What Works: Identifying Effective Nutrition Education Curricula Delivered to Low-Income California Adults

Abstract

The audience most interested in SHFPP include food systems colleagues who work with lowincome populations and those who provide nutrition education support to food pantries. Theory, Prior Research, Rationale: SHFPP was based on the Socio-Ecological Model (SEM). The SEM provided a framework for understanding the multifaceted and interactive effects of the environment and the individual. Using pantry staff interviews, client surveys, and focus groups, the SHFPP team developed a toolkit to help pantries with making educational, environmental, and policy changes to community food pantries (Canto, Park-Mroch, & Ingham, 2017). This presentation builds upon the work of the SHFPP team and investigated further into the facilitators and barriers to making safe and healthy changes in food pantries. Description: The SHFPP toolkit included 25 tools in four specific areas: "Give your pantry a healthy boost", "Promote food safety in your pantry", "Develop your action plan", and "Evaluate your efforts". Several pantries who used the toolkit to make changes were interviewed. We summarized the interview data into two topic areas, facilitators and barriers to making healthy and safe changes. Evaluation: In-depth interviews with a convenience sample of nine community food pantry staff are presented. The sample included pantry representatives of urban and rural pantries; pantries who provided pre-boxed food packages and those who gave their clients food choices; and pantries whose clientele belonged to Latino and African American groups. Specific tools in the SHFPP toolkit were reported to be helpful for food pantries who make safe and healthy changes including nutrition education efforts, donor education, and developing food donation and distribution policies. Conclusions and Implications: Community pantries who make healthy and safe changes to operations and pantry environment should focus on communication and education of their staff, clientele, and donors.