During the holidays, food drives and charitable giving campaigns raise awareness of food insecurity, but people experience disruptions in access to healthy food year round. New research by Dr. Kristin Mmari (https://www.jhsph.edu/faculty/directory/profile/1541/kristin-mmari) and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Public Health (https://americanhealth.jhu.edu/issue/risks-adolescent-health) reveals that some adolescents engage in risky behavior to get access to food or money to buy food.

In this Data Points episode, our GovEx Director of Applied Research discusses these findings with Dr. Mmari and Anushka Jajodia (https://www.behance.net/anushkajajodia), a Social Design Fellow from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) (https://www.mica.edu/). Together with researchers from the JHU Department of Civil Engineering (https://engineering.jhu.edu/ams/), this team is taking a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding and mapping systemic barriers to food access, and developing a process to put this valuable research into action.

For further reading, see the relevant Urban Institute study linked here (https://www.urban.org/research/publication/impossible-choices-teens-and-food-insecurity-america/view/full_report).