National honors collaborative tackles food and climate justice

Food justice, climate justice, and sustainable agriculture. These are the themes for the three-year program known as The Justice Challenge, which brings together honors students and faculty from institutions across the nation to explore and address grand challenges.

Supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Virginia Tech participates as one of four lead institutions. As the program begins its second year, the success of the first year will serve as a blueprint for the rest of the program.

Food justice colloquium

As an introduction to The Justice Challenge, students participate in a nine-week online colloquium course in the fall. The course provides the basics of that year’s theme so students can become conversant in the topic before beginning hands-on work in their spring semester signature experiences. Rachael Budowle of the Honors College and Kim Niewolny of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences led Virginia Tech’s contributions to developing and delivering key food justice content for the colloquium.

That content focused on addressing the what, why, and how of food justice. At the end of the colloquium, students were able to answer core questions about food justice: “What is it?” and “Why do we need it?” and “how do we approach it?” Part of the content provided for the course consisted of cases from the faculty’s own community-engaged teaching and research, providing examples of what the concepts introduced in the colloquium can look like when applied.

Design and campus community-engaged learning 

After students learned the basics about food justice through the colloquium, they put their learning into practice in one of three signature experiences: an online hackathon, a field course, or a design challenge. The Honors College hosted a design challenge within a special honors studio course.

This design challenge centered on a partnership with the Market of Virginia Tech, built in a collaboration between Rachael Budowle and Isabelle Largen, assistant director of food access with VT Engage. Kim Niewolny was co-instructor for the course.

Justice and equity approaches to student food insecurity were at the heart of the course. Rather than trying to address a temporary need on campus, students studied the sociocultural factors which increase the likelihood that any given student at Virginia Tech – or any higher education institution – might experience food insecurity.

“Research increasingly shows that historically marginalized and underrepresented populations of college and university students are inequitably at greater risk for experiencing food insecurity,” Budowle wrote in the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development. Just and equitable approaches position “those students’ needs, priorities, and voices at the heart of strategies to address it.”

The design challenge allowed Honors College students to collaborate alongside invited students from the civic agriculture and food systems minor in one classroom. The students’ subject matter knowledge paired with the honors students’ training in transdisciplinary collaboration enhanced the class’s ability to produce useful deliverables with and for their mentor, Largen, by the end of the course.

Supporting The Market

A central aim of the design challenge was to give the students hands-on experience in producing a usable product with and for their mentor, Largen, and The Market of Virginia Tech. Instructors collaborated with Largen to identify project topics based in The Market’s priorities. Sustainable partnerships like these help to address partners’ needs while giving students experience with real-world, campus- and community-engaged action.

Students completed three interrelated projects, each of which embraced justice and equity approaches to student food (in)security:

The Market of Virginia Tech Cookbook

• This project gathered favorite recipes, including ingredients, preparation steps, useful equipment, and pictures of meals from students based in food they receive from The Market.
• Students developed an anonymous form using inclusive language to collect and compile nine recipes into a designed cookbook template.
• The cookbook focuses on culturally diverse meals and a range of dietary needs, using an approach that centers students’ own voices to help future students feel more confident when using The Market's resources.

Virginia Tech Food Security Resource Map

• Students explored how normalizing food insecurity and using dignity-based language can reduce stigma and increase resource accessibility. They found visual and spatial representations of food access resources have proven effective in other contexts, especially for international students who may disproportionately experience food insecurity.
• This project created an interactive prototype map of on-campus food access resources, including images, location details, hours, open access information, and other key use and food-sharing information for each resource.
• Students developed resources to facilitate sharing the map across campus.

Mini-Market Toolkit

• In addition to The Market, VT Engage Food Access Initiatives include “Mini-Markets,” now called “food share cabinets,” which are small-scale pantries that provide shelf-stable nonperishable food for short-term food access needs in distributed locations across campus.
• This project group began by communicating with The Market and Mini-Market contacts to understand current Mini-Market best practices, challenges, and needs, including around shared responsibility and equitable partnerships.
• Students created a toolkit for launching and managing food share cabinet using their findings, making it easier for interested parties across campus to set up and maintain a Mini-Market, including template emails and signs and examples of inclusive language.

Brenna Demko, honors student and geography major, is continuing her work in a summer internship, hosted by the Honors College and Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation, to help the Virginia Tech Food Access team advance and implement the projects started in the course.

“Participating in the Justice Challenge has allowed me to develop a deep understanding of how food insecurity is systemically situated and how there are many approaches that can be — and must be — taken to advance food justice. I’m proud of the final products that my classmates and I created, and I really appreciate being able to use the skills from my major to enhance the food security work I’m doing for my internship,” said Demko.

As The Justice Challenge moves into its second year, the focus shifts to climate justice. Building on the success of year one's food justice initiatives, honors students at Virginia Tech will collaborate across disciplines and institutions to drive meaningful climate action and cultivate leaders committed to justice.