Accessibility, Affordability,
and Awareness.
WHO WE ARE
We are a group of six undergraduate students from the Leeds School of Business planning a spring break outreach trip to New Orleans, LA. We are each passionate about resolving our nation's childhood obesity/malnutrition crisis; however, we recognize that this is not possible until business and political leaders begin prioritizing the health of all individuals in our nation, not just those with privilege. Boulder, a health-centric bubble, does not provide us with a realistic conception of the barriers that must be overcome to resolve our nation's health crisis. Louisiana, on the other hand, has one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the nation. In New Orleans, we plan to expand our frame of reference and open our minds to feasible methods of actively challenging this problem.
Our team includes Ellyson Beyer, Aidan Cepulis, Alice Haugland, Sarah Maaliki, Arti Pandey, and Charles Smith. We also plan to invite four additional undergraduate students on our trip in order to expand their knowledge about this issue and help maximize our impact within the CU Boulder community. To learn more about each organizer, visit Our Team Page.
OUR VISION
Our vision for this project is to gain insight into New Orleans community engagement efforts aimed at combatting our nation’s childhood obesity/malnutrition epidemic while considering the factors of accessibility, affordability, and awareness. In order to achieve this goal, we will work with the following organizations: GrowDat Youth Farm, Sprout NOLA, and Edible Schoolyard NOLA. These programs utilize gardening initiatives to educate elementary and adolescent students about healthy eating.
We also plan to conduct supermarket research, observing consumer behavior and collecting data on items purchased. This research will help us generate a comparative cost analysis between a hypothetical “healthy shopping list” and “unhealthy shopping list.”
In addition to these hands-on, experiential activities, we plan to tour the New Orleans Health Department and conduct interviews with local health experts. In short, we envision this experience to give us valuable insight into a food culture outside our own, ideally opening our minds to solutions for our nation’s health crisis.
