Etta Hanlon didn’t expect a class assignment to blossom into a sustained community partnership addressing food insecurity in Roanoke. But one home-visit story — a family receiving excellent health care but struggling to find consistent meals — shifted the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine student’s focus and set a new partnership in motion.
The medical school’s Boots on the Ground course gets first-year medical students out into the community to better understand Roanoke’s diverse needs. Students are tasked with identifying a local need and then designing a way to meet it. As Hanlon and classmates Blaire Barton and Colby Mallett began looking at hunger in the region, they saw an opportunity to make a tangible, ongoing difference.
“Blaire had volunteered on a home health visit with the Children’s Health Improvement Partnership [CHIP] and noticed that while families received excellent health resources, there wasn’t consistent food support,” Hanlon said. “She recognized the gap and suggested we connect CHIP with Feeding Southwest Virginia.”…