when that food is going to maintain its peak quality,” she said. “It has nothing to do with food safety, but 90 percent of Americans are throwing away food at or before the sell-by date because they think the dates are about food safety.”
Economos spoke about efforts to reduce childhood obesity and the importance of community engagement, specifically the role that engagement plays in designing sustainable strategies that are effective.
McCabe advised participants to focus on one specific problem within the scope of the issues at hand, rather than the broad topics of food access and poverty.
“Pick a battle that is important enough to matter, but small enough to win,” she said.
After the opening symposium, participants were given 60 seconds to pitch a specific problem to their peers. They then split up into small teams to search for a potential solution to their chosen problem. The organizers encouraged participants to build multidisciplinary teams comprised of a combination of undergraduates, graduates and experts.
“If you can get students at the beginning of their education process to realize the value of team-based multidisciplinary problem-based work, then you’ve taught them early,” Linton said to the Daily. “It’s part of our mission, to spread that ideology.”
Throughout the rest of the hackathon, participants worked on devising solutions in teams and attended various workshops focusing on topics such as creating business models, health and obesity, food access and working with community members to solve problems.
All teams pitched their final concepts to a panel of judges from a variety of disciplines, including nonprofit organizations, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and TII.
The winning team was comprised of Tariana Little and Malika Hodge, students at the School of Medicine, and seniors Jordin Metz and Anna Kaplan. The concept that the team worked on was an app called Food Finder Instantly, also known as FooFii.
“FooFii is an app that centralizes food sources by location, and it’s free and easy to navigate,” Little said. “It really targets low-income mothers, particularly living in Roxbury, but could be extended to families in Boston and, down the line, nationwide.”
The winning team said that the diverse skills and areas of expertise of its members were important in developing their app.
“We come from a lot of different backgrounds academically, professionally and personally, so we were able to bring a lot of different skill sets,” Metz said.
The team was given a $1,000 seed grant from TII to continue to develop the concept. The team hopes to continue its work with FooFii using the seed money.
“This activity…was so illustrative of what TII hopes to achieve,” Linton said in her closing remarks on Sunday. “Tufts is such a perfect place to found this institute and there is no better proof of this than you, the students.”
The first Human Health Hack was organized last year by seniorJordan Klein under the name "Global Health Hack" and was brought to TII to administer this year.
“I was amazed last year at the hack,” Linton said. “I had never been part of a hack before, and I was just floored by it. I couldn’t wait to do one.”
CORRECTION: The print version of this article misspelled Roxbury, MA and Christina Fogarasi's title within the Tufts Institute for Innovation. The article has been updated accordingly.
