Built by the Field: Cross-Sector Learning Agendas for Nutrition, Hunger & Health

Recording

Overview

For fifty years, many federal initiatives and national commissions set out to end hunger and improve nutrition in America. Each one generated its own data, evaluations, and research findings, and yet the problems remain entrenched. So at a time of renewed calls to action in public health, researchers and advocates are asking: what is the future of learning about America's hunger, nutrition, and health? 

The Data Foundation, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, brought together the field to chart the future. Through focus groups and a cross-sector workshop, the Data Foundation put community organizations, frontline researchers, and federal partners together to ask questions about the problems to be solved, and how to meaningfully move the needle in addressing persistent questions relevant to practitioners and policymakers alike. The result is a community-first Learning Agenda on Nutrition, Hunger & Health that treats data infrastructure, measurement, and shared standards as actual levers for progress, not footnotes to it.

Realizing a return on the nation’s investments in research and evaluation can be accelerated from improving coordination, sharing standards, and building new infrastructure to unlock the solutions already sitting in the data produced by agencies, states, and local programs across the country. Attendees joined us as we discussed how the research and evaluation community can use this new community-developed learning agenda for impact.

More broadly, the learning agenda provides a model for the evidence community and agencies implementing laws like the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act in considering what cross-sector, community-developed learning agendas can look like. Speakers discussed: 

• “Why now” and where the learning agenda builds on prior evidence-building strategies 
• How the learning agenda bridges research across government agencies, academic institutions, and community organizations
• How hunger and nutrition experts shaped the agenda's research questions and created guidelines for effective data practices
• Actions agencies, funders, and researchers can take next to close the evidence and data infrastructure gaps identified by the learning agenda

Speakers

• Nick Hart, Ph.D., President & CEO, Data Foundation
• Susan Jenkins, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Center for Evidence Capacity, Data Foundation
• Shelly Ver Ploeg, Senior Fellow, National Center for Food and Agricultural Policy
• Sara Stefanik, Director, Center for Evidence Capacity, Data Foundation
• Spiro Stefanou, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics at Penn State and Former Administrator of the USDA/Economic Research Service
• Nathan Varnell, Policy and Research Analyst, Center for Evidence Capacity, Data Foundation