Nutrition Policy Institute's Wendi Gosliner was awarded a $439,345 California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) Specialty Crop Block Grant to partner with Impact Justice and ChangeLab Solutions to increase demand for California-grown fruits, vegetables and nuts in California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) state prisons. The CDCR is the largest California state food purchaser, with over $150 million in purchases annually. The project will educate CDCR stakeholders about the benefits of procuring and serving more California grown specialty crops; work with stakeholders to develop policy and systems-level changes to promote procurement of California grown specialty crops; and work with formerly incarcerated individuals to understand opportunities and barriers to increasing consumption of California grown specialty crops in CDCR facilities and to provide them with nutrition education. The project broadly will reach 120,000 incarcerated people. The two-year project begins November 2020.
Nutrition Policy Institute Director and Cooperative Extension Specialist Lorrene Ritchie received a $100,000 grant from The David & Lucile Packard Foundation to study the challenges faced by California families with young children that participate in the USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is in collaboration with Shannon Whaley, director of research and evaluation at Public Health Foundation Enterprise-WIC. The project will identify barriers that WIC participants in California are experiencing in using WIC food benefits. It will also identify WIC families short-term unmet basic needs, such as food and housing insecurity, as well as access to unemployment benefits, health care, and childcare, while required to remain at home. The project will also identify how California WIC agencies are implementing federal waivers and other modifications to WIC services due to COVID-19 that can be later used to inform WIC. The 12-month project will begin on May 1, 2020 with NPI researcher Nicole Vital as the project manager.
Nutrition Policy Institute Senior Researcher and Policy Advisor Wendi Gosliner along with her colleagues Professor Lia Fernald at the University of California (UC), Berkeley School of Public Health and Dr. Rtia Hamad of UC San Francisco received a $10,000 grant from the Berkeley Population Center to conduct a study entitled, “Effects of COVID-19 Mitigation Strategies on Economically Disadvantaged Children and Families in California." They will be interviewing 30 families with young children in Alameda, Merced, and Los Angeles counties to capture the impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) mitigation strategies -- shelter-in-place orders and school closures -- as well as safety net responses -- increased CalFresh benefits for some and changes in school meals -- on families' well being and food security. The study aims to capture knowledge, perceptions, and utilization of various supports during the crisis and ways in which current and future policy response measures could better meet families' needs.
Nutrition Policy Institute is collaborating with The Brigham and Women's Hospital, Inc. and Public Health Foundation Enterprises (PHFE), Inc. on two projects funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Healthy Eating Research Program, as announced today. NPI's Christina Hecht and Laura Vollmer, of NPI's National Drinking Water Alliance, received funding to collaborate with Sonya Shin at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Inc. on a project to expand and evaluate a community-based intervention to increase healthy beverage consumption by Navajo preschool children. The second project is a collaboration between NPI's Lorrene Ritchie and Lauren Au with Shannon Whaley of PHFE Women, Infants and Children (WIC) on a project that will pilot test and evaluate an expansion ofWIC's $9 per month cash value benefit for the purchase of fruits and vegetables to $23 per month. These research teams are being funded through Healthy Eating Research's annual call for proposals. This call for proposals focused exclusively on children ages 0-8, and the resulting projects focus on a range of topics, including WIC, healthy beverage consumption, and food purchasing patterns.
Nutrition Policy Institute (NPI) Senior Researcher and Policy Advisor Wendi Gosliner, in collaboration with Professor Lia Fernald at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health, received a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Equity-Focused Policy Research grant to understand the reasons for disparities in access to income support, particularly among urban Latinx and African American populations and among rural whites in California. Dr. Gosliner will work with Dr. Fernald specifically to evaluate levels of awareness, barriers to uptake, and the benefits of participation in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) among families with children ages 0-5 years old in three California counties - Los Angeles, Alameda, and Merced. The two-year project will be completed in November 2021.