Nelson Mandela said, “Education is the most powerful weapon with which you can change the world.” For those prepared and passionate to change the world with the key to success, at a time when it is increasingly harder to achieve credentials and training through limited courses and high student loans, websites such as ‘Coursera’ are becoming an effective means of sharing and teaching the information we need to know how to change the world.

For those who want to become involved in foreign policy and understand the interconnected economies of the global food system, Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health recently started a 6 week long free course entitled, “An Introduction to the U.S. Food System: Perspectives from Public Health”.

Taught by Robert S. Lawrence, M.D., this introductory course on food systems discusses “activities, people and resources involved in getting food from field to plate.” Food production in the United States deals with not only the agriculture sector but our country’s economy, the population’s general well being and health, and political issues impacting all corners of the world.

Dr. Lawrence has an extensive and highly respected background in public health. He is currently a Professor of Health Policy and International health and the Center for a Livable Future, an institution which he helped establish in 1996. He has sat on multiple committees and was the director of Health Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation. Aside from himself, the course will also feature other faculty from the Center for a Livable Future as guest lecturers.

In order to create meaningful policy changes to reduce food insecurities and global poverty, courses such as this are extremely useful in introducing to the public the various connections that must be taken into consideration before embarking to ‘change the world’.

For someone with the desire to end world hunger, it is not enough to be equipped with a fire in their heart and a sociology degree in their hand.  By having widespread familiarity or in depth knowledge across multiple sectors, economics, diet and health, and global politics in this case, it will be easier to attack the problems we want to fix.

– Deena Dulgerian

Source:coursera