Mizzou Students’ Idea Becomes a Reality: Deaton Scholars Program CAFNR Feature Article

This article originally appeared in an online College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources publication written by Jacqueline Janorschke and published on March 14, 2020. Read it here!

Then-senior Maria Kalaitzandonakes and then-freshman Holly Enowski, both science and agricultural journalism students interested in food insecurity, helped lay out the framework for what would later become DSP. The students envisioned a program dedicated to food insecurity and poverty issues that was multidisciplinary and encompassed a mentoring component.

“What’s so exciting about this program is that undergraduate students who were in the College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources had recognized the power of all these ideas that they were getting from all parts of the university and they said, ‘If we pull this together and find a way to work together, we can come up with some new solutions to some old problems,’” Deaton said.

“What I like so much about the Deaton Scholars Program is that it is a campus-wide initiative, but really has roots in the values and the things that I learned within CAFNR,” said Enowski, who’s now a senior and a program leader for DSP.

Enowski addresses students, faculty and staff during the DSP Spring Opening Ceremony this January. Photo by Yanu Prasetyo, courtesy of DSP.

The program began in the spring of 2017 with mentor and mentee pairings; Kalaitzandonakes and Enowski modeled the first pairing. A freshman, sophomore or junior would be paired with a senior, graduate or PhD student from across different disciplines. Together, the mentor and mentee would identify an issue related to poverty and food security and work to create a final community project that offered real-life solutions to the issues the students identified.

“The DSP mentoring aspect is important to me personally because a lot of times growing up and in the early years of college I felt like people didn’t take my passion for food insecurity seriously,” Enowski said. “The mentorship aspect in DSP empowered me to take myself seriously.”

Today, DSP looks very similar to the initial year, except rather than being put in groups of two, participants work in teams of four or five students from different disciplines to frame a poverty or food insecurity problem plaguing a community in the US, or elsewhere, and generate a creative potential solution to solve or alleviate the problem.

“The team dynamic has allowed people to really find a community within DSP,” Enowski said.

There were 55 Deaton Scholars this year, and around three-fourths of the students participating in the program are undergraduates.

“It’s heavily driven by the fresh ideas of undergraduates willing to tackle difficult issues,” Deaton said.

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Deaton Scholars present their team projects during the DSP graduation ceremony and have the option of applying for possible funding to take steps to implement the project. DSP is a semester-to-semester program, so students who are still interested can continue their work in the next semester.

Deaton Scholars visit during their first meeting at the 2020 Opening Ceremony. Photo by Yanu Prasetyo, courtesy of DSP.

“We encourage students to work together to make something that’s tangible, that could be implemented and that would actually work,” Enowski said.

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For Enowski and Deaton, watching DSP grow throughout the years has been “exciting, stimulating and worthwhile.”

“When the Deaton Scholars Program started, people thought we were crazy and they didn’t think the program was suitable for undergraduate students,” Enowski said. “Now, to see it have name recognition on campus, to see projects funded and people move on to graduate school with a focus on food insecurity or using some aspect of what they learned in Deaton Scholars beyond the program, has been the most rewarding part.”