Poverty and hunger exist in many neighborhoods in the city of Syracuse, but because of shifting demographics over the past few years the areas of need have changed. Some sections of the city have sufficient access to supplies while others are consistently “food insecure.” Dale Johnson, executive director of the Samaritan Center, a hot-meal program serving the hungry in downtown Syracuse, tried for some time without success to get a comprehensive overview of which neighborhoods and age groups were well-served, which ones were not, and why.

“There really wasn’t a coherent picture of what was going on citywide when it came to food availability,” says Johnson ’74 B.A. (P.Sc.)/’01 M.P.A. (who also holds a J.D. from SU’s College of Law). In an effort to document the realities of hunger in the city, the center’s board of directors approved the formation of the Syracuse Hunger Project. The goal of the project was to bring together all agencies in the city that deal with the problem of hunger and to combine their information in one central database.

“Geography was the obvious discipline that would help us turn what we found into real pictures,” says Johnson. In fall 2003, he called Don Mitchell, professor and chair of the geography department at Maxwell, for help with the project. Mitchell discussed Johnson’s request with Jane Read, assistant professor of geography, who specializes in geographic information systems. She agreed to involve the students in her Principles of Geographic Information Systems course in the project.

“It was very clear to the students -- from the articles they read and from what Dale Johnson said when he came to talk to the class -- that this was an important project,” Read says. “It had real meaning, real consequences.”

The students, mostly junior and senior undergraduates, gathered data, including the location and operating hours of food pantries, the number of meals served, food stamp and WIC participation statistics, and census numbers, from human service agencies throughout the city. With specialized computer software, they turned the information into a series of maps -- high-impact portraits of poverty. Through their efforts, the picture of hunger in Syracuse, once a scattered and fragmented mosaic of bits and pieces of information, has been brought into sharp focus.

“To me, the most important thing is that the maps became a focal point for discussion by a diverse group of people around the city,” Mitchell says. “People from many different agencies and organizations came together around the table to look at the maps and talk about the problems in ways they never had before. Yes, the maps contain a great deal of information, but what they really did was to provide a means to talk about important issues in a way that minimized long-standing problems.”