2024-2025 IHDSC Partnership Development Seed Award Cohort

IHDSC is pleased to announce its second cohort of Partnership Development Seed Awardees! The program is designed to invest in the cultivation of new and existing research-practice-partnerships (RPPs), which we know are central to equity-driven scholarship. The Institute is committed to creating and strengthening partnerships that are mutually beneficial, equitable, and sustainable and that center the voices of community stakeholders. This year, we partnered with NYU's Cross-Cutting Initiative on Inequality + Opportunity to launch the second cycle of the partnership call to move the needle on institutional barriers that have historically limited the development and sustainability of RPPs. Together, we aim to stimulate social impact locally and globally through the expansion of RPPs that represent our core principles: equity, collaboration, and interdisciplinarity.

Through the Partnership Development Seed Award Program, IHDSC aims to:

Inspire the formation or fortification of new and existing partnerships with stakeholders outside of academia including non-profit and community-based organizations, advocacy groups, governmental agencies, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs)
Support scholarly affiliates’ commitment to developing sustainable RPPs by investing financially in the early stages of relationship development
Amplify research and collaboration strategies that center the voices and experiences of community stakeholders in the creation of new knowledge for social impact

While IHDSC’s long standing Seed Award program provides funds for pilot research projects, this program is intended to fund partnership development activities.

Food as Medicine: Supporting New Initiatives with the Brownsville Community Culinary Center

The Brownsville Community Culinary Center (BCCC) is dedicated to enhancing the lives of Brownsville residents through free, high-quality culinary vocational training. Their mission is to provide a supportive and welcoming environment where individuals can learn the art of cooking and gain valuable skills. Collaborating with various local partners, they ensure access to fresh, healthy, and culturally relevant foods, all prepared by participants in their training program under the guidance of industry professionals. The BCCC also serves as a vital resource for community groups, offering a space for organizing, addressing local issues, and fostering community connection through celebration, learning, and dining together. The BCCC stands as a cornerstone of resilience and innovation in Brownsville, Brooklyn,

Food as Medicine (FAM) initiatives encompass a range of interventions, including medically tailored meals, groceries, produce prescriptions, and culinary and nutrition training for healthcare professionals, particularly physicians who receive little to no nutrition training in their medical school curriculum. Overall, evidence supports FAM initiatives’ positive impact on food insecurity, diet quality, cardiometabolic risk factors, disease self-management, and cost-effectiveness. This partnership with the Brownsville Community Culinary Center (BCCC) aligns with the project team's short- and long-term scholarly interests of advancing cardiometabolic health in underserved communities through nutrition education and research. It also addresses the BCCC's goals of collaboration with organizations such as NYU, increasing visibility to their programs, expanding their DWP, and addressing structural barriers in the Brownsville community.

PI: Dr. Andrea Glenn, Assistant Professor, Nutrition and Food Studies, Steinhardt

Partner: Brownsville Community Culinary Center

Urban Planning and City-level Programs to Support Child Development

This project involves two partnerships with city-level partners in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Tirana, Albania.

The office of the Chief of Cabinet of the City of Buenos Aires in Buenos Aires (3.2 M habitants), Argentina has the overall mission of build a better city for all the people in Buenos Aires to allow them to grow, develop and dream [“construyendo una mejor Ciudad para todos los porteños. Un lugar que nos permita crecer, desarrollarnos y soñar.” ] and the Council for the rights of children and adolescent protects the right of children in the city. The current partnership will focus on establishing a new partnership in order to design a plan for better construction and development of Child Protection Residencies to connect vulnerable families to supportive and responsive services.

The partnership with Qendra Marredhenie (QM) in Tirana, Albania will focus on pilot and baseline data collection to evaluate QM’s School Streets program, which redesigns streets in front of schools to transform them from car traffic-dominated spaces to pedestrian-dominated and climate-resilient spaces for social interaction between caregivers and children, among caregivers, and among children during school drop-off, pick-up, and for school events. They do this in partnership with the city of Tirana (Mayor’s office and city construction teams) with a combination of removing lanes for parked cars, constructing wider sidewalks with that saved space, adding speed bumps, reducing speed limits, narrowing lanes of existing traffic, planting trees and creating attractive places to sit and interact. Such urban design initiatives (Global Designing Cities Initiative, 2019) have not been evaluated with causal impact evaluation designs.

PI: Dr. Florencia Lopez Boo, Director, Global TIES, Steinhardt

Co-PIs: Dr. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Courtney Sale Ross University Professor of Globalization and Education, Applied Psychology, Steinhardt, and Dr. Kate Schwartz, Senior Research Scientist, Global TIES

Partners: Office of the Chief of Cabinet of Buenos Aires, Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents and Qendra Marredhenie (QM) in Tirana, Albania

Feeding Change: A Collaborative Approach to Food

By prioritizing the narratives and insights of those most affected by inequities in the food system through a participatory approach, this project aims to cultivate a comprehensive understanding that informs policies, interventions, and community-driven solutions. Grassroots Grocery, Dr. Trude's partner on this project, operates and serves communities across the Bronx, Harlem, and Upper Manhattan. Their mission is to remove barriers to food access (i.e., transportation, inconvenience, stigma, injustice, dignity) by bringing the pantry to the people. As a bottom-up movement, Grassroots Grocery partners with trusted community leaders who distribute food to their neighbors. Whether it’s a Saturday spent delivering produce or bringing prepared foods to a community fridge, every action helps feed people in need – without sacrificing their pride. In the short term, this partnership with NYU will provide critical insights into the impact of our distribution approach, equipping us with data to refine and strengthen our programs. Long term, collaborating with an academic institution will help establish an evidence base that enhances our ability to secure future funding, advocate for systemic change, and scale our model to new communities. By integrating research with community-driven action, the project aims to create a sustainable framework that informs both policy and practice.

PI: Dr. Angela Trude, Assistant Professor, Nutrition and Food Studies, Steinhardt

Partner: Grassroots Grocery

Learn More

IHDSC Partnership Development Program

IHDSC'S Partnership Development Seed Award Program is designed to invest in the cultivation of new and existing research-practice-partnerships (RPPs), which we know are central to equity-driven scholarship.