The Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at the School of Public Health invited Manuel Franco to present the Photovoice Villaverde project. The Center for a Livable Future funded Manuel Franco during his PhD and Post Doc in Baltimore. Anne Palmer, program director of the Food Communities & Public Health Program at the CLF introduced Manuel Franco.
“It all started with Manuel,” said Anne Palmer, eleven years ago Franco used funds from an Innovation Grant awarded by CLF to conduct a food environment study in Baltimore neighborhoods. The study was one of the first of its kind at the Bloomberg School. It looked at a few specific low-income neighborhoods and quantified a few things related to food environment: What were the most common types of food stores? What types of food did they offer? Where were different stores located in relation to where people lived? Franco then merged that dataset with another well-known dataset (the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, or MESA) about cardiovascular health.
“His study showed that Black and low-income people in Baltimore live in areas with less healthful food due to the types of stores and what those stores sell,” said Palmer. “In addition, he found that those residents have lower quality diets.,” Franco’s PhD thesis findings earned him an unexpected call from the Baltimore City Health Commissioner, and then the ball was rolling.
“His study led to the formation of the Baltimore City Food Policy Task Force, the funding of the Food Policy director, and so much more,” said Palmer.
