SDOH policy proposal: food access in your community

This brief is unusual in that it contains almost no prose — it is a list of section headings with a few parenthetical instructions. That is not a defect and it is not a template you are free to reorganise. **The headings are the rubric.** Each one names a scored element, there are more than twenty of them, and the most common way to lose marks here is to write a flowing essay about food access and let four or five of the named sections dissolve into paragraphs that address them implicitly. Keep every heading, in this order, and write under it. If a section feels redundant, that is a signal you have misread it rather than permission to merge it, and the two ethics sections below are the clearest example. Build the document as a skeleton of headings first, then fill it — the reverse order is how sections go missing.

Look at what the parentheses actually require, because they are the only quantified instructions in the document and they are easy to skim past. Demographic information wants two or more statistics; risk factors wants two or more; trends over recent years wants two or more. That is a floor of six data points, each of which needs a source recorded in the table's own source column. And every one of them is qualified by the phrase running through the headings — *in My Community*. National figures are the default answer and the wrong one: the assignment is asking you to characterise a specific local population, which usually means county-level or tract-level data rather than the CDC's national summary. Deciding what counts as your community — a county, a city, a set of census tracts — is therefore the first decision in the assignment, because every figure you gather afterwards depends on it and mixing scales midway is worse than picking the wrong one.

Two sections are quietly the same question asked twice, and answering it once costs you a whole heading. *Ethical Implications of Current Policy or Absence of Existing Policy* is about the status quo: who is being harmed right now, and what it means that nobody has acted. *Two Ethical Implications of Proposed Policy Alternative* is about your own proposal: who bears its costs, who is excluded from its benefits, what it does to autonomy or to equity. A policy that improves average access while concentrating its costs on the people already worst off is ethically interesting, and that is the kind of observation the second section exists to capture. Notice also that the second one specifies **two**, so a single implication leaves half the section unanswered — and the easiest second one to find is almost always distributional: who does not benefit, and were they already the worse off group.

The structure is also asking you to make a choice rather than a recommendation. *Two Policy Alternatives to Address the SDOH* comes before *Preferred Policy*, which means a submission that proposes a single obvious intervention has failed a named section and weakened the one after it — a preference is only meaningful against a rejected option. Generate two genuinely viable alternatives, not one real proposal and one straw man, then say what decided between them. The financial costs and benefits section is usually where that decision actually gets made, so those two sections should agree with each other. If your costs and benefits analysis favours the option you did not prefer, that is worth saying explicitly and defending on other grounds, which is a far stronger document than one where the numbers quietly point the other way.

Finally, the section most often left vague is the one doing the persuasive work. *Potential Results of Inaction* is the lever this entire document turns on, because a policy maker is rarely moved by the merits of a proposal and is frequently moved by the cost of doing nothing. Attach numbers to it: projected prevalence, downstream utilisation, cost trajectory. The same applies to *Identification of Appropriate Policy Maker(s) or Legislator(s)*, which asks for named individuals with actual jurisdiction over food access in your area — a council member, a state representative, a specific committee — not 'the government' or 'policy makers', because the whole document is addressed to them. Communication methods depend on the same specificity: how you reach a county commissioner differs from how you reach a state committee, and a generic answer about raising awareness fits neither.