This fall in Arizona, advocates used a research report from Alexander Meyer, a Fordham student in the international political economy and development graduate program, to get the state to change its policy around SNAP benefits for community college students.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to a food assistance benefit called SNAP—Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—was expanded.

By analyzing data from the Arizona Department of Economic Security, Meyer found that during this time, there was at least a 22% increase in Arizona college students accessing this benefit.

“My primary research question was, is there a population of college students that is in need, but is cut off from accessing SNAP because of too-stringent eligibility requirements?” said Meyer, who is from Arizona.

“The answer to that question is there is indeed a large population of college students in need of SNAP.”

Expanding Access

Across the country, about one in five college students face food insecurity, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education.

In order to qualify for SNAP—outside of the pandemic emergency—applicants must meet federal income guidelines. In addition, “able-bodied” adults also have a work requirement, which can include everything from having a job to being in a career training program. Being a student in traditional colleges and universities, however, usually does not make them eligible, so many students can’t access the benefits unless they also work part time.

During the pandemic, that requirement changed and college students became eligible. But when the emergency declaration ended in the spring of 2023, those expanded benefits went away, leaving many college students facing food insecurity issues again, Meyer said.

In stepped the Arizona Food Bank Network, where Meyer once worked and still maintains connections. The organization advocated for college students, or at a minimum, community college students, to maintain their access to SNAP.

“Hunger and food insecurity on college campuses is a growing issue across the nation,” a memo from the Food Bank Network, which cited Meyer’s paper, read. “Increased food insecurity and decreased education levels can have detrimental and long-lasting effects not only to individuals but also to the health and economic well-being of communities as a whole.”

Their work, backed up by Meyer’s paper, helped convince Arizona’s Department of Economic Security to count community college as a career training program, which allows students at those schools to satisfy the work requirement.

Next Steps

For Andrew Simons, Ph.D., associate professor of economics, seeing his student’s work—which started in his applied econometrics course last fall—be used to change state policy is a huge achievement.

“Some part of me wants to say this is the goal, but this is far exceeding the expectation,” he said. “You always want your research to be influencing the world.”

Simons and Meyer are doing a bit more analysis and work on the paper with a goal of getting it officially published in an academic journal. They’re also continuing the research, with a plan to look at the next set of data from 2023.

“We can analyze what that drop-off looks like and use that to further bolster our findings, saying, ‘You allowed this temporary exemption to allow more students to qualify for SNAP. Participation went up, and then you took it away, and participation went back down,’” Meyer said.

Meyer said he’s proud that his work had an impact, and that he hopes his research can be used to expand eligibility for all college students in Arizona and support similar policy changes in other states.

“Frankly it’s a dream—who doesn’t want to contribute via their research to expanding policy that in a very real way will touch tens of thousands of college students, making sure they have food to eat, and via that food, that they can thrive in their studies,” Meyer said.

At Fordham, students can participate in the meal swipe donation program, where students with extra meal swipes can donate them and students who are facing food insecurity issues can access additional meal swipes through campus ministry. In addition, students facing food insecurity-related challenges can reach out to staff in student affairs, campus ministry, financial aid, or their dean’s office for additional resources.

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned in a report that the progress that has been made on global food security is likely to take a hit because of climate change. Rising temperatures, the report said, are expected to cause “local availability limitations, price increases, interrupted transport conduits, and diminished food safety.” 

That’s why, on a chilly Wednesday morning in October, Fordham student Julio Farach-Varona found himself working at a farmers’ market in the parking lot of a senior living facility in the South Bronx.

Classwork on the Streets of the Bronx

Farach-Varona, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who is from Atlanta, is one of 16 students enrolled in Ecology and Economics of Food Systems. The brand-new course is co-taught by Dawn Fariello, Ph.D., lecturer in biology, and Andrew Simons, Ph.D., associate professor of economics.

Farach-Varona’s job that morning, along with four other undergraduates, was to help transform a parking lot in Highbridge, a neighborhood just south of the Cross Bronx Expressway, into a distribution hub for fresh, affordably priced produce. Students cleaned and sorted produce from three upstate farms, helped customers, and tidied up at the conclusion of the market, which ran for five hours a week for six weeks this fall. 

At the market, and another one students worked at in East Tremont run by La Familia Verde, residents use government-issued Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Farmers Market Nutrition Program coupons to make purchases, and because they’re supporting local producers, whose shorter travel times make their carbon footprints smaller, they’re helping in a small way to fight climate change. 

“It’s kind of cool to see how you can apply what you’re learning in a classroom to the real world outside the gates of Fordham,” said Farach-Varona.

It was exactly the kind of outside-the-classroom experience he hoped to get when he toured the economics department his senior year in high school. His interest is in developmental economics, which is focused on the greater good for the greatest number of people, so the course piqued his interest. In addition to the community experience, students read Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet (Knopf, 2018), which gave them an understanding of food systems as a whole.

Addressing Climate Change: A Directive from the Pope 

The class is a small part of Fordham’s larger efforts to address the effects of climate change. This February, in response to a call from Pope Francis, the offices of mission integration and ministry, the provost, and facilities management came together and tasked CCEL with responding to Laudato Si’ Action, a call that the Vatican issued as a follow-up to Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on climate change titled Laudato Si’.

After convening a task force for six months, the center published its Laudato Si’ Action Plan, joining 67 other universities around the world in doing so. The document is a seven-year plan with goals that touch on everything from hosting an annual sustainability conference and conducting a comprehensive study of waste management on campus to establishing a sustainability panel at Fordham’s International Conference on Cyber Security.

Complementing the Climate-Action Efforts of the Facilities Department

Fordham has also answered the call to reduce its carbon footprint in terms of its facilities. In 2007, the University was a founding signatory to the NYC Carbon Challenge, initially committing to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 30% over the next decade. Fordham extended its commitment to the challenge in 2017 by pledging a 40% reduction by 2030, and every year, progress, such as the 2019 installment of solar panels on the Rose Hill parking garage, is detailed in a climate action plan annual report. 

Julie Gafney, Ph.D., director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said that the goals of Fordham’s Laudato Si’ plan are meant to complement and broaden the scope of continuous work done under the supervision of Marco Valera, vice president for facilities, to improve Fordham’s physical plant.  

“We’ll be working really closely together on the ongoing infrastructure and facilities work, but we know that the work of sustainability goes beyond that,” she said.

“We’re an institution of higher education, so we need to look at how we’re teaching classes, the research projects that faculty are taking on, and our relationship with community partners, industry partners, and elected officials.”

Different Perspectives on Food Systems

Fariello created the Ecology and Economics of Food Systems course last May after Fordham’s provost put out a request for an interdisciplinary STEM course with a Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) connection. CCEL-related courses, which have community service built into the syllabus, have grown dramatically in number at Fordham since the first seven debuted in 2014; there are 90 this year. The course emphasizes food insecurity in the first half, and sustainability in the second. With a $1,500, five-year grant from CCEL, they were also able to make the connection to the market. Like the students in the course, both Fariello and Simons each have their own experiences with food; Fariello grew up with food insecurity, and Simons worked from 2008 to 2011 as director of programs for the aid organization Food for the Hungry in Addas Ababa, Ethiopia.

“I find that when students come to Fordham, they come from different demographics and show a very varied understanding of food systems,” Fariello said. 

“So, it’s really important that when we’re talking about food systems and social, economic, and environmental sustainability, students get to see that. It’s not just learning it, but physically interacting with those sorts of differences.”

The food insecurity section required students to work 15 hours at the farmer’s market. The sustainability section featured a trip to Stone Barns, a non-profit farm and educational center in Pocantico Hills, New York, that has showcased sustainable food production practices since 2003. The two extremes are important to understand, as climate change is expected to exacerbate the divide in the future. 

“You’re going to get a very different view of the people they see coming to the farmers’ markets in the Bronx versus the people they see at Stone Barns, which is very much on the elite, high end of the culinary scene,” said Simons.

The Complexities of Natural Resources Management

Fariello and Simons note that while there is a debate currently raging about whether it’s possible to both feed every person on the planet while also doing it sustainably, their goal is not to take sides but to help students better understand the contours of the complex challenge. If you want to increase food production, you can do so by cutting down forests and converting them to farmland. But then you remove a vital ally in the fight to slow climate change, as trees store carbon.

“Students are very worried about sustainability. They’re worried in some sense that the world is ending because of climate change,” said Simons.

“So they’re very interested to hear things like, ‘If you set up farming this way, you’re going take more land away from forests. What if technology can change, and get more yield per unit of land, then you wouldn’t necessarily need to take out a forest?”

Working with the Community

CCEL is a good place to oversee a wildly ambitious project, both because it is part of Fordham’s Department of Mission Integration and Ministry and because the center can connect the University to outside partners.

“We can’t do climate justice and environmental justice alone. We’re part of an ecosystem here in New York, nationally, and internationally,” she said.

The Ecology and Economics of Food Systems course is a great example of the kind of synergistic approach that CCEL is striving for, she said. The market in East Tremont has been open for over a decade, but the one in Highbridge is brand new, and opening it required collaboration between the La Familia Verde, the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, Fordham, the Highbridge Community Development Corporation, Essen Health, and Catholic Charities. At Fordham, a great deal of the coordination was overseen by Surey Miranda-Alarcon, director of campus and community engagement at CCEL.

“Not one of these organizations could have done this on their own, and truly, we couldn’t have done it without the capacity that the students add,” said Gafney.

“One of the things I love about this project is, it is ongoing and sustainable. It’s not something we’re doing just for the learning value, although it does have tremendous learning value.”

Aleyna Rodriguez, executive director of the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, said the market fulfills two essential goals. One is bringing healthy food to those who either can’t afford it or can’t easily travel the hilly neighborhood of Highbridge to get it. The other is supporting the farmers at Rottkamps, Trinity, and Rising Roots, the upstate farms where the produce is grown.

“We try to keep everything affordable for community members, but when we hear from someone that something is marked too high, we do provide them with insight on the importance of supporting local farmers,” she said.

“We say to them, ‘You’re helping to feed their families as well. They’re helping to feed your family, and you’re helping to feed themselves.’ It’s a full circle.”

Rodriguez was effusive in her praise for the Fordham students. 

“Even if they don’t speak Spanish, they’re able to connect with the community residents; they’re happy to see them,” she said. “And the community can see that Fordham is here.”

For Rafael Melgarejo, 82, a native of the Dominican Republic who has lived with his wife in Highbridge for 17 years, and in the Mary Mitchell Houses for the last three, his visit to the farmer’s market on Oct. 19 was his third. He was as excited to see his neighbors as he was to buy vegetables. 

“There’s not too many chemicals in it. You grow it, and it’s healthier. The main thing is the will that you people have to help others, the needy ones,” he said of all the community groups involved. “That’s the main thing. For that, may God bless you.”

Farach-Varona likewise appreciated the sense of community that morning. His mother hails from Puerto Rico, so he grew up speaking Spanish. He found himself chatting with the mostly elderly customers about which vegetables would go well in sofrito—a mix of aromatics that is the base of many Latin American dishes.

“It was nice to talk to people on a deeper level rather than, ‘How many pumpkins do you want, or how many apples do you want?’” he said.

“It’s kind of the equivalent of working out. You just feel nice about it afterward, because you’ve interacted with so many people, and you see the smile on people’s faces when they get the produce, and they know it’s good food.”

At a certain point though, he realized he needed more training if he was going to continue with the type of work he was called to. He found what he wanted in Fordham’s Graduate Program in International Political and Economy and Development (IPED), which is administered by the Graduate School in Arts and Sciences. This year, he will earn two masters degrees, in IPED, and economics.

“I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to move forward in this field and I wasn’t able to contribute as much as I had wanted to,” said Ferraro, a native of Armonk, New York.

“The IPED program really seemed like the best of all worlds in terms of practicality and theory.”

While pursuing his master’s, Ferraro conducted research on a little-understood but potentially large problem: cattle lead poisoning in India. After traveling to India and Bangladesh in the summer on a GSAS-funded fellowship he began working on a project titled Lead and Livestock: Estimating India’s Bovine Lead Exposure. The paper for the project, which he will present at the Northeast Agriculture and Resource Economics Association’s conference this June, uses Indian government data from 2010 to create a machine-learning model that tries to predict the total livestock fatalities due to lead exposure there.

“When I was at the site, people kept talking about how their livestock had been perishing very quickly with these very severe symptoms. After further research, I came to realize that it is a phenomenon, but it’s something that’s not really well-documented,” he said.

The problem stems from two realities of contemporary life in rural India. Livestock, which are in many cases the only form of capital poor families possess, are free to roam as they please, while lead battery recycling plants are poorly regulated. No one knows exactly how big the problem is though; Ferraro hopes that his paper can get the issue on the radar of the Indian government.

“I’m estimating that just due to car battery recycling, India lost millions of dollars in livestock assets, and the people who are most affected are poor rural farmers,” he said.

Ferraro is also the co-author of a meta-analysis study of all the research that’s been done on lead exposure in low and middle-income countries. The purpose of the study is to try to develop a “background,” or baseline level of lead exposure that a person can expect to have based on where they live. The study is being conducted in partnership with Pure Earth, an environmental research organization where Ferraro has been a research assistant since January 2019.

“It’s been a really great experience, and I think the meta-analysis especially is going to be meaningful when it comes out. It was nice to work with a team, and I gained a lot of the statistics knowledge,” he said.

Andrew Simons, Ph.D., an assistant professor of economics who taught Ferraro in his Econometrics and Agriculture and Development classes and supervised his research for the India lead study, said his dedication to a cause like this isn’t surprising, given his drive and initiative.

“Very often Greg would hang around after class and have some question that was probably a little bit more advanced than what we were talking about in class, and I would give him some answer about that and then the next week, he would have gone and read about it or thought more about it,” he said.

“Professors really appreciate that kind of self-driven inquiry and self-driven initiative, which he definitely has a lot of.”

Upon graduation, Ferraro will be traveling to Cote d’Ivoire on a Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship. Working with the country’s agriculture ministry, he hopes to use his expertise on data collection to help officials use low-cost, open-source software to create computer models for problems such as child labor and deforestation.

“There’s a lot of money that gets invested into trying to reduce child labor, and we’re not even sure if it’s effective or not. Obviously, I’m not going to resolve this issue on my own, but I think that even governments with low budgets should be able to start their own data management collection,” he said.

“Just being there and starting it, I think could have an impact.”

The trip has been delayed until January 1 due to the coronavirus pandemic. But as an Ironman Triathlete, Ferraro is used to taking the long view.

“I grew up in a more privileged background, and I had a lot at my disposal and was never in need. So, I’ve been motivated to perform work that I know has a positive social effect,” he said.

He’s also motivated by past failures, including times when he didn’t have the skills he needed.

“For all the things I have done well, I’ve had projects blow up,” he said, noting that past plans for both law school and doctoral studies have both fallen through.

“These are just some examples just to press the point that it’s not exactly a linear path, and I think I actually enjoyed that. Because for every step of the way, I’ve learned something, and it forces me to really sit down and work hard to get whatever it is. At the end of the day, I think I’m better for it.”