A community is where we live. It’s where we share our days with family and friends. And it’s a place to invest our energy to make the world a little better than it was before.
It’s the power of building community that motivates Annie Hardison-Moody, associate professor of agricultural and human sciences with NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Her research and work reach far beyond the grounds of NC State into communities across North Carolina.
She’s played a role in the creation of a vibrant community farm started by ethnically Karen refugees in Wake County. Thanks to her research, Lee County Cooperative Extension created a lending library of cooking equipment for those who may not have access to what they need at home. And she’s served as a Parks and Recreation Task Force member in Edgecombe County, helping to craft a 10-year parks and recreation plan to better serve that community.
While these are just a few examples, the central theme is Hardison-Moody’s passion for behind-the-scenes research and work that ultimately helps people and communities thrive. In addition to her teaching role, she serves as the interim assistant Family and Consumer Sciences Program leader and an NC State Extension specialist. She also directs and serves as lead author for Faithful Families Thriving Communities, a faith-based health promotion program that is a partnership between NC State Extension and the North Carolina Division of Public Health.
“The common thread for all of this is that I see my role as a facilitator,” she says. “The work is happening in communities — and my role is to uplift that work, to support them and to be a tiny little piece of this bigger community narrative.”
Finding Her Purpose
Hardison-Moody grew up in Raleigh with a passion for musical theater and vocal performance that led to a scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill. But she soon found the performance atmosphere wasn’t the right fit for her. General education courses in religious studies and women’s studies, however, helped her find the right path.
“I switched to the women’s and gender studies department, and I just found my love,” she says.
She earned her bachelor’s degrees in religious studies and women’s studies before receiving a master’s in religious studies with a focus on gender from Vanderbilt University. She then went on to pursue her Ph.D. in religion at Emory University.
In the summer between two years at Vanderbilt, Hardison-Moody came home to Raleigh for a job with the North Carolina Division of Public Health in women’s and children’s health.
“Public health was the perfect confluence of the things that I care so much about; focused on communities, and particularly women and mothers,” she says.
In fact, motherhood is central to everything she’s studied since. She went back to Vanderbilt the next year and wrote her master’s thesis on pregnancy. Her Ph.D. built upon that with a deeper understanding around communities, the social norms that shape them, and how religion is so often tied to beliefs about health. At the same time in the public health realm, she looked at how religion impacts reproductive health. Today, her research, work and teaching sit at the intersections of religion and health, while also examining topics surrounding gender, food and families.
“I love interdisciplinary work, I always have,” she says.
When she finished her Ph.D., Hardison-Moody knew she’d return to North Carolina. She’d interacted with NC State Extension in her public health work, and secured a position as a project manager for Voices into Action: The Families, Food, and Health Project (VIA), a USDA grant for a study focused on food insecurity. She later grew her role with Extension to full time and then was hired as an Assistant Professor and Extension Specialist at NC State.
The VIA project worked with 124 families over eight years with a focus on low-income families. The perspective of female caregivers was central, she says, because they are very often the ones who do the shopping and food preparation.
“We talked with them about all facets of their lives — from what it’s like to grocery shop with very limited SNAP benefits and limited income, to ways their broader environment shapes what they’re able to do, such as their access to resources,” Hardison-Moody says.
The results spurred change within local communities, such as community action groups, she says. It was that project that led to the cooking equipment lending library in Lee County.
Growing Stronger Communities
While her work extends across North Carolina, Hardison-Moody brings these experiences back to her teaching at NC State.
“When I work with graduate students, I encourage them to think about their roles,” she says. “We have a way to bring the university to communities (through Extension) that doesn’t exist in this way outside the land-grant system.”
Extension also has a unique ability to build relationships and build trust within communities, she says.
“What gets me really excited is hearing from and talking to people who are doing work in these local rural communities — that’s really hard work because they’re underfunded, understaffed, and don’t have access to the resources we have in urban counties,” she says. “And yet, they’re so committed to improving health and thinking about sustainable economic development in their counties.
“From the research side, we’re identifying some real gaps in how we understand rural communities and what they look like, and how we should be working with them when it comes to health,” she continues.
That was evident as well in her COVID-era research project. She and Sarah Bowen, professor of sociology at NC State, served as co-researchers for FIRST: Food Insecurity Responses, Solutions, and Transformation. Through FIRST, they worked to understand how families’ food practices had shifted as a result of COVID-19 and worked to identify the processes that could buffer some families from food insecurity but not others.
Her relationships within communities have also led to opportunities to serve locally, working closely with Extension agents and county managers, and serving on parks and recreation boards, for example. With her interim position with the Family and Consumer Sciences Program, Hardison-Moody sees still another way to reach out across the state. She’s a support arm for family and consumer science agents state-wide and family and consumer science specialists within the university, as well as a partner with colleagues at N.C. A&T State University.
Looking toward the future, Hardison-Moody and Bowen are working on a book manuscript. Hardison-Moody says they’ve learned so much about food insecurity and hope to start a larger discussion about how to address food insecurity in the United States.
“Our question is, what does it take for us as a country to say, it’s enough — what does it take for people and children to not be hungry?” Hardison-Moody says.
After all, building a better community is what it’s all about.
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