BUSPH Idea Hub: “Students Collaborate with Starbucks to Track COVID Policy Changes”

When COVID-19 cases in the United States began to surge again last fall, states and cities started imposing a flurry of executive orders and public health guidance to mitigate the spread of the virus and save lives. From indoor dining restrictions to mask mandates, many of these state and local policies began changing on a daily basis, posing operational challenges for retail businesses as they adjusted accordingly to keep their employees and customers safe.

During the fall 2020 semester, 14 Boston University students embarked on a bold initiative with the Starbucks Coffee Company to track COVID-19 policies affecting retail businesses and restaurants in the US and Canada, organizing this information into a database for Starbucks employees (called partners) to reference as they facilitate store re-openings and implement safety protocols unique to each of their cafes in North America.

The collaboration is a novel partnership between the global coffee giant and the School of Public Health, and one of the first relationships spearheaded by SPH’s recently formed idea hub that aims to bridge the gap between public health and private industry.

Students from SPH, the School of Hospitality Administration (SHA), and the School of Social Work (SSW) worked closely with Paul Shafer, assistant professor of health law, policy & management, and Starbucks corporate partners to populate the COVID Community Information Exchange (CCIE), a database that the company created to code state and local regulations and public health guidelines that have impacted retail businesses. The project satisfied the MPH practicum requirement for several of the SPH students.

“This collaboration with Starbucks is very exciting for SPH and idea hub, but it is most of all an extremely valuable learning experience for our students to see firsthand how complex health policy can be in the middle of a public health emergency,” says Shafer, who is the principal investigator of the CCIE. “There is a lot of nuance and detail that goes into not only finding these policies, but distilling their complex language down to what a cafe manager can actually understand and respond to.”

MSW/MPH dual degree student Mekedelawite (Maya) Atakilti looks at the project’s benefits and challenges from a personal standpoint.

Mekedelawite (Maya) Atakilti, a dual-degree student in the MPH/MSW program, says she appreciated the opportunity to lay the foundation for policies that promote safe working conditions for essential workers, during and after the pandemic.

“I have family members who work in restaurants and are directly impacted by these types of policies,” says Atakilti, who herself worked in a small restaurant that was forced to shut down during the pandemic to assess how to implement the new safety orders and guidelines into its operational framework. Restaurant owners whose first language is not English face additional barriers in comprehending the often complex or vague language in the regulations, she says.

“When I started the project, I thought about how these restaurant owners are looking at and implementing this data, and how states can do a better job of making their guidelines more readily available to people and easier to follow,” says Atakilti, who reviewed mandates in Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, and North Carolina. For example, most states last fall had implemented mandates for face coverings, but few state guidelines indicated what businesses should do if a customer refuses to wear a mask, she says. “It’s really difficult to parse through all of the information and make sure that you’re following all of the guidelines correctly.” […]

---