Writing Project #1: Justifying an Evaluation

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Introduction
Food as one of the basic human rights continues to be a burden to provide not just in the developing worlds but in the developed countries as well. In 2017, FAO recorded that about 821 million people have food insecurity CITATION Foo18 \l 1033 (Food Security & Nutrition around the world). This same scenario exists in the schools as well, University of California found that about 52% of students face food insecurity particularly low and middle income students. This lack of a basic need led to poor academics, anxiety, depression and poor health. For the purpose of developing students holistically, the university sought to meet the issue and provide sustainable food and housing. This led to the creation of Global Food Initiative (GFI) in order to reduce and consequently eliminate food insecurity.
The Global Food Initiative is a bold and practical program that will eliminate food insecurity for college students. However for the program to sustain its goal, the root causes of food insecurity need to be addressed for the program to sustain students in and outside school.
Discussion
Food insecurity means lacking resources to provide healthy and affordable food CITATION Jen171 \l 1033 (Wallace), unfortunately the cost of living has not been parallel with the increasing cost of higher education and therefore students in campuses have had to forego meals just to meet their tuition and housing costs. The University of California found that 21% of its students face food insecurity and about 8.7% are homeless. The lack of basic needs affects a student’s well-being to learn. The university president Janet Napolitano and other chancellors founded the GFI to help the needy students as well as carry out research to identity the root cause of food insecurity which once dealt with, food insecurity will be utterly eliminated.
The success of the initiative was placed under a subcommittee, FAS-BN whose role was to offer preventative training and education to school and community students. The preventative program was meant to alleviate the current crisis of food insecurity and train students on how to meet this basic need by themselves, a training they can also use when out of college and share with the community.
The efforts of the system included provision of pre-college programs to teach on meeting basic needs effectively to both community college and high school students, training and providing financial aid to students, the crisis committee expansion to help cater for the newly found crisis, collaborate with counties and states for students to register in Calfresh, giving students food vouchers, create pantries that provide healthy and diverse food types, promote resolutions on dealing with homelessness and reviewing of assessment tools on this system.
The GFI was founded on 6 concepts that are geared to ensure that students’ basic needs are met and offer tools and resources in terms of training to students which will facilitate elimination of food and other basic needs insecurity. The first is the goal of the initiative and that is to make sure students have resources and information that will ensure they have all the basic needs CITATION Glo17 \l 1033 (Global Food Inititative: Food and Housing Security at the University of California). A research by Dr, Watson found that students felt that the institution only cared for the academics of the students which unfortunately would be undermined if the basic needs were not being met CITATION Tyl17 \l 1033 (Tyler D. Watson, etal).
The second concept is staffing and infrastructure, where all campuses will create centers and provide enough staff members that will help students meet their basic needs. These centers encourage participations of all students for efficiency CITATION Glo17 \l 1033 (Global Food Inititative: Food and Housing Security at the University of California). Such centers are also meant to provide life skills on food literacy and financial skills that would greatly improve the students’ welfare CITATION Tyl17 \l 1033 (Tyler D. Watson, etal).
The university noted that the cost of living and tuition was one of the burdens leading students to forgo some of the basic needs like food to get housing and pay for their academics CITATION Tyl17 \l 1033 (Tyler D. Watson, etal), therefore seeking funding from the state and federal governments would acquire the resources needed to help students and even give them financial aid to help them meet the costs of college ...