I came into Kansas Appleseed with a specific lens. My earlier research focused on cooperatives and the ways rural communities build systems of support, especially in Kansas and Nebraska. After living in Colorado and seeing stronger food access networks there, I started asking what support systems existed for Kansans. I thought this fellowship would help me answer that question directly, but instead it pushed me to ask better and more complicated ones.
At first, I understood food access in fairly simple terms. I thought people mostly approached it either as an economic issue, where the main challenge was affording food, or through the lens of their own identity and experience. Even though those realities overlap, I expected people to frame hunger through one or the other. My time at Kansas Appleseed challenged that assumption almost immediately.
I saw how the organization worked across issues instead of treating food access as something separate. Through its work, I saw how hunger connects to youth justice, voting rights, Medicaid, and education, and that changed the way I understood collective action. Different groups want similar outcomes, but they bring different priorities, pressures, and limits to the table. Watching those tensions play out made the work more compelling because it showed me how change unfolds over the years. That perspective shaped how I understood the rest of my fellowship and the broader food access landscape in Kansas.
I came to see that funding structures shape food access just as much as geography or cost. Even when communities respond to urgent need, the organizations involved must still navigate the longer-term effects of grants, institutional expectations, and the metrics that determine what counts as success. That realization changed how I thought about collective action. I began to pay less attention to food access as a question of need alone and more attention to the relationships that organize response: schools, nonprofits, funders, legislators, and local partners. What those actors can do depends on shared goals, and on credibility, strategy, and how their choices are perceived by others. In that sense, collective action responds to funding structures and reshapes them by determining which issues gain legitimacy, which approaches attract support, and which forms of advocacy remain politically sustainable.
In my previous experience with a senator’s office, I saw policy from within an established legislative structure, where much of the agenda already arrived through trusted relationships and existing institutional credibility. At Kansas Appleseed, I saw a different side of that process. Advocacy organizations have to build and maintain that credibility themselves while also shaping the policy language, anticipating objections, and deciding which risks are worth taking during legislative session. That work requires a level of focus and precision that I had not fully understood before. It showed me that policy change depends on good ideas, but also the ability to carry those ideas through a political environment where credibility can be difficult to build and easy to lose.
That idea became even clearer when I thought about Kansas as a largely rural state with a handful of stronger resource hubs, especially during an election year. Cities like Wichita, Kansas City, Lawrence, and Manhattan hold more visible support systems, but they also draw people in from surrounding counties that lack the same resources. Seeing those patterns before an intense campaign season sharpened the way I thought about place, because it showed how population centers shape access to services and political attention. At the same time, the legislature has to govern a state where no two small towns face hunger in quite the same way. That makes food access policy difficult to communicate, especially when programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) require technical explanations and lawmakers are already balancing multiple committees, constituencies, and priorities. Watching advocates try to compress a complex, place-based issue into a few persuasive minutes with a legislator made clear just how much strategy this work demands.
Listening to county delegates at the Kansas Farmers Union at the beginning and sitting in on conversations periodically at the Lunch Table showed me another side of food access work beyond the statehouse. In both spaces, I watched people grapple with complex policy questions in grounded, practical terms shaped by their own communities. The Kansas Farmers Union gave me a clearer sense of how differently food access takes shape across counties, while the Lunch Table showed me how school leaders weigh programs like CEP against concerns about funding, implementation, and public response. What connected those experiences was the challenge of translation. Advocates not only had to understand technical policies and legislative developments themselves, but also explain them in ways that community members could use in real time. Watching that process taught me that effective advocacy depends on pushing for better policy based on the ever-building public understanding of why change takes time and why access depends on decisions unfolding across multiple levels at once.
Kansas Appleseed gave me a close view of how policy work actually happens. I watched staff and partners bring food access into legislative conversations with clarity and persistence, and I saw how much that process depends on relationships. Advocacy did not move in a straight line. Wins and losses came in pieces, and progress depended on repeated effort across different kinds of organizations, from grassroots campaigns to schools to food banks. That experience made policy feel less abstract and much more human.
