Jenks senior Adilei Brown took second place in the high school central division of the 2026 C-SPAN StudentCam documentary competition for her film on food insecurity. The cspan contest asked students to connect the enduring power and relevance of the Declaration of Independence to a contemporary issue in their communities.
Brown's StudentCam Film
Brown's documentary is titled "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness: Is that Possible on an Empty Stomach?" It focuses on food insecurity in Oklahoma and the changes to SNAP described in the film.
Brown said, "My goal is to just kind of bring awareness to this issue," and added, "I feel like people think that [food insecurity] is a very foreign issue, they're like, 'Oh, that would never happen to me,' whenever it could. … Everybody is just one bad thing happening to them away from needing this help."
Michelle Brobston On SNAP
Michelle Brobston, the COO of Hunger Free Oklahoma, appears in Brown's film. Brobston says the Trump Administration's Big, Beautiful Bill will affect the state's hungry and shift federal money to the state.
In the film, Brobston says, "Oklahoma, even though we pay our taxes to the federal government, that money will no longer be used for benefits to feed our most vulnerable neighbors," and, "It will be instead shifted to the state, that will have to pick up a surprise bill of $270 million." The film says the bill reduces Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding by approximately $186 billion over 10 years, imposes stricter work requirements for SNAP recipients, and expands those requirements to more age groups.
Oklahoma Cost Shift
The film also describes new state obligations under the bill. States would have to cover 75% of administrative costs, up from 50%, and would have to pay 15% of benefit costs if a state's error rate is 10% or higher.
Brown's film places those changes against a state where more than 15% of households are food insecure. Brown said, "Food should be a human right," and she described working on the documentary with Kenneth Ruggiano, her Jenks film teacher, who said, "I just listened a lot," and that Brown "had a good vision, a good idea of where [she] wanted to go. And it was just a lot of talking about how to get there and what are some things that you could be doing to help translate those ideas to visuals?"
Cspan Results In 2026
Brown's second-place finish gives her a national placement in the 2026 competition, which was framed around America's 250th anniversary and the Declaration of Independence. The article does not say whether her film will be shown again, whether the competition will announce additional results, or whether any state or federal policy changes will follow from the film itself.
