Meals, friendship, and the economics of belonging

From journalism to development economics

Growing up in Petaluma, California, an agricultural city north of San Francisco, Gabriella imagined a different path for herself. 

“From around age 10 through my first year of college, I was sure I wanted to be a journalist. That was the plan. I would have laughed if you’d told me I’d become an economist,” she says. 

But after taking a course on world poverty as an undergrad at University of California San Diego, her path took an unexpected turn. The investigative spirit that drew her to journalism found a new outlet.

“I loved the research papers we read and felt like this was such a big, important puzzle—why can’t we solve this? I like problem-solving, especially around big, meaningful problems,” she says. “In many ways journalism and research are similar: you investigate a problem and try to get to the bottom of it. That investigative part appealed to me in both fields. Research gave me a way to do that with fewer time pressures.”

Before coming to Harvard Kennedy School, she worked at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and Innovations for Poverty Action, managing field teams and data collection in Malawi. These experiences highlighted for her the importance of making public service a priority in the research process, not only the research question.

“It showed me how impactful it can be just to do research well. You’re hiring and managing a whole team,” she says. “It’s almost like overseeing a small firm that’s responsible for your data collection. It’s important to do that carefully.”

“I’ve tried to prioritize building long-term working relationships and supporting skill development,” she says. At one point, she ran lunchtime Excel trainings because there was demand from staff. “It helped me see how much you can contribute simply through how you use your time and build capacity, beyond the research outputs. You can structure the work so it benefits the people involved along the way.”

Listening her way into a research agenda

Gabriella knew she cared about inequality when she arrived at HKS—her conversations in Malawi clarified what that meant in practice.

“Almost all of my projects have started with long conversations about people’s lives,” she explains. “Through conversations, it became clear how much social inequality shapes everyday experience. Those conversations kept drifting toward social inequality because it’s such a salient and painful part of people’s lives.”

She saw a major gap in the data. 

“There’s very little data on people’s subjective experiences of social isolation in lower-income countries. That data is just starting to emerge, and more people are working on it now, which I’m excited about,” she says. “We still don’t know nearly enough, even though social isolation clearly shapes people’s day-to-day well-being. That’s the gap I’m trying to contribute to filling.”

Her doctoral research was supported by organizations like the Women and Public Policy Program, where she was a 2024 Cultural Bridge Fellow, partnering with Invest in Knowledge in Mchinji, Malawi to run a randomized controlled trial on social isolation among vulnerable women.

A simple idea: shared meals, new networks

Her dissertation focuses on women in rural Malawi who move to their husbands’ villages after marriage, leaving behind families and childhood friends. She began studying food insecurity, but the women’s stories shifted her focus.

“I didn’t expect my research to focus so strongly on social inclusion. Initially, I was very interested in food consumption and food insecurity, which is a major issue in Malawi,” she explains. But asking women how and who they ate with led to new questions.

“I pivoted and started using meal sharing as a tool to get people to spend time together,” she says. “I still look at food security outcomes and find effects on food consumption—but social inclusion became the main thing I was trying to influence, with food security as an outcome rather than the primary focus.”

The intervention itself was strikingly simple. 

“I first asked women if they wanted their names on a list so others could invite them for a meal. Almost everyone said yes. Then, for those in the treatment group, I showed them a list of neighbors’ names—women they generally knew or at least knew of—and told them they could pick someone to invite. My team would then go to that person and convey the invitation. The intervention was essentially ‘greasing the wheels’ of socializing: reducing the friction involved in taking that first step toward one-on-one interaction.”

Eighty percent of participants shared at least one meal. “Anecdotally, many described that initial meal as the start of a friendship. For some, the interaction ended there, but it continued for others.”

A year later, the effects were visible. “I find effects on food security—women report eating more meals per day and more protein—and on mental health, measured as a reduction in depressive symptoms.”

She says the nuance lies in who the new relationships are with.

“The economic benefits—like starting small income-generating activities—come from relationships with higher-income women,” she explains. “Many say they did this because they learned from higher-income women that these activities were profitable. That information and the resulting confidence reduce the perceived risk of trying something new.”

The psychological benefits, on the other hand, come from relationships between two lower-income women, “Those peer relationships drive the improvements in depressive symptoms,” she notes.

Her takeaway? “Relationships matter, but who you’re connected to shapes what kind of benefit you receive. Simply increasing social interaction may not deliver all the potential gains if people never have meaningful contact with those who are different from them,” she explains. “To get a full range of benefits—from emotional support to economic opportunity—you may need opportunities to interact deeply with both similar and different people.”

Teaching, relocating, making the first move

This fall, Gabriella will join the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh as a tenure-track assistant professor, where she will teach “Intro to Development Economics” to undergraduates. It’s a full-circle moment for someone whose own path began with a world poverty course in San Diego.

“As a teacher, I’d be very happy if each student left the class having learned something that makes them see the world differently,” she says. “I don’t need all of them to become development economists, but I do think development economics has relevance far beyond the classroom. It helps students better understand the world in ways that continue to matter after the course ends.”

On the research side, she plans to keep examining the links between social isolation and poverty. “There’s growing recognition that social isolation isn’t just a rich-country problem,” she notes. “There’s emerging evidence that social isolation and loneliness may actually increase with poverty, both across and within countries. We’ve already seen a similar pattern with mental health: as inequality grows, mental health problems often concentrate among people with fewer resources.”

“I want to better understand whether and where that’s happening with social isolation: in which parts of the world, under what conditions, and why,” she explains. “It’s plausible that as some people in society get richer more quickly, others are left behind economically and socially. We tend to form social networks with people of similar economic status, and if you’re working all the time just to get by, you have less time for leisure and connection. These are hypotheses—I don’t yet know how true they are or where they hold, but that’s why I’m eager to keep studying them.”

As she prepares to move to Pittsburgh, her research feels personally relevant. 

“People talk about dreading the process of building a new social circle from scratch. It’s a lot of work, and it’s emotionally risky,” she explains. “The key message I’d share is: you’re not the only one who wants more friends or deeper connections. A lot of people feel the same.”

Although she has not collected the data to assess if the patterns she observed in her project hold in other contexts, she would guess that, whether in a rural village in Malawi or a city in the United States, the core insight holds. 

“If you think you’re the only one who wants more connection, you’re almost certainly wrong,” she says. “Other people want to interact, too. Someone just has to be brave enough to make the first move—sending the ‘Want to grab dinner Friday?’ message—without assuming they’ll look foolish.”

For Gabriella, seeing such important impacts of sending an invitation has encouraged her, in her own life, to be less inhibited by social worries. A simple invitation can matter more than it seems. 

Banner and portrait images by Steph Stevens. Personal photos courtesy of Gabriella Fleischman.