Nutrition Policy Institute researchers Christina Hecht and Janice Kao will take part in the 2022 Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior conference on the intersection of nutrition education and behavior and the digital world. Hecht is a co-author of the abstract “Associations of Perceptions of Water Safety and Tap Water Taste with Beverage Intake Among U.S. Adults,” which Sohyun Park, the lead investigator, will present as a poster. Kao will present a poster from the NPI CalFresh Healthy Living evaluation unit research team—Carolyn Rider, Christina Becker, Evan Talmage, Kaela Plank, Amanda Linares, and Kao—in person from 12:15 to 2:00 EDT on July 31. The poster is titled, “Where Do We Go from Here? California Local Health Departments Navigate School-based SNAP-Ed During COVID-19.” The conference will be held in person, in Atlanta, Georgia, and virtually, from July 29 to July 31, 2022.

Schools are an ideal setting to improve child nutrition and food security and are critical environments in which to implement policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) public health interventions. Federal mandates for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education, known as CalFresh Healthy Living in California, require PSE interventions for obesity prevention efforts combined with direct and indirect education interventions. Researchers at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Nutrition Policy Institute developed a new method to evaluate the ‘dose' score of complex and multicomponent SNAP-Ed interventions in schools, which can then be linked to student health outcomes. The method also proposes how to calculate dose scores for different intervention categories, including direct education, PSE, garden-based interventions, and physical education. This novel evaluation method can be used in future SNAP-Ed evaluations to inform practitioners and policymakers about the most promising school-based public health interventions to support children's health. The proposed method was published in the American Journal of Evaluation. Study authors include researchers from the NPI CalFresh Healthy Living evaluation team, Sridharshi Hewawitharana, Janice Kao, Carolyn Rider, Evan Talmage, Karen Webb, Wendi Gosliner, and Gail Woodward-Lopez, and Sadie Costello from UC Berkeley.

The USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) is an evidence-based program that helps low-income individuals live healthier lives through education, social marketing, and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) changes. Known as CalFresh Healthy Living (CFHL) in California, SNAP-Ed is overseen by the California Department of Social Services and implemented by four state implementing agencies and the local implementing agencies (LIAs) that they fund. The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) is one of four state implementing agencies and funds 60 local health departments. Beginning in 2018, California's LIAs use the Program Evaluation and Reporting System (PEARS) to report their CFHL activities and interventions. The Nutrition Policy Institute serves as CDPH's evaluation contractor for its CFHL program; NPI's PEARS team, Carolyn Rider, Janice Kao, Evan Talmage, and Christina Becker, provide technical and evaluation assistance to CDPH and its LIAs for PEARS reporting. They authored a  new report which presents the background, definitions, and methods used by CDPH and its funded local health departments for reporting CFHL interventions implemented throughout California during Federal Fiscal Year 2020. The report, titled “Background on Local Health Department Reporting of CalFresh Healthy Living Programs in the Program Evaluation and Reporting System, FFY 2020”, also details challenges in reporting CFHL activities and gives recommendations to improve reporting. 

USDA's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – Education (SNAP-Ed) impacts the lives of participants through education as well as policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) change initiatives at schools, early care and education facilities, food banks and pantries, and other community sites. SNAP-Ed, which focuses on individuals and families with low income and the communities in which they live, can improve health equity. However, SNAP-Ed interventions were dramatically impacted in 2020 by the global COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers at the Nutrition Policy Institute presented relevant research findings at the 2021 National Health Outreach Conference, held virtually on May 3-7, 2021. Their presentation, entitled 'Challenges and Opportunities for SNAP-Ed Programs during the COVID-19 Pandemic', described the ways in which California's local health departments shifted their SNAP-Ed efforts,  barriers that COVID-19 created in their PSE work, and factors that facilitated new and continued efforts. Despite a 37% reduction in the number of SNAP-Ed sites reached in 2020 when compared to each of the previous two years, many successful PSE efforts were implemented by local health departments in 2020, including new interventions at numerous sites that were initiated in response to COVID-19. A common theme reported in relation to successful efforts was the importance of strong partnerships. NPI's Carolyn Rider presented these findings in collaboration with NPI researchers Janice Kao, Christina Becker, Evan Talmage, and Gail Woodward-Lopez.