Anyhow, I saw Pauline and Hannah there, and I'm sure all three of us just couldn't be more thankful for the timing of this lecture amidst current project discussions on OBESITY. Hannah did ask a public question to the commissioner on how to best approach as a team of 25 students to accomplish some solution to the Obesity and food accessibility in Harlem. I'm sure she will talk about it in next class, and I'll leave further discussion to her questions on that! I really want to thank Hannah and Pauline for coming and making some contacts with the different active groups that were present and are doing stuff like we are attempting this semester. 
The lecture itself was almost everything we've covered in class thus far, and it felt good that we are nailing the right public health issue to pursue this semester. Obesity, Heart Attack, Diet, Physical Activity etc. was the top priorities for the department of Health's agenda for coming years. He also talked about their advertisement campaigns in the last few years, their initiative to reduce the salt from processed/packaged foods, efforts to increase access to food and how to increase physical activity etc.... The lecture was quite informative regarding All thing DOH has been doing. He also amused us by adding some DOH's preventative flyers during Cholera Epidemic more than a century ago, and the silliness involved to control a disease. And also some current health promotion flyers from an upstate university and the vagueness of the public messages. The moral of showing all that stuff was to show inevitable significance of the environment and health outcomes!!
Anyhow, we can probably get access to his lecture once they post it online. I asked him at the end about our idea of bringing a supermarket to Harlem to fight the food inaccessibility and disparities, and he was kinds iffy on that. He said that it will be politically hard to get that done with our limited capacity as students. He recommended that we convince the local bodegas to increase their selection of healthy food. And right then, some one interrupted our discussion and said that brining a super market is hard because they have tried it as well. And then the commissioner escaped from us and left, and I started the conversation with the interrupter:)
He was also from Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University. We started discussing the project ideas, and he said that he has been consulting with the Student Wellness Center at City College to bring the healthy food to the cafeteria, bring more microwaves for different social gathering places at the campus and also they are working on bringing farmer's market at CCNY.
How amazing is that??? Isn't that what most of you have been suggesting in your journals??
So for the people, who are interested in doing GROUP_CCNY projects, we can collaborate with them and get significant work done at City College by the end of the semester:) By the way, Farmer's market has already done a site assessment at city college, and I'll ask more details on that matter later. Maybe we can push some pending work to get the fresh stuff get to CCNY campus soon.
Other than that, we'll talk more about it in class. Olivia has also set up some meetings for her and I to meet with local CBO's working in the Harlem community on Food Access issues. I'm very optimistic of getting GROUP_COMMUNITY going into some strong paths as well.
At the end, I'll just say that after group/individual presentations in next class, we'll assign people on different project and start the fieldwork:)
Here's a clip from Dr. Farley's talk:
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