If someone asked me about the best thing I did over summer vacation, my first answer would be the toadlet migration I witnessed during my birthday camping trip, but the second would have to be listening to students talk about data scraping Twitter using R at a weekly unBox meeting. Of course, I had no idea what that meant, but hey, I’m lucky enough to love learning even when I’m in way over my head. But probably the funniest part is that I’m supposed to be an advisor!
So how did I come to be one of the faces in this particular Zoom version of the Hollywood Squares talking about hunger? Charlie Hoffs did not get into her first PWR 2 choice, Amanda Frye’s “From the Margins to the Center through Critical Race Theory”. As a result, I had the good fortune of having her as a student in my winter 2019 PWR 2 course, “Action Research: Making Time for Social Justice,” where students undertake research projects that engage with communities of which they are a part, or ones they are interested in learning more about, all in the hopes that their research can lead to action. One of Charlie’s primary intellectual and social justice interests is food, so she researched veganism on Stanford’s campus, surveying more than 400 Stanford students about “their perceptions of veganism … [and] their personal dietary habits.” Charlie discovered that although veganism is typically portrayed as a white, elite movement, and is even believed to be so on Stanford’s campus, it is practiced just as much by students of color from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds.
Charlie was lucky enough to deliver these findings before classes went online the last week of winter quarter, but on the last day of class, Charlie was feeling pretty defeated by the hardships she knew her less privileged FLI and POC peers were going to be facing as the result of Covid-19. When she voiced her concerns a number of her classmates agreed that she was right, but that things could be done to correct these pandemic-heightened but historically-consistent inequities.
At the end of March 2020, a few weeks after campus had been closed for the pandemic, Charlie emailed me about a project she’d undertaken over the spring break. Obviously, she had taken her peers’ words to heart because this is what showed up in my in-box:
I have been working to get a couple projects off the ground. My friends and I made a map of school meal sites still active despite school closures:)
Today, we started working on a new project: a petition to expand the online food stamp purchase program nationwide. Would it be possible for you to post it on your Facebook page? It's super easy from the change.org site to just click "Share on Facebook." I'll follow up with a forward-able email. You were so helpful in sending my survey along to new lists, and in trying to get this petition started, you were one of the first connected people who came to mind!
Change.org Petition to Expand Online Food Stamps Nationwide
Also, if you are plugged into any Bay Area lists or networks, it would be so invaluably helpful if you could pass the email along to them! Or you could shoot me their email and I could get it going.
Thank you so much:) I would love to check-in sometime soon! Though I can imagine you are in the thick of grading... anyway, I'm around all the time, so let me know if you have a moment to talk someday.
That someday happened in May when I was invited to be an advisor for the then-called SNAP Action Initiative, led by Charlie and her co-founder Isabelle Foster (Stanford B.A. Public Policy ‘18 and M.A. International Policy Studies ‘19). Since that time, the group has grown from an initiative to a movement, contributed data analysis to help Senator Durbin’s Expanding SNAP Options Act of 2020, has been working to increase access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) online, has created SNAP online purchasing guides for eligible recipients, is preparing three academic articles and has renamed itself the unBox Project (the website is unboxproject in case you want to find it and only remember unBox). And aside from advisors, they "are a movement of high school, college, and recent graduate volunteers working to help unify and empower nationwide efforts to end hunger. Members leverage their skills, passions, and resources to source projects and enact change through iterative problem-solving and collective action."
I was initially asked to advise the team on conducting community-engaged research, which at that time meant getting user feedback about the BayAreaCommunity.org website, created in response to Covid-19 to help folks access free school lunch sites, health resources, COVID-19 test sites and more. BayAreaCommunity.org and unBox began as separate projects, but their missions have so many overlaps that they have melded into one.
I didn’t end up helping with this project, but I was able to facilitate a discussion among the volunteers about the intersections between food justice and race as well as about how to attract more racially, ethnically and class diverse members to the team/movement. Several of us pulled together readings (mostly the students, tbh), for instance, this powerful interview with Karen Washington, and we had a really insightful conversation. Not only did we talk about the intersections among food access, race and poverty, but the discussion also helped us recognize and tap into unseen/unknown diversity already on the team. Some of the volunteers had experience with using or had family members who use SNAP. It also led to us talking about the fact that many low-income students might be invested in unBox’s mission and certainly have the skill to contribute, but that they cannot afford to volunteer their time.
Following up on that conversation, I was asked/offered to lead a discussion about public participation. In another, “everything I know I’ve learned from my students” moment, Grant Gordon, a student in my spring 2020 Identity PWR 2 researched the Amazon HQ2 debacle, focusing on the company’s and New York City’s disingenuous use of public input. Intending to update Sherry Arnstein’s 1969 model of public participation and add a corporate responsibility step, he discovered and told me about the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). Fascinated by the potential overlaps between public participation and community-engaged research, I signed up for their nine-day training and distilled what I’d learned for an unBox workshop. Charlie tells me that she and some of the other movement members still talk about IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation when making decisions around public engagement.
And unBox’s engagement continues to grow. They were a community partner for students enrolled in the Stanford Sustainable Cities class—using units as a way compensate students for the time they spend working on unBox projects. Some conducted user testing interviews for BayAreaCommunity.org and the SNAP Online Purchasing Guides. The Stanford Daily highlighted the students' work with unBox and other community partners. unBox’s data team is layering COVID-19 case data with SNAP participation, SNAP Online delivery coverage, and other demographic data for California to highlight numerous access barriers.
Helping lead discussions, sharing my networks and contributing rhetorical insights have been rewarding, but I’ve gotten so much more from being a part of unBox than it has gotten from me. Because I met Joel Berg, the brilliant founder of Hunger Free America through unBox, I did a bit of phonebanking to get out the low-income vote. I learned to use Slack; how a Google doc can be an extraordinary way to keep crucial notes and trace the evolution of an organization/movement; and most of all, to love quantitative data in the service of social justice. As I wrote for the site: “Although I am inspired by every aspect of this volunteer team’s commitment to reducing food insecurity [and increasing food access], what I find most spectacular about unBox is its members’ ability to ask nuanced questions, create and present data that answers them, and find the people and organizations who can use that information to make substantive change.”
Hunger has never been a focus of mine, but it has always been a critical national and global issue, and is, of course, even more so during the pandemic. Although I have not been able to help the undocumented people who line up for blocks and blocks and blocks twice a week in my neighborhood, who are ineligible for SNAP (or, the documented immigrants who are lawfully eligible for SNAP but don’t sign up for SNAP even if they are eligible because they are afraid they will become “public charges” and be denied citizenship), on every unBox call I learn more about this system from these incredibly smart and committed volunteers, academic researchers and practitioners. The calls help me believe that there are still good things, good people and good possibilities in this world.
