Nutrition Initiative

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THE ISSUE - ACCESS TO NUTRITION EDUCATION AND HEALTHY MEALS

Low income families lack access to healthy food
In 2001, The Bay Area Partnership launched the Nutrition Initiative to address the growing child hunger, malnutrition, and obesity epidemic in the Bay Area’s low-income communities. 

Children in these communities are particularly vulnerable to both malnutrition and obesity due to three main challenges:

1. Lack of information about nutrition and healthy eating
2. Limited household food budgets
3. Poor retail food availability that favors highly processed foods over fruits and vegetables

Two sides of the same problem: obesity and malnutrition
Despite recent years of economic growth in the San Francisco Bay Area, the number of families and children experiencing hunger or food insecurity continues to rise.  Paradoxically, childhood obesity has reached epidemic proportions.  In the last thirty years, the percentage of overweight children ages 6 to 11 more than doubled, and the percentage of overweight adolescents ages 12 to 19 has tripled.  During this time, childhood onset of Type II diabetes has also soared.

Schools can play a critical role
Schools are critical in addressing the disparities in child nutrition and health education.  For many children, especially those in the lowest-income communities, school meals represent a majority of their daily nutritional intake.  In addition, schools can also provide physical activity and nutrition education for both children and parents to support healthier life-long habits.

Underutilized resources for school nutrition
Resources are available to support full participation in the school meal programs as well as school-based nutrition education programs.  Unfortunately, many schools lack the human resources to complete the complex planning, application, and implementation processes required to successfully access these resources.

For example, funding from the California Nutrition Network (Network) can be used to support school-based nutrition education programs.  However, it is often difficult for low-income schools and communities to access the Network funds due to limited awareness and burdensome administrative hurdles.  This is where the Partnership can help.

OUR INITIATIVE: HELP SCHOOLS PROVIDE NUTRITIOUS MEALS AND TEACH ABOUT HEALTHY LIFESTYLES

The goals of the Nutrition Initiative are to:

• Give children access to nutritious breakfasts, lunches, and snacks at school
• Help schools implement best-practice nutrition standards and policies (thereby reducing the availability of “junk” foods and improving the availability and attractiveness of healthy foods)
• Teach children and parents about healthy nutrition in an engaging and culturally appropriate manner.

For more than five years, the Bay Area Partnership has employed its proven strategies of resource brokering, local capacity-building and partnership development to the challenge of child nutrition.  Our work has focused on helping schools access funding and best practices for implementing nutrition education programs.  We assist schools with a variety of needs, including completing time-consuming California Nutrition Network applications, developing partnerships with county public health departments, selecting nutrition curricula, and developing manageable paperwork processes for state reporting.

OUR IMPACT:

Launching new nutrition programs
Through the Nutrition Initiative, the Partnership has helped over 25 schools and early childhood education centers to launch nutrition education programs – often garden-based – that benefit students and parents alike.

Increasing availability of school meals
In 2001, the Partnership launched its Nutrition Initiative by administering a survey of regional schools offering school breakfast.  Based on the information gathered, we helped over 50 schools access the necessary funds to plan for and launch school breakfast programs.

Increasing families’ access to food stamps
The Partnership is also working to increase participation in the federal Food Stamps program, which has had historically low participation among eligible families.  As a pilot project, we are helping food services directors in Oakland and Marin school districts to connect families that participate in the school lunch program to the Food Stamp program.  As one step, food service directors included food stamp outreach materials in school lunch application packets to increase awareness among parents and caregivers.

NEXT STEPS

Improving the quality of school meals
As we help our target schools (those with free/reduced priced lunch participation rates of 50 percent or greater) to serve both lunch and breakfast, we are also focused on improving the quality of food served in these meals.  While schools have made an effort, for example, by adding more fresh fruits and vegetables, there is still a long way to go.  The greatest barrier to serving higher quality food is cost – low federal reimbursements for schools meals make it difficult to cover the costs of serving fresh foods.  However, if schools can find a way to serve better, tastier food, they can, in turn, add to their food service revenues by attracting more paying customers.  The challenge is finding a way to get into this cycle.  There are successful models we are examining and plan to promote with area schools.

Increasing summer meal participation
One chronically underutilized meal program is the Summer Food Service Program – currently, only 30 percent of the 324,000 children eligible to receive free and reduced priced meals in the Bay Area participate in summer meal programs.  This means that children relying on school meals for a large part of their food intake are likely to be going hungry in the summer months.  In spring 2006, the Bay Area Partnership enlisted the aid of a group of graduate students from the Goldman School of Public Policy, UC Berkeley to look at the summer meal challenge.  Based on their conclusions and recommendations, the Partnership plans to convene stakeholders to promote sharing of model practices and offer technical assistance to increase the number of summer lunch programs being served in the coming year.