“No social movement has ever succeeded without the people involved being part of it,” Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger commented to the Philadelphia Inquirer this week. He was talking about the significance of Witnesses to Hunger, a program at the Drexel University School of Public Health that celebrated its fifth anniversary this week – and is built around exactly such participation of the people involved.

Tianna Gaines-Turner, a Witness to Hunger from Philadelphia, shows her children an action wall depicting Witnesses’ experiences speaking in public, with legislators and through the media.

“Witnesses” began in 2008 when Mariana Chilton, PhD, an associate professor at Drexel, received an open-ended grant to do anything she wanted to build upon her research addressing child hunger and poverty. She was already working as the lead investigator in Philadelphia for Children’s HealthWatch, a major multi-site research program…