005 Adam Hege on Social Justice and Food Insecurity in rural Appalachia

Appalachian's Director of Sustainability, Dr. Lee Ball sits down with Assistant Professor of Public Health, Adam Hege to discuss his journey from studying exercise science to addressing issues like food insecurity, social determinants of health and quality of life in the rural Appalachia region of North Carolina.

  Transcript

Troy Tuttle: Define sustainability. Odds are your definition is completely different from the next person’s. Appalachian State University’s Director of Sustainability, Dr. Lee Ball, sits down with his guest to explore the many ways in which sustainability affects our lives. This is Find your Sustain-Ability.

Dr. Lee Ball: So, joining me today in the podcast studio is Adam Hege, and Adam is an assistant professor of public health in the Beaver College of Health Sciences. Adam, thank you so much for joining us today on this cold Appalachian morning.

Adam Hege: Glad to be here. It was a good walk across campus this morning.

LB: Yeah so, in our podcast, Find your Sustainability, we really try to mix it up a little bit and invite different types of people in to talk about different aspects of sustainability and something that I am always extremely curious about are people’s stories and their connections to sustainability. So, if you don’t mind, right off the bat here, to tell us about your story and maybe- you know just kind of how you got to where you are now and your connection to sustainability and social justice.

AH: Okay, I guess my story kind of in this goes back to -- my early professional career, working in a local government setting and working in the parks and recreation setting. Just interacting in that with children, and seeing their lives and the challenges they go through, and working with kids was always something I was passionate about. Within this job, part of my job was really focused on kids health and well-being and giving them an outlet. A lot of the kids I was working with did not have the best home lives and those types of things and so, outside of work I’ve been very active in the United Methodist Church as some people know, and so my faith and my professional life and all those kind of things connect and then I found my passion probably in the last 6 or 7 years for public health and social justice and health equity and really striving in my professional life through my research, teaching, service to really connect those dots and really try to get -- my passion right now is really getting students engaged in that and really trying to get their passions going and seeing that there’s thing in our world and all around us that just are not just, and really helping to get their passion and fire that I’ve been able to receive. I feel like a lot of the students have similar backgrounds to me, a North Carolinian, so that’s really neat and you know connecting it to sustainability is really the world we live in, if we’re not practicing health equity and social justice and these types of things, it’s not going to be sustainable. When we think about our biggest public health challenge facing our world is climate change and if we’re not protecting our earth and protecting our citizens and striving to make a better world, its-- we’re not going not going to be sustainable.

LB: Yeah, great. Can you tell us a little bit about your academic career and how you kind of landed here in Boone?

AH: Yeah so, I -- so that’s, it’s a really weird story. I’m -- my wife if you talked with her, I’ve been in school a lot. So, I started out as an athletic trainer, I thought I wanted to work with sports and be around athletes, in which I still love sports and passion about it. But, I got that first job that I mentioned a while ago, in a local government setting, and that kind of directed me to go back for more schooling because I wanted to be able to affect people much more so than on the individual setting, I wanted to have that impact on community level, societal level, so I went back and actually I have my graduate degree, first graduate degree, here from Appalachian State in Public Administration and I owe a lot of my success now to Dr. Bradbury here at App State in the public administration department. Just seeing the passion, he was able to bring into class-- I could -- I think during that process I was making the connections that there was something bigger and I think throughout my education of history, I was always directed and headed towards public health and just didn't realize it. So, I think piecing all this together and I went on for my doctoral studies in public health and just was able to read and learn all the history of public health and just learn about all the things that it’s involved with. I think if people really take a step back and look at public health, it’s kind of written into our founding as a country and so vital to our world and society.

LB: So, I find it really fascinating to hear peoples stores and how their pr