Working families with low- to moderate-income can receive up to $6,000 in Federal benefits and an additional $3,000 in California state benefits through the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the largest poverty alleviation programs in the nation. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers EITC a critical evidence-based cost-effective intervention to improve health within five years, however only 53-80% of eligible families received these benefits in 2017 and 2018. Nutrition Policy Institute's Wendi Gosliner will collaborate with Rita Hamad from the University of California, San Francisco and Lia Fernald from UC Berkeley on a project to test an outreach program designed to improve take-up of the Federal and state Earned Income Tax Credits among participants in the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). The two-year project, “Advancing health equity by alleviating poverty: A multi-level, evidence-based pilot trial to increase take-up of the Earned Income Tax Credit,” started October 1, 2022, and was made possible with funding from the Blue Shield of California Foundation. This project builds on previous work by Gosliner, Hamad, and Fernald as part of their Assessing California Communities' Experiences with Safety Net Supports study, which showed barriers to Federal and state EITC uptake.
The California Fruit and Vegetable EBT Pilot Project aims to develop and refine a scalable model for increasing the purchase and consumption of California-grown fresh fruits and vegetables by delivering supplemental benefits to CalFresh recipients in a way that can be easily adopted by USDA Food and Nutrition Service authorized retailers in the future. The California Department of Social Services EBT, in partnership with CalFresh, Office of Systems Integration, and California Department of Food & Agriculture awarded three grants to non-profit organizations or government agencies to meet this goal. Nutrition Policy Institute's Wendi Gosliner received $90,313 as part of a larger $537,690 grant from CDSS to collaborate with the Ecology Center to evaluate and understand the experiences and impacts of the pilot project on farmers' market managers, vendors, and CalFresh shoppers. The Ecology Center of Berkeley coordinates the Market Match consortium and will pilot the new program in Los Angeles, San Bernadino, Alameda, Napa and Sacramento counties. The two-year project began on October 1, 2022. The NPI project team includes Carolyn Chelius and Sridharshi Hewawitharana. Gosliner has conducted evaluations of CDFA's Nutrition Incentive Program for the past five years.
Nutrition Policy Institute researchers were awarded three separate 18-month research grants up to $250,000 as part of the Healthy Eating Research 2021 special solicitation on COVID-19 and Socioeconomic Recovery Efforts. Lorrene Ritchie, in collaboration with co-principal investigator Susana Matias from UC Berkeley and the CACFP Roundtable, received a grant for a project titled, “Child and Adult Care Food Program: Impacts of COVID-19 Differences in Reimbursement Rates on Family Childcare Home Providers, Children, and Families”. Wendi Gosliner is serving as co-PI on a project with Juliana Cohen from Merrimack College entitled “Evaluation of Universal Free School Meals,”, and is collaborating with Lia Fernald from UC Berkeley on another project entitled “Longitudinal Study of Low-Income Families with Young Children: Assessing California Communities' Experiences with Safety Net Supports Survey (ACCESS)”. Healthy Eating Research is a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Only 9 grants were awarded this cycle.
California was the first state to adopt a policy to provide school meals, free of charge, to all students after the federal COVID provisions expired this summer. Beginning school year 2022-23, California's Universal Meals Program for school children—also known as school meals for all—will continue to serve school meals free of charge to all students, as mandated on July 9, 2021 by AB 130 (McGuire). The University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nutrition Policy Institute received $2.4 million in one-time funding to evaluate school meals for all in California as part of the 2022-23 California State Budget. NPI's Wendi Gosliner is principal investigator of the project in collaboration with research team members Lorrene Ritchie, Monica Zuercher, Christina Hecht and Ken Hecht. The NPI research team is collaborating with multiple state partners, including the California Department of Education and a variety of non-profit and community-based organizations that engage parents and students as well as national partners working to understand the roll out of school meals for all in Maine and Vermont. Preliminary results from ongoing NPI California school meals for all research has already informed CDE and other state and national school meal stakeholders about the opportunities and challenges as well as resources needed to provide healthy and appealing school meals to all students.
The California Department of Social Services became the State Agency to oversee the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), which was previously managed by the California Department of Education, effective July 1, 2021. This administrative change to the program was initiated by the Budget Act of Fiscal Year 2021 in alignment with the State's goal to build and strengthen equitable, comprehensive, quality, and affordable child care and development systems for the children and families in California. The Nutrition Policy Institute will work with the CACFP Roundtable to identify barriers experienced by child care centers that work directly with the state or through a sponsoring organization and child care center sponsors in accessing CACFP in order to inform recommendations for improvement. The six-month project began in September 2021 and is lead by Nutrition Policy Institute principal investigator and director, Lorrene Ritchie, in collaboration with NPI researchers Danielle Lee, Christina Hecht, and Claudia Olague.