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Tag: Harvard Mississippi Delta Project

Harvard’s ties to the Mississippi Delta region continue to thrive and grow stronger and deeper with each passing year

December 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Via Mississippi Delta Project 
By Colin Ross, Harvard Mississippi Delta Project Co-Chair, HLS ‘16

Celebration copyOn the evening of November 18th, the students and faculty of the Harvard University community came together for the 7th annual Delta Celebration—a chance to share appreciation for the beauty and culture of the region, and to exchange insights about ways to help confront its challenges. Students and faculty of the Harvard Law School and School of Public Health were joined by special guest speaker Professor John Green, the Director of the Center on Population Studies at the University of Mississippi. HLS Dean Martha Minow also took the time to attend and give remarks.

The Delta region continues to face a range of economic, social, and health challenges, from poverty to obesity to unemployment. Since its inception, the Food Law and Policy Clinic has been committed to helping address these challenges, including supervising the student practice organization, the Harvard Mississippi Delta Project. At the event, the leaders of the Delta Project presented about their team’s efforts to study and address these challenges for clients in Mississippi. These include:

  • The Food Policy Initiative is working to get healthier, local food into Mississippi’s schools. The team members are working with the state’s burgeoning farm-to-school network to study what policies could further support the growth of farm to school programs in Mississippi;
  • The Health Initiative is doing advocacy work to support a bill in the Mississippi legislature to encourage breast-feeding, and spread the health and economic benefits the practice brings;
  • The Economic Development Initiative is studying the ways grant funding works in the region and how it might be streamlined; and
  • The Child & Youth Initiative is tackling a delicate but critical issue: the obstacles to contraceptive access in Mississippi and how reducing them could end the state’s high rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.

Dean Minow praised these efforts and the overall commitment to the Delta as a concrete example of students carrying out the HLS mission to advance justice in society.

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Harvard Law Students Visit Delta Center

March 23, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Harvard University Law School students recently received an overview of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area by Dr. Roland Herts, director of Delta State's Delta Center for Culture and Learning. The center's Lee Aylward led a tour of the area.

Harvard University Law School students recently received an overview of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area by Dr. Roland Herts, director of Delta State’s Delta Center for Culture and Learning. The center’s Lee Aylward led a tour of the area.

Via the Delta State University 

Harvard University Law School students recently spent a week in the Delta as part of an initiative between Mississippi State University and Harvard. The project is based in Clarksdale Miss. and is called the Harvard Mississippi Delta Project. 

The students took some time during the week to tour the Delta. Dr. Roland Herts, director of Delta State’s Delta Center for Culture and Learning provided the students an overview of the Mississippi Delta National Heritage Area, and the center’s Lee Aylward led the Delta tour.

The mission of the Harvard Mississippi Delta Project is to improve public health and promote economic development in the Delta. These terms are viewed in the broadest sense to include a range of topics such as financial services, healthy eating, education, infant mortality reduction and more. In addition, the project hopes to engage Harvard Law School students in innovative, interdisciplinary approaches to social change. By using their legal knowledge to support local partners in one of the poorest and most under-served areas of the United States, they hope to be a small part of our region’s larger transformation.

More than 100 law students have volunteered with the project by providing pro bono legal assistance and policy analysis for nonprofit, for-profit and governmental clients in the Delta. The platform regularly considers new assignments to which it can contribute, and this year’s assignment is heir-ship.

Learn more about the project at https://orgs.law.harvard.edu/deltaproject.
Learn about the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at http://deltacenterforcultureandlearning.com.

Harvard Delta Clinical Fellow’s Work on Breastfeeding in MS Highlighted

February 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments
Desta Reff, Mississippi Delta Fellow

Desta Reff, Mississippi Delta Fellow

Via the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation 

Last week, the Jackson Free Press published a cover story, via the Hechinger Report, on Breastfeeding Rates in Mississippi. Despite the numerous health benefits, Mississippi has some of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. This is especially problematic because the benefits of breastfeeding address many of the health issues that plague Mississippi, such as high rates of diabetes, SIDS, and obesity. The Jackson Free Press also published an article focused on whether policy changes can increase breastfeeding in Mississippi.

The articles feature the efforts of Desta Reff, the Harvard Delta Clinical Fellow, and her efforts to increase breastfeeding rates through programs and policies within the state.

As the Harvard Delta Clinical Fellow, Desta is a joint appointee of Harvard Law School and Mississippi State University and works, in  close collaboration with CHLPI’s Food Law and Policy Clinic, to improve public health and economic development in the Delta.

Garden of Hope: A Documentary on Farm to School in Mississippi

December 23, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Via the Harvard Food Law and Policy Blog

In the fall of 2013, Desta Reff, the Harvard Law School/Mississippi State University fellow, produced this documentary on Farm to School programs in Mississippi. The documentary was shown at the 2013 Farm to Cafeteria Conference on December 3rd, 2013, to an audience of over 150 people. It chronicles the efforts of schools, growers, and advocates in Mississippi working to increase children’s consumption of fresh, healthy, locally grown foods. Watch it here.

Over the past few years, the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic has worked closely with the Mississippi Food Policy Council, as well as farmers, schools, government agencies and other stakeholders in Mississippi to foster the creation of Farm to School programs in the state. The initial Clinic project was a report on barriers to expanding farm to school in Mississippi, written in spring 2011 (Expanding Farm to School in Mississippi). Following that report, the Food Law and Policy Clinic, working with the Harvard Law School Mississippi Delta Project, developed legislative recommendations (Mississippi Farm to School Legislative Recommendations) that the Mississippi Food Policy Council and the Mississippi Legislative Task Force on Healthy Food Access could use for advocacy for farm to school legislation in 2012. Two of these recommendations passed in the state legislature and are now state laws.

Mississippi Delta Celebration

November 27, 2013 / / 0 Comments

L-R: Mr. and Mrs. Winokur of the Winokur Family Foundation and Christopher Masingill, Co-Chairman of the Federal Delta Regional Authority

By: Ona Balkus
Clinical Fellow at the Food Law and Policy Clinic
Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation

The 5th Annual Harvard Mississippi Delta Celebration is an annual celebration of the work students and faculty from schools around Harvard University are doing to improve economic, health, and social conditions in the Delta region of the United States. Student organizations and faculty focus their efforts towards this region because it has historically faced high rates of unemployment, poverty, and less access to higher education. The Celebration, in its 5th year, is made possible annually with the generous support of the Winokur Family Foundation and hosted by the HLS Mississippi Delta Project and the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation.

This year’s celebration, held at Harvard Law School on Wednesday, November 20th, highlighted a wealth of projects members of the Harvard community have engaged in over the past year, including: the HLS Mississippi Delta Project’s pro bono legal and policy work for its partners in the Delta; the HLS Spring Break Pro Bono trip to improve food access in Clarkdale, MS; the Harvard Water Security Initiative’s project to study flood control and environmental issues related to the Mississippi River; Harvard Kennedy School’s Community Development Project’s community engagement work in Greenwood, MS; students assisting state legislators through Mississippi Policy Partners, a partnership between Harvard and the Mississippi NAACP/One Voice; Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Alumnus Raymond Jetson’s urban civic engagement project Metromorphosis, based in Baton Rouge; and the impressive efforts of the Harvard Law School/Mississippi State University Fellow, Desta Reff, and the first ever Harvard School of Public Health/Mississippi State University Fellow, Maya McDoom, both supported by the Winokur Family Foundation.

Continuing in its success from past years, the event was a great opportunity for students and faculty to meet, network, and build relationships for future collaboration. The Co-Chairman of the Federal Delta Regional Authority, Christopher Masingill, was a guest of honor at the event this year. He closed the celebration by thanking the Harvard community for all of its work, emphasizing the significant impact these projects are making to improve quality of life in the Mississippi Delta region.

Clinical Events: Mar 5-9

March 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

There’s always an event (or two or three) to attend at HLS. A few clinical events are highlighted below but for a complete listing of HLS events, please visit the HLS calendar.

Harvard Legal Aid Bureau 1L Info Session
Tue, Mar 6, 6–7:30pm
Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, 23 Everett Street

Stop by the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (HLAB) – the nation’s oldest student legal services organization – to learn more about the application process, the types of cases handled by HLAB, and the HLAB community.

Contesting Childhood: When Law and Politics Go to School
Thu, Mar 8, 12–1pm
WCC 4133

Harvard Law School SJD Candidate Lisa Kelly discusses mandatory schooling in North America and how the seeds of “family privacy” were sewn – and retroactively invented – in response to the shifting relationship between family and state.

Hosted by the Child Advocacy Program.

HLS Advocates for Education Conference – Closing the School to Prison Pipeline: Redirecting our Future
Thu, Mar 8, 9am–6pm
WCC, Milstein East ABC

The HLS Advocates for Education Conference will take a multidisciplinary approach to evaluating the issues that contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline while discussing potential solutions. Professor James Forman Jr. of Yale Law School will be the keynote speaker.

Co-sponsors include Child and Youth Advocates (CYA), Harvard Prison Legal Assistance Project (PLAP), Harvard Defenders, La Alianza, Black Law Students Associations (BLSA), Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review (CRCL), Women’s Law Association (WLA), and Harvard Mississippi Delta Project.

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