Dr. Mariana Chilton will describe her team’s original work funded through the first round of Systems for Action research that supported a trauma-informed peer-support financial empowerment program for caregivers participating in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF).

While the program significantly reduced food insecurity and improved mental health, there were challenges to convincing the state to fully fund the program despite potential savings to TANF & Medicaid. Barriers included formally accessing administrative data and entrenched systemic racism and gender discrimination in state and university systems. Despite those barriers, the program continues, but with limited scope, reach, and impact.

Dr. Chilton will also provide broader context of systems change work to promote food security that she unpacks in her new book The Painful Truth about Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again.

--  

This webinar is hosted by Systems for Action (S4A). S4A is a signature research program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) that is housed in the Department of Health Systems, Management and Policy. S4A research builds a Culture of Health by rigorously testing new ways of connecting the nation’s fragmented medical, social, and public health systems