Families with low-income that participate in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program–known as CalFresh in California–receive monthly benefits to spend on food. The California Nutrition Incentive Program (CNIP), operated by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, is a strategy to increase CalFresh participants' intake of fruits and vegetables by making them more affordable with financial incentives for purchasing them at venues such as farmers markets. The COVID-19 pandemic led to major disruptions to the food system, resulting in many challenges for farmers and low-income shoppers. Additional federal funds were provided during the pandemic to increase CNIP incentives to better support farmers and CalFresh shoppers. Wendi Gosliner from the University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nutrition Policy Institute received funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture to evaluate CalFresh farmers market shoppers' experiences of the additional funds for CNIP-type incentives during the pandemic, expanding on her previous CNIP evaluation work. Gosliner will work in partnership NPI researchers Sridharshi Hewawitharana, Celeste Felix and Ron Strochlic, CDFA and the Gretchen Swanson Evaluation Center on the one-year project, which began in January 2022.
Nutrition Policy Institute researchers are partnering with pediatrician and public health researcher Anisha Patel from Stanford University on a new National Institutes of Health-funded study to understand the impact of a childcare-based healthy beverage intervention. The study is titled, “A Multi-Level Intervention to Promote Healthy Beverage Intake through Childcare.” NPI researchers will be responsible for evaluating the intervention's impact on child drinking water intake and dietary intake. The study builds on NPI's previous collaboration with Patel to evaluate a similar intervention in school settings as part of “The Impact of School Water Access on Child Food and Beverage Intake and Obesity” study, also funded by the NIH. The NPI research team includes Lorrene Ritchie, cooperative extension specialist and director of NPI, who will be working with NPI's Christina Hecht, director of NPI's National Drinking Water Alliance, Suzanne Rauzon, Celeste Felix, Nicole Vital and Patricia Wakimoto. The five-year project began in August 2021.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
- Author: Wendi Gosliner
- Editor: Lorrene Ritchie
California's Free School Meals for All (FSMFA) policy is a landmark investment in free school meals for all students that may reduce stigma and improve students' food security, diet, health, school attendance and academic performance. It will be implemented beginning in school year 2022-23. The University of California Nutrition Policy Institute received funding from the California state legislative office to assess the FSMA program and policy implementation through a formative evaluation to inform initial implementation, process evaluation to identify challenges and facilitators to optimize ongoing implementation, and outcome evaluation to quantify impacts on schools, students, families and communities over time. The four-year study began in October 2021 with NPI's Wendi Gosliner as principal investigator in collaboration with research team members Lorrene Ritchie, Christina Hecht and Ken Hecht. The NPI Research team is collaborating with multiple partners, including the California Department of Education, a variety of non-profit and community-based organizations that engage parents and students, as well as a team of national researchers studying the implementation of free school meals for all students in Maine.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
- Editor: Lorrene Ritchie
University of California Nutrition Policy Institute researchers will work with the National WIC Association to evaluate the effect of increases to the amount of money participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) receive to spend on fruits and vegetables. Participants receive a “Cash Value Benefit” (CVB) to buy a variety of vegetables or fruits up to the CVB amount. CVB amounts for all women and children on WIC were raised to $35 per month from the usual $9 or $11 from June-September 2021 with funding from the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Congressional appropriations enabled monthly CVB amounts to continue at $24 for all children through March 31, 2022. The new project will evaluate WIC participants' perceptions of the CVB amounts, household food security, and child fruit and vegetable intake before and after the increases using data collected from surveys of WIC participants across five State WIC Agencies including Connecticut, Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico. This project is part of a larger project titled, “Multi-State WIC Participant Satisfaction Survey Project: Learning from Program Adaptations During COVID” funded by the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, National WIC Association, and The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
- Author: Danielle L. Lee
- Contributor: Ron Strochlic
- Editor: Lorrene Ritchie
Nutrition Policy Institute researcher, Ron Strochlic, received funding to partner with researchers from the University of California (UC) to identify promising practices to support the health of California agriculture workers. Strochlic, a longtime researcher of California agriculture worker health issues and former executive director of the California Institute for Rural Studies, will be conducting interviews with growers and farm labor contractors, as well as stakeholders representing different sectors–farm labor advocates, farmworker-serving nonprofits, grower organizations and health care providers–on agricultural worker health. The goal of the interviews is to identify promising practices for increasing access to and utilization of health care services among agricultural workers and their family members, as well as access to wellness services, including nutrition and physical activity. Strochlic will be working with Christy Getz, UC Berkeley Cooperative Extension Specialist in Agriculture and Food Systems, to interview stakeholders. The interviews are part of a larger project, known as the Farmworker Health Study, led by the UC Merced Community and Labor Center. Findings will be shared with the California Department of Public Health with recommendations for improving farmworker health. The two-year project, funded by UC Merced, started in March 2020. Additional project collaborators include Paul Brown, Ed Flores, and Anna Padilla of UC Merced, and Brenda Eskenazi of UC Berkeley.