The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 — 3A

GREG GOSS/Daily

Montana Stevenson, graduate student in the School of Natural Resources and Environment, speaks on issues ranging 
from food scarcity to racial injustices during the Food Justice Panel at the Dana Building on Tuesday.

within cities like Detroit.

“This is legal segregation,” 

Bernardo said. “This is what it 
looks like.”

Another panelist, Mama Han-

ifa Adjuman, who is the Educa-
tion and Outreach Director of 
the Detroit Black Community 
Food Security Network, said the 
city of Detroit doesn’t need mis-
sionaries, but rather needs allies.

While working with DBCFSN, 

Adjuman said the organization 
noticed a new phenomenon in 
the city of Detroit: Young, subur-
ban white people were coming to 
the city to teach members of the 
Black community how to garden.

“To come into the city and 

begin to garden was not the 
issue, it wasn’t even the prob-
lem,” Adjuman said. “To dis-
respect 
the 
traditions, 
to 

disrespect the residents in the 
city of Detroit — residents who 
have for thousands of years been 
engaged with agriculture — was 
the problem.”

Adjuman said the most effec-

tive movements happen organi-
cally by the people who will be 
most affected by the decisions.

“This is a grassroots commu-

nity organization that came out 
of the people in Detroit — the 

Black community in Detroit, first 
identifying a very real problem 
and then coming together collec-
tively to create a solution to that 
problem,” she said.

Panelists Whitney Smith and 

Montana Stevenson, both gradu-
ate students in the School of 
Natural Resources and Environ-
ment, focused their presentation 
on the Ypsilanti food system.

Their research examined food 

accessibility for impoverished 
areas of Ypsilanti by examining 
the public transportation system 
to those areas of the city.

Smith and Stevenson first 

identified where residents in or 
near Ypsilanti could buy food, 
including both traditional food 
stores as well as pharmacies, 
farmers markets and food banks.

Their results concluded that 

some of Ypsilanti’s most impov-
erished areas do not have access 
to bus lines, and therefore don’t 
have access to affordable and 
nutritious food.

“Access is still a critical part of 

food justice, and it is very impor-
tant to this conversation,” Smith 
said.

Panelist Carla Dhillon dis-

cussed what she described as 
the 
unjust 
appropriation 
of 

native communities’ food sys-
tems through government trea-
ties, highlighting how colonists 
arrived in the United States 

and erased native people and 
their culture and have therefore 
greatly altered their food sys-
tems.

She also said native food sys-

tems, such as sacred wild rice, 
have become more difficult to 
cultivate since native popula-
tions have been relocated to res-
ervations.

“The many ways that settler 

America disrupts collective food 
relations represent forms of food 
injustice,” Dhillon said.

LSA senior Claire Roos, who 

was also one of the event’s orga-
nizers, said the event was cre-
ated to recognize that while food 
sustainability is an often-dis-
cussed topic, food justice is not.

“Oftentimes we forget to 

address the social justice side,” 
Roos said. “You can’t have sus-
tainable food without social jus-
tice.”

Business 
junior 
Courtney 

Maliszewski, who attended the 
event, said it particularly inter-
ested her because of current 
health and nutrition concerns 
addressed in the media in Flint 
and Detroit. 

“I really took away how 

it affects so many different 
groups,” Maliszewski said. “And 
I definitely think that is some-
thing more people need to be 
aware of.”

FOOD
From Page 1A

since its start in 2012.

“I think that resonated with 

a lot of people who use social 
media for dating purposes and 
have 
been 
really 
frustrated 

with the way they’ve been 
approached,” she said.

Kellie Carbone, a health edu-

cator at Wolverine Wellness and 
director of the event, said the 
evening’s theme was “surren-
der,” because everything that 
could have gone wrong, did go 
wrong, in each student’s story.

“That was half-joking,” she 

said. “But it does seem like each 
time the performer went to per-
form, their pieces constellated 
around some type of theme, 
some similarity that they can 
draw from each piece.”

Public Health graduate stu-

dent Kristen Harden said she 
found the storytelling format of 
the event engaging and power-
ful.

“It’s a really awesome way to 

put out messages about things 
like positive body image and pro-
moting health and wellness on 
campus,” Harden said. “I think 
this is really great and wanted 
to come and see that. It’s a really 
nice sign of solidarity and sup-
port.”

Harden said she thought the 

night’s theme resonated with her 
the most.

“Surrendering to self-love and 

to support and just being you is 
wonderful,” she said. “Just sur-
rendering to being comfortable 
with yourself and loving who 
you are.

Public Health graduate stu-

dent Kathleen Koviak said she 
learned not to be afraid of herself 
by listening to the monologues at 
the event.

“It’s all just to be yourself and 

love yourself for who you are 
and to share your story and what 
makes you, you,” she said.

It’s important students attend 

the event and experience the 
performer and their stories, 
Carbone said, because of what 
she described as a campus-wide 
obsession with attaining perfec-

tion.

“They’re used to being the 

best, the brightest,” she said. “A 
lot of the research we’ve done on 
campus shows that the student 
population as a whole is also 
really reluctant to ask for help or 
admit that anything is wrong.”

Carbone said the storytelling 

format has encouraged students 
to craft their own narratives and 
share them with an audience.

“What we have found when 

we started doing workshops and 
events like this, is that when 
you give people an opportunity 
to say what’s going on, the light 
bulb goes off for other people,” 
Carbone said. “Our goal is to 
challenge some of the stigmas 
that exist on our campus, espe-
cially around appearance and 
perfection and attractiveness 
and weight.”

BODY
From Page 1A

Susan Ernst, director of Uni-

versity Health Services gynecol-
ogy department and assistant 
professor of obstetrics and gyne-
cology, earned a grant for a pro-
posal pertaining to medical care 
in Ethopia.

Ernst runs a gynecology clinic 

at the University for adolescents 
and women with disabilities, 
and has been working to offer 
similar services at the St. Paul’s 
Hospital and Millennium Medi-
cal Center in Ethiopia.

Ernst said the Ethiopian Cen-

ter for Disability and Develop-
ment and the Ethiopian Women 
Disabilities National Organiza-
tion both acknowledged there 
were barriers preventing adoles-
cents and women with disabili-
ties from receiving reproductive 
health services. Because of this, 
she began working on a proposal 
with the aim of creating focus 
groups with these demographics 
to gather information about the 
obstacles to receiving medical 
care.

Ernst plans to survey the 

administrators, 
faculty 
and 

nurses at the hospital about their 
difficulties in providing care for 
their patients, such as the physi-
cal barriers patients with severe 
disabilities face from hospitals 
not being properly equipped to 
assist them.

“Our ultimate goal is to try 

to improve those services that 
are not only offered at St. Paul’s, 
but throughout other reproduc-
tive health care clinics in Ethio-
pia,” Ernst said. “In the United 
States we have code and all of 
the buildings have to be built to 
code for patients with disabili-
ties, but there, some of the clin-
ics may not have a ramp to get 
up into the clinic area, or even if 
the patients can get up into the 
clinic area, the doorways might 
not be accessible for somebody 
in a wheelchair.”

Ernst said she appreciates the 

award because it has allowed her 
to collaborate with individuals 
from Ethiopia, the University of 
Michigan and University of Cen-
tral Florida.

“This 
money 
allows 
the 

research team to not only go back 
to Ethiopia and do this work, but 
to actually hire women with dis-
abilities in Ethiopia to help us as 
study coordinators and to pay 
the adolescents and women with 
disabilities to be a part of our 
focus group and just to work in a 
collaborative manner to address 
this problem,” Ernst said.

Other 
recipients 
included 

Nancy Fleischer, an assistant 
professor of epidemiology and 
Elizabeth King, assistant profes-
sor in health behavior and health 
education.

Fleischer said her project 

is focused on the role of social 
mobility in racial and ethnic dis-
parities and infant health. With 
the grant, Fleischer said she will 
be constructing a multi-gen-
erational data set to link birth 
certificate data across multiple 
generations to understand cross-

generational social mobility and 
to see if that is related to adverse 
birth outcomes such as prema-
ture birth.

As part of the grant, Fleischer 

said she has been able to hire a 
graduate student who has been 
doing work on Institutional 
Review Board applications and 
data request applications. She 
also said the award has allowed 
her to work with colleagues in 
South Carolina, as well as at 
Michigan State University.

“It has been helpful for mak-

ing connections across campus, 
since I started my faculty posi-
tion just in September of 2015, 
and don’t have the research 
linkages 
already,” 
Fleischer 

said. “I am very grateful to have 
received it and I look forward to 
doing the work.”

King said she’s planning on 

working 
with 
collaborators 

in Russia to do a qualitative 
research study on why women 
who test positive for HIV dur-
ing pregnancy do or do not stay 
in HIV care.

“This Seed Grant is allow-

ing us to do this project, which 
hopefully will be the foundation 
for designing an intervention 
to improve women’s outcomes 
related to getting enrolled in, 
and staying on, HIV treatment 
services,” King said. “We’re hop-
ing to use our findings from this 
project to design a program to 
help women.”

Other beneficiaries include 

Shobita Parthasarathy, associate 
professor of public policy, Musi-
cology prof. Louise Stein and 
Ruth Tsoffar, associate profes-
sor of women’s studies and com-
parative literature.

Stein is planning to utilize the 

funding she received from the 
IRWG to pay for travel to Italy. 
Her research focuses on famous 
17th century alto castrato singer 
Giovanni.

She said this is an impor-

tant component to traditional 
Italian gender roles because 
Grossi seems to represent the 
emergence of a new kind of mas-
culinity. In particular, Stein said 
she’s interested in understand-
ing how Grossi succeeded in the 
competitive operatic market-
place, as well as how he executed 
different kinds of masculinity on 
stage.

“(The grant) will provide me 

the funding to be able to travel 
to the libraries and archives in 
Italy that have the materials I 
need,” she said. “I also appreci-
ate this because gender study is 
a new area for me ... I look for-
ward to also collaborating, get-
ting advice from scholars here at 
U of M.”

Applications for the grants, 

which are annual, opened in the 
fall. They were scored based on 
multiple criteria regarding the 
project, including its quality 
and importance, its relation to 
IRWG’s central focus on women, 
gender and sexuality, and its 
inclusion of issues regarding 
race, sexual orientation or cul-
ture. The significance of the 
project to its field as well as the 
contribution to the University 
was also taken into account.

GRANT
From Page 1A

in two student forums in the fall 
aimed at gathering feedback on 
the R&E requirement.

According to the resolution, 

the center would provide train-
ing and resources for graduate 
student instructors and profes-
sors to better facilitate sensitive 
discussions regarding race and 
ethnicity. It would also create a 
space for students to engage in 
further dialogue.

Several members expressed 

confusion about the functional-
ity of such a facility. LSA senior 
David Shafer, a CSG representa-
tive, said he appreciated the spir-
it of the resolution, but wanted 
to know more about the logistics 
of the center, such as who would 
work there and how it would 
operate.

In response, LSA junior Sean 

Pitt, CSG chief of staff, stressed 
the intent of the resolution. He 
explained that it aims to serve 
as a sign of student support for 
the proposal to the University’s 
administration so that the LSA 
committee currently reviewing 
the R&E requirement will fur-
ther entertain the creation of a 
support center for R&E courses. 
The committee could then work 
to strategize and develop specif-
ics.

The resolution was referred 

to the resolutions committee for 
further review. Shafer also sug-
gested hosting a forum to gain 
feedback for such a center.

Guest Speakers
LSA senior Adam Waggoner, 

chair of the Student Organization 
Funding Commission, updated 
CSG on the commission’s activi-
ties at Tuesday’s meeting. SOFC 
is the branch of CSG that makes 
funding decisions to support stu-
dent organizations on campus.

Waggoner said SOFC’s budget 

was about $200,000 last semes-
ter, which represents about half 
of CSG’s. $198, 927 was reim-
bursed to student organizations 
by the end of the semester. Stu-
dent groups requested nearly 
half a million dollars in funding 
total, and slightly over a quarter 
million dollars were awarded. 
He explained that demand for 
funding has been increasing 
both because of a rise in requests 
and easier accessibility due to 
the online application.

This semester’s budget has 

been raised to $225,000; howev-
er, Waggoner said it’s not propor-
tional to the increase in demand.

Out of the nine periods of 

funding CSG divides the semes-
ter into, seven waves remain for 
this semester.

we can give people except to be 
conservative.”

Neeley said one of the most 

important steps for the commu-
nity to take is restoring trust in 
the government.

“We have to go back and 

rebuild the trust and confidence 
of those in the geographical area 
who were severely impacted so 
they can feel comfortable living 

CSG
From Page 2A

WATER
From Page 2A