Rutgers Equity Alliance for Community Health

Instead of information living in remote locations, school-specific databases, personal spreadsheets, or archived websites, Collaboratory brings it into one university-wide, searchable resource that supports collaboration, storytelling and future opportunities for funding and partnership. Through in-depth documentation, mapping, and reporting it creates a shared record of community-engaged work across all chancellor-led units, giving that work greater visibility, strengthening partnerships, and supporting the expansion of community-centered initiatives.  

Pamela Rothpletz-Puglia’s REACH project, Dismantling the “Kids’ Food” Archetype, took just such an approach to the issue of ultra-processed kids’ food, which is heavily marketed in cities with low-income and minority residents. “This targeted marketing encourages diets with limited variety, which creates resistance to new food, ultimately increasing lifetime risks of obesity and chronic disease,” says Rothpletz-Puglia. 

The Hope Village Garden Club reflects a sustainable, community-based model of programming built through phased investment, cross-sector partnership, and ongoing community input. At its core, the initiative demonstrates the importance of listening to community needs and responding through collaborative, service-driven programming that can adapt and grow over time. 

Sara Elnakib, PhD, MPH, RDN, of Rutgers Cooperative Extension, co-author of NJ Roadmap for Food System Resilience, and New Jersey Food Democracy Collaborative Network Facilitation Team Member, partnered with the NJFDC to apply for a REACH grant to address this need. They set out to co-develop a solution that would improve access to critical food system data by building a tool that reflects real-world needs—focusing on the data points most relevant to day-to-day operations, resource allocation, and data-driven decision-making. 

They are part of a Rutgers program called Scarlet Hope for Autism: The Road to Excellence in Education (SHARE) in which the university partners with two of its host communities in New Brunswick and Newark to help those districts better serve their special-needs population.

As part of a four-month experiment in Newark, mothers of preschoolers were given cameras to snap pictures of food that is readily available at supermarkets and restaurants in their community. Of the 814 photographs submitted, the vast majority showed how prevalent ultra-processed foods are on the shelves of stores and menus of restaurant chains.