As a first attempt at collaborating with GVSU, the project was successful. It established a contact with GVSU, the UM SPH students highly rated the experience as important for their public health practice perspective, and the students collected 200 surveys. Although the number of surveys collected was below the desired goal for the overall project, the opportunity to partner with GVSU in the project had far greater outcomes. As the faculty lead from GVSU indicated, “Again, my thanks to your students, our stakeholders were “blown away” that you would come all the way from Ann Arbor to help with a Grand Rapids issue.” UM SPH’s engagement in this effort has created the initial steps toward building a relationship with faculty at GVSU and the community of Grand Rapids. The fifteen UM SPH graduate students received an one-hour introduction to the project by GVSU faculty and community stakeholders. The students learned that the assessment was being conducted to gain a better understanding of the community’s perspective on food availability and food choice. The community stakeholders believed that the neighborhood lacked accessible and affordable food choices. However, they needed the data to validate their claim. By partnering with GVSU they would be able to quantify (or not) their hypothesis. The introduction provided the students with the context for which the data was being collected and underscored the importance of data beyond the academic domain. Through the data collection, the students gained practical knowledge into data collection such as the challenges of getting people to take the survey and the importance of survey sampling. The community partnership had an impact on the students to understand that data and data analysis are only part of the research process, but that the community and people are vital to the process. As one student pointed out, “it’s not all about lab work or running data analysis. It also pertains to relationship building and communication.”