Anthropology M.A., 2010

As executive director of LEAP, a nonprofit organization dedicated to local food access and equity around Roanoke, Virginia, Maureen McNamara Best’s work requires fluency and familiarity with agriculture, economics, health, policy, and the environment – so it’s a good thing she studied anthropology, she says.  

“I think a lot about how can you use what you’ve learned to influence policy or how other people think about things, or just to provide a different perspective,” McNamara Best says. “Anthropological framing is so important to make sure we don’t get disconnected from the people. 

McNamara Best completed an Anthropology master’s at CSU (M.A. 2010), working with Professor Emerita Kate Browne and focused on the economic viability of farmers in Northern Colorado. Her thesis combined participant observation, interviews, and other research to examine the impacts and challenges of building and supporting a local food system within state, regional, national, and global food systems. The experience was a sort of tasting menu for the executive director position with LEAP when she started in 2013. During the pandemic, she also earned a Master’s of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. 

“Through my MPH, I gained technical knowledge and an understanding of the policy layer, but the framing and the core of my work was and continues to be rooted in anthropology.“ 

Our department spoke with McNamara Best about her job and how anthropology is the table-setter for careers working on food systems and policy. 

Q&A with Maureen McNamara Best

Tell us more about what LEAP does and what you do in your job. 

LEAP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit started in 2009, run by volunteers. I became the first paid director in 2013. We really look at how to connect farmers and consumers and how to build more equitable and resilient local food systems. Our focus is largely on Roanoke, which is in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. 

We run a number of programs to nurture food and community – to help support the economic viability of local farmers and to make affordable, equitable access to food possible. So, we have a mobile farmers market. We have a fixed site farmers market. We have a food hub. We have a farm share program. We have a processing kitchen to decrease food waste, and we have a retail store. It’s a lot of piloting and making sure it’s needed in the community and that it also makes sense.

We take a food-systems approach to looking at food and community and toward looking at flexibility and redundancy to have more resilient local and regional food systems and policy. 

In what ways has studying anthropology helped you be a good executive director and nonprofit leader? 

With anthropology, we’re employing this lens to understand lived experiences and unintended consequences of policies and systems – and to not get too far removed from the people and communities affected. I try to apply that thinking when working with people and communities and within the organization.  

I think anthropology is really systems thinking and I think as society and structures get more complex, the anthropology skillset of being able to look at challenges from different perspectives and being able to approach and have conversations with people from different cultures is so helpful.  

It’s also understanding that there’s nuance and there is no one right answer, no single solution. I think anthropology holds that as a central tenant and I think it’s really important we as people just have that humility. 

Can you speak more about the tools of anthropology that you bring to your job? 

Within program evaluation, we apply a lot of qualitative and quantitative methods to look at program design and effectiveness and appropriateness, including using qualitative approaches to tell stories about the impact of the work. I think that all those things have helped me be effective in understanding and evaluating challenges and possible solutions because people and communities and needs are not static and constantly changing. 

It’s hard to balance competing needs but we continue to evaluate the structures and policies that we’re setting up and the costs of making different short- and long-term decisions for individuals and families and for the organization. 

I also think theory of change and anthropology theory – as well as methodology and political economy classes – are really important and can affect how you approach the work and to understand the different ways that we all are thinking about challenges.

I think anthropology is really systems thinking and I think as society and structures get more complex, the anthropology skillset of being able to look at challenges from different perspectives and being able to approach and have conversations with people from different cultures is so helpful.

Was there a specific class or experience that stands out for you from your time at CSU?

I really liked working with Dr. Mary Van Buren, she taught the theory class (ANTH 500), and I loved that class. It was really helpful for me. 

Method in Cultural Anthropology (ANTH 441) was a really important class, too, with Kate Browne who was my advisor. It was also really good having a small cohort of other graduate students to wrestle with some of the big questions we were asking… we all had very different projects and we approached them differently and we were able to have that space where we can continue to learn and push each other.

Where do you see opportunities and intersections between anthropology and public health? 

I think that public health is starting to be informed more from anthropology than it was. Historically, public health has been more in health systems and less in people-based systems. Looking at my coursework from Johns Hopkins, we’re trying to make sure public health is connected to the people, and that’s essentially what an anthropology degree does. More and more with community based-public health, a lot of that is either directly or indirectly informed by ethnographic methods.

What are you most proud of since completing your Anthropology MA? 

I’m proud that I’ve been able to build an organization and support a lot of community-based and community-driven programs in Roanoke, and to see that how we are doing our community-based work is reflected in the feedback and development happening in other organizations and communities.  

Also, I’m proud that we, as an organization, can commit to continuing to change and improve how we do our work. That’s constant and exhausting but it’s also the reality of how you really do community work or policy work. You have to always be changing and be able to build in flexibility and the ability to shift and change in response to the community.  

Do you have any advice you would provide to current students? 

I think that it’s important to acknowledge where you’re uncomfortable and move through it. Through my thesis, I had to do that before doing fieldwork where you have to just say, ‘OK, I can do this. I will do this.’ I’m an introvert. I still have to do some self-talk to approach people that I don’t know! 

I think it’s an incredibly important skill to make connections with a wide range of people that have really different values. And anthropology will force you to do that and it’s going to serve you well. 

What do you do outside of work for fun?

I have two young kids and a husband, and we spend a lot of time outside in the mountains and teaching the kids new skills, which is really interesting to watch how they learn and how we teach.