Emerson Fellow
Nancy Chang
27th Class, 2020-2021
Born to parents hailing from Tianjin, China, Nancy grew up in Elk Grove, California. She attended Stanford University studying Earth Systems with a focus on sustainable food and agriculture. During her time in college, she developed a passion for food justice through food recovery efforts and environmental justice organizing. Nancy brought together on-campus academic, activist, and environmental groups for an event on food sovereignty and land liberation, delivered by a collective of pan-indigenous young farmers called Black Earth Farms. She organized farm work days and breakfast cook days to bring students off campus to farm, cook, and volunteer with Bay Area food justice groups and community leaders. Passionate about childhood nutrition, she co-designed and co-taught a culturally appropriate nutrition curriculum for elementary schoolers in East Palo Alto. Last summer, Nancy performed field research through the Rural Education Action Program that informed a nutrition program for babies in rural China.
Field placement: Food Lifeline
Seattle, Washington
Nancy worked with the Community Programs Team at Food Lifeline in Seattle, Washington, to conduct a landscape analysis of pre-COVID-19 existing community needs assessments that considered food security and related sectors like health, workforce development, and housing. Coupled with that, she performed mapping and data visualization to showcase counties and communities disproportionately affected by COVID-19 and hunger. Results of the analysis will help inform future programming in Western Washington.
Policy placement: Food Research & Action Center
Washington, D.C.
Nancy worked with the Early Childhood Programs Unit at FRAC on producing guiding materials to help states apply for P-EBT benefits and created linguistically relevant P-EBT outreach toolkit materials to reduce confusion & fear around public charge for nutrition assistance programs. She also created interactive dashboard that details demographics, food access/security, poverty, health outcomes, program participation and service locations to inform a hunger landscape analysis in New Jersey.