Rooted primarily within Penn’s Department of Anthropology, the Urban Nutrition Initiative is a
community-based, ABCS program seeking to enhance the West Philadelphia community’s
(including the University of Pennsylvania’s) nutrition and health status. It also seeks to enhance
learning by impacting University teaching and the University-assisted community schools with which
it works. Finally, the Urban Nutrition Initiative seeks to develop a model that can be extrapolated,
with appropriate modifications, to other settings nationally and internationally. As a consequence, a
basic component of its activities is involved with research and evaluation. The nutritional concerns that the Urban Nutrition Initiative engages meet the criteria of “ill-defined problems” as described by Gallagher (1997):