Mariana Chilton

Professor of Practice in the School of Public Health & Health Sciences University of Massachusetts Amherst

  • Amherst MA

Mariana Chilton is a nationally recognized expert on food security, trauma and economic empowerment with mothers of young children.

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University of Massachusetts Amherst

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Expertise

Women's Rights
Health Equity
Food Security/Food Access
Food Security
Hunger
Trauma
Maternal and child health
Reproductive Rights

Biography

Mariana Chilton, Ph.D., MPH, is a school-wide Professor of Practice with a faculty home in the Department of Nutrition. Chilton authored “The Painful Truth About Hunger in America: Why We Must Unlearn Everything We Think We Know—and Start Again” (MIT Press, October 2024).

Before joining UMass, Chilton carried out research and programming on food security, trauma, and economic empowerment with mothers of young children. She founded and directed the award-winning Center for Hunger-Free Communities which developed solutions to hunger and economic insecurity. During this time, she launched Witnesses to Hunger, a movement to increase women's participation in the national dialogue on hunger and poverty, founded and directed the Building Wealth and Heath Network to incentivize entrepreneurship and build family wealth, and served as principal investigator for the Philadelphia site of Children's HealthWatch, a research network devoted to improving health and well-being of young children and their caregivers.

Chilton served as the Co-chair of the National Commission on Hunger meant to advise Congress and the United States Department of Agriculture on how to improve anti-poverty programs. She has testified before the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives and served as advisor to Sesame Street and the Institute of Medicine. Chilton’s work has been covered in the feature-length documentary “A Place at the Table,” and in the Washington Post, the Philadelphia Inquirer, public radio, and CBS National News.

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Education

University of Pennsylvania

Ph.D.

Folklore & Folklife

2000

University of Oklahoma

M.P.H.

Epidemiology

1999

University of Pennsylvania

M.A.

Folklore & Folklife

1995

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Select Recent Media Coverage

Weekend reading: Hunger in America

Food Politics  online

2024-10-01

A review of the book “The Painful Truth About Hunger in America”

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Select Publications

Sacred Nutrition: Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty and Rights of Women and Nature to Ensure the Right to Food in the United States

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

MM Chilton

2024-01-01

This Paper is a provocation to move beyond a standard human rights and right to food framework to encourage scholars, activists, and political leaders to engage in full throttle societal transformation. Ending hunger in the United States demands nothing less. The modern human rights framework is enshrined in the modern nation-state system that is rooted in the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and genocide. Three primary ways in which these roots took hold were through land theft, rape, and starvation. Hence, to assert that integrating the right to food and freedom from hunger into nation-state constitutions or into national plans to end hunger without significantly altering the structure of the nation-state will be fundamentally ineffective. Nation states currently depend on keeping people hungry, especially women and children. If this is the case, then we ought to consider new ways of envisioning and devising a world in which all people are free from hunger and have good nutrition that supports human and more-than human flourishing. To do so demands we address food insecurity at its roots.

This Paper relies on twenty-five years of empirical research with Black women, Native communities, and other groups of color, as well as on the scholarship of Black and Native thinkers. In doing so, the Paper outlines how rape, colonization, racism, and gender discrimination continue to generate food insecurity and hunger, and how incorporating a broad view of the right to food to support rights of women, Indigenous peoples, peoples of African descent, and the rural poor are integral to the right to food. Finally, this Paper shows that societal transformation can only be made possible through providing reparations to descendants of people who were enslaved, respecting and repairing treaty rights with Native nations, and changing human beings’ relationship with the natural world from viewing food as commodity to revering food and the natural world as kin with equal standing to humans. In doing so, we can meet the challenges of the climate catastrophe and promote resilience of future generations.

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How trauma-informed programming to treat social determinants unveils challenges to systems alignment

Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved

Emily Brown Weida, Victoria Egan, Mariana Chilton

2021-01-01

Cross-sector collaboration and systems alignment to promote a culture of health can address social determinants of health (SDH), improve family well-being, and create a more equitable society. This paper documents our attempt to align Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Medicaid to promote health through a trauma-informed program, The Building Wealth and Health Network (The Network). The Network successfully integrated into traditional TANF and addresses SDH through peer-group programming where caregivers heal from adversity and build financial skills. We identify three challenges to alignment of TANF and Medicaid: 1) TANF's culture of compliance, 2) societal and systems-level forces including racism and discrimination, 3) misaligned partnerships (values, priorities, structure, and capability). For each challenge, we propose solutions including incentives for innovation and partnership, and promotion of racial equity initiatives, including reparations. By highlighting challenges and solutions we seek to strengthen current approaches to achieve health equity through systems alignment.

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