Sep 28, 2017
5 Questions for Our Fellows — Elena Teare
Earlier this year, we partnered with the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility to launch a fellowship program for students and scholars at The New School for Social Research. Selected from master’s and doctoral programs across The New School, fellows will have the opportunity to imagine, test, and help implement new innovations as part of the IRC’s global research and innovation efforts. You can learn more about the fellowship here.
The Zolberg Institute was founded in 2014 to promote new approaches to the theory and practice of addressing challenges to human mobility, while aiming to help create more open and inclusive democratic societies. With support from the Arnhold Foundation, we’ll be working with the Zolberg Institute to identify and support fellows working in areas of displacement and migration.
IRC and The New School are organizations with shared roots and history in New York; in fact, the early New School was imagined as a “university in exile” for scholars forced to flee from World War II in Europe. It’s fitting that we come together to develop solutions for the unprecedented displacement we see today. For the next several weeks, we’ll check in and share what our first cohort of fellows have been up to.
Fellow: Elena Teare
Degree: MA in International Affairs ‘18
1. Briefly describe your role.
I help find new ways of making sure children avoid getting sick from severe acute malnutrition (SAM), and determine whether our ideas could work in multiple places around the world. Project Sprout is unique in that its aim is to design for the prevention of SAM, rather than treatment (after the fact). Not much is being done in this realm because of the many pathways and risk factors for SAM.
My focus was finding research on Tanzanian agriculture, post-harvest loss and technologies, severe acute malnutrition, nutrition, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) programs. I was the go-to person for this information in the field.
2. What are you most excited about in your work with the Airbel Center?
Being able to work and talk directly with the people we wanted to design for was hands down the most exciting! Especially since it’s well known that there is a gap between research and armchair development work, and those who spend time in the areas where programs are being implemented.
The final couple of weeks of my fellowship were spent in Tanzania doing some light-touch prototyping, like testing whether nutrition and hygiene “option cards” could help mothers improve their children’s health, while still maintaining the agency to decide for themselves. In the field, we discovered that mothers already knew about best practices, like feeding vegetables and animal protein to their children, and the importance of having clean water. Session after session, we asked how long a mother should exclusively breastfeed her baby for, and we were met with a chorus of “six months!”
But, like most answers in development, the problem was money. They all said they didn’t have the money to do these things, or that the hours taken up by farming kept them from boiling water properly or exclusively breastfeeding for six months. Hearing and seeing the barriers families have firsthand was critical to developing our ideas, and we took this knowledge as the keystone for our final prototypes.
3. What do you believe are the biggest challenges in your job?
Knowing what questions you should be asking, what assumptions you should be challenging, and recognizing important information when you weren’t even looking for it.
I definitely felt the growing pains during the ideation phase of the project, since it grated against me to just spit out ideas. Some early ideas were as targeted as gamifying adolescent sexual and reproductive health in the form of a Tamagotchi-like game, and some were as high level as creating a national campaign linking nutrition with beauty, confidence, and strength. Internships are typically task-oriented — this fellowship was not. Developing the confidence to say your ideas and defend them is a hard skill, but I eventually felt less restricted as I was met with encouragement and respect by my colleagues. I learned to push myself to constantly challenge assumptions and critically engage with every part of the design process.
4. Tell me about someone who/something that has influenced your decision to work in your field?
My family is Nicaraguan, and growing up in a developing country that has faced profound struggles with war and poverty motivated me from a very young age to be involved in development and humanitarian work. I remember very distinctly when I was in the 6th grade, the Save Darfur campaign was all over my school, and I just could never get over the injustice and violence that people in the world suffer simply because of the happenstance of where they were born. It made a very huge impact on me, and since then I have carried that experience and never lost focus on what I wanted to do.
Landing in Tanzania to work on designing Project Sprout was emotional because I had realized that this has been a goal I have been working towards since I was 11 years old; that goal being working abroad in a development and humanitarian capacity. I reflected that my focus and ambition delivered me right where I wanted to be.
5. What has been the most important innovation you have witnessed in your lifetime?
I think my answer will mirror a lot of other people’s. The internet and its ever growing accessibility is, I think, the most important innovation in my lifetime. When I was a kid, we still had dial-up and every year after that, I saw the exponential growth and sophistication of the internet. The wealth of information that people are able to access is unprecedented, and I only hope that it continues to democratize and decentralize information so that every person can benefit from it.
Curious about how we’re using R&D methods to prevent severe acute malnutrition? Read more about Project Sprout here.
