Progress 07/01/23 to 06/30/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Our mission is to be a resource center for children who are overweight or at greater risk of obesity. Last year, we provided a trifecta of programming so as to reach program participants at school, at home and on their screens! According to the CDC, today approximately 13.7 million children and adolescents, ages 2-19, suffer from obesity and are likely to become overweight adults, thus increasing their risk of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and other health issues. The reality is that obesity is becoming more common in a growing number of states and there's a notable difference in obesity prevalence by race and ethnicity. At least 35% of Black adults had obesity in 38 states, and the same was true for American Indian adults in 33 states and Hispanic adults in 32 states. Obesity rates were lowest among young adults, with about 1 in 5 people ages 18 to 24 considered to have obesity. Rates were about twice as high among adults 45 to 54, with a prevalence of about 2 in 5, (CDC, 2023). However, this same study noted that obesity prevalence decreased as the level of education increased. Based upon this information, we chose to make an impact within underserved, low income neighborhoods where the residents are predominantly African American and Hispanic. Before we could provide education as a change agent for obesity, we had to address the fact that all the communities we serve are in known food deserts. We first provided healthy food and cooking videos via monthly mobile food distributions to African American families and seniors who could not afford to buy food. We are particularly mindful of the prevalence and impact of food insecurity. Families living with food insecurity often have to choose between paying bills or buying food. Worse, In Metropolitan Atlanta's 29-county service area, 1 in 9 people are affected, including 1 in 7 children. (Atlanta Community Food Bank, 2023). But it's not just food insecurity, it's also the challenge of food access! An ongoing barrier is the existence of "food swamps", areas where vulnerable populations live with limited access to grocery stores with healthy food options. This barrier makes a big difference. Recent studies have shown that people who live in an area with easier access to unhealthy food--a food swamp--were 13% more likely to suffer from a stroke than people who lived in neighborhoods with fewer unhealthy stores and restaurants. (International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2023) Secondly, we provided free literacy experiences and nutrition education to public school students. These students were typically African American, in 1st to 3rd grades. These students were learning in schools where at least 85% of the children are enrolled in a free or reduced lunch program. The purpose of this program is to invest in children's literacy and promote the consumption of healthy snacks. This is critical because children under 5 in the US are missing out on vital nutrition by drinking sugary drinks and passing up fruits and vegetables. There are gaps in vegetable and fruit consumption related to race and household food sufficiency. Parents of Black children were most likely to report that their kids didn't eat a daily vegetable or fruit, (CDC, 2023). Going forward, our ongoing vision is to move all Metro Atlanta children, adults and families from the margins into the center of the healthy eating and living movement. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In 2023, we staggered the programmatic rollout of The C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Community Teaching Kitchen Project. We needed to find innovative, unstructured ways in which to provide educational experiences for program participants of all ages in this Post Covid-19 era. This new way of living, learning and working caused us to pause. Rather than rolling out a calendar of cooking classes, we have instead focused upon building a support base for our in-person programming and gaining followers for the online virtual programming. This ideology was derived from meetings with key stakeholders who have illustrated successful program implementation last August through December. So, we started in February with two, "Follow Me to the Kitchen" educational videos filmed at C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Mobile Pantry events. Here, Chef Lisa Rochan, a C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Board Member and Community Teaching Kitchen Manager provided tips for preparing healthy meals from the vegetables and proteins provided at the pantry. These videos have garnered 108 likes and 130 views to date on the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. YouTube Channel. What we learned from this process is that it will take a combination of delivery methods to attract, engage and retain cooking class participants. We will continue to provide monthly cooking class videos as we configure the reintroduction of family focused cooking classes. Simultaneously, we had applied to the American Heart Association's Empowered To Serve National Accelerator Program (AHA ETS). This four month program is designed to help a deserving entrepreneur or organization receive up to $5,000 to elevate the work they're doing to address barriers to optimal health. We realized that we ourselves needed training for this new Post Covid-19 era! In July of 2023, we were selected to be one of 10 finalists in the country to participate in the program which provided weekly education sessions and professional development homework through December of 2023. One of the most intensive exercises occurred in October where Chef Ashley had to create a social media campaign about C.H.O.I.C.E.S. which convinced people to vote for her on a daily basis. After three weeks, we were awarded the "Fan Favorite" prize of $5,000 by securing the most votes! This national program taught the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. staff how to utilize new methods of communication for nonprofit promotion in mixed delivery platforms. Since graduating from the AHA's ETS program, we have continued to partner with the AHA for virtual cooking classes broadcasted on at the national level. This past May, we participated in the AHA's Heart Healthy Campaign with three cooking class videos illustrating simple, healthy meals which were viewed 71 times to date on the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. YouTube Channel alone. The ETS program elevated our video production skills and nutrition education content which has made our culinary arts more appealing to a wider audience. This is key because resuming our Cooking with C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Family Workshop Series is contingent upon gaining a support base of local families for in-person instruction and national followers for virtual classes. Building upon that methodology, our programming has been engaging and educating professional adults by providing "team-building" opportunities for several national corporations. In these instances, the goal was to train adults to think differently about their food access, cooking skills and daily consumption. We utilized The C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Community Teaching Kitchen to provide traditional education via cooking classes and "on the job training" via volunteerism. In these cases it was not about providing adults with technical skills so as to gain employment. But rather, to improve their understanding about food and how it can affect their performance where they currently work! One such example was the "Pack A Palooza" day on June 11th with Cisco. Their team of 35 people assisted C.H.O.I.C.E.S. by first packing 300 grocery bags which were taken to families at three recreation centers in underserved Atlanta neighborhoods. The Cisco team then participated in a cooking class which was broadcast live throughout their WebEx network nationally. The day ended with a healthy lunch and "to go bag" of fresh fruits and vegetables for everyone! As a companion to this activity we launched our "Give a Bag of Groceries" online fundraising campaign which will run through July 31st and has raised $5,188 to date. These funds are for Metro Atlanta families in need of food during the summer months since school is closed. Lastly, we do recognize the importance of traditional STEM education for students and job training for adults so as to break the cycle of generational poverty. Studies have shown that economics and education are predominant root causes for systemic, negative social determinants of health. In keeping with our CFP goal of obtaining new funders, we applied to and received a $5,000 grant from the Delta Community Philanthropic fund this May. They will work in partnership with our Executive Director, Mrs. Vanetta Keyes, who is a Certified Public Accountant with over 37 years of small business and franchise accounting. This fall, C.H.O.I.C.E.S. will be able to provide young women, students and hopeful entrepreneurs with Financial Literacy education workshops via the Community Teaching Kitchen. We are also meeting with collegiate stakeholders and culinary professionals to re-invite our culinary apprenticeship program for this Post Covid-19 era. We are hopeful that the relationships formed with our corporate "team builders" can be leveraged towards employment connections for graduate apprentices. We anticipate piloting the new C.H.O.I.C.ES. Culinary Apprenticeship Program this winter. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The broadcasting of our community impact has largely been limited to the release of program and event specific results. We produce report cards annually containing numerical metrics for key target areas. These report cards are shared in social media, posted to our website and incorporated within grant reports. We realize that marketing continues to be a weak area for our organization due to the loss of our Media Manager in 2022. Since that time, we have made earnest attempts to elevate our branding and share our work by hiring new media consultants. We have been successful in some ways. Once such area is with the complete redesign of the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. website so as to make it more user friendly and informative. Upon opening the website, the very first thing a visitor sees is the dissemination of our programmatic results. After perusing our website, visitors can opt to watch companion videos via the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. YouTube Channel. This channel is another media avenue where we have hired several new media professionals to generate videos about our program and events. One such example is the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Year 2023 In Review which can be viewed by clicking this link: https://youtu.be/cZtJ0wbJ8Bs?si=SoMbzQmoOUITb2ss C.H.O.I.C.E.S. also has a well-developed marketing strategy which uses a combination of new and old methods to share information within the community. Our approach is to: (1) notify the 14,000 families in our database via eblast newsletters, (2) post PSA's and reels to 4 social media accounts with over 7,000 combined followers, and (3) use our "Text to Pantry'' software which conveys information to over 500 subscribers via text to their cell phones. As we resume our community stakeholder meetings, we are hopeful to find even more mediums in which to disseminate C.H.O.I.C.E.S.'s programmatic results. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Over the last 22 years, the world has evolved and so too has C.H.O.I.C.E.S.! We began with weekly fitness classes for overweight children that were mostly girls and young women. As we've learned more about why children were overweight, we transitioned our programs to address a wider scope of unmet needs such as accessibility to fresh foods and basic nutrition. We also discovered the importance of educating everyone in that child's household about obesity and obesity-related chronic diseases. The reality is that the United States obesity, diabetes, and hypertension rates are consistently highest in African American populations. The C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Community Teaching Kitchen was created in 2018 to be a multi-faceted venue acting as a resource for reversing this trend! We will continue to promote the ideology of "food as fun and medicine". This means sustaining our monthly mobile food pantries, providing hybrid platform cooking classes to families, culinary arts workforce training, and non-stigmatizing life skill learning opportunities for overweight children. Going forward, our aim is to address the long-standing challenge of childhood obesity and malnutrition by using technology to personalize health and nutrition education. We are providing our longest running program, The Sisters in the Lifestyle Intervention Teaching Exercises (S.L.I.T.E.), which has targeted USDA grant goals with a new approach. In keeping with our CFP goal of obtaining new funders, we received a $75,000 grant from the P.E.A.R.L.Milling Foundation last October for this program. Since January of this year, we have been focusing upon engaging at-risk, overweight girls 11 to 17 years of age. We are introducing artificial intelligence and technology into their culinary education. There's 28 girls and young women currently enrolled in the S.L.I.T.E program working on "The Zoey's Adventures" public service campaign. Thus far the program has created 3 videos with 291 views on the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. YouTube Channel. The activities of this program will expand the C.H.O.I.C.E.S. Community Teaching Kitchen into a lab where next-generation ideas converge to teach nutrition and health in an engaging, hands-on manner to 100 young women. The question we seek to answer is - "Can we develop an enhanced program that leverages advanced technologies as tools for wellness and core life skills training so that we transform young women's relationships with technology, health, and nutrition?

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? C.H.O.I.C.E.S. utilized the USDA Community Food Program (CFP) grant funds towards underserved neighborhoods in Metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia. These areas are known food desert communities in Fulton, DeKalb, and Gwinnett Counties. Over the past 12 months, we have achieved the following goals and objectives: A. From January 1, 2023 - December 31, 2023, C.H.O.I.C.E.S. was able to make this programmatic impact: 1. Provided 1.258 million pounds of food to families with low incomes in DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett Counties. 2. Provided 1.486 million meals by hosting 58 Mobile Food Pantry Distribution Days and 3 Annual Events in DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett Counties. 3. Served 24,041 families (about 72,123 people) via cooking classes, mobile food pantries and special events. 4. Educated 1,522 students and 87 teachers with 1,547 culinary kits via Snack and StoryTime Children's Literacy Series virtual field trip live demo classes at 4 Atlanta Public Schools. 5. Donated 325 Children's Books to 4 Atlanta Public School libraries as part of the Snack and StoryTime Series. 6. Engaged 3,025 volunteers from corporations, civic groups, community associations and academic institutions to assist in the monthly mobile food pantry and cooking classes. B. From January 1, 2024 - June 28, 2024, C.H.O.I.C.E.S. was able to make this programmatic impact: 1. Provided 229,452 thousand pounds of food to families with low incomes in DeKalb, Fulton, and Gwinnett Counties. 2. Provided 275,342 thousand meals by hosting 4 Mobile Food Pantry Distribution Days and 1 Annual Event in DeKalb, Fulton and Gwinnett Counties. 3. Served 4,900 families (about 15,371 people) via cooking classes, mobile food pantries and a special event. 4. Educated 1,320 students and 70 teachers with 1,340 culinary kits via the Snack & StoryTime Children's Literacy Series virtual field trip live demo classes at 3 Atlanta Public Schools. 5. Donated 185 Children's Books to 3 Atlanta Public School libraries as part of the Snack & StoryTime Series. 6. Engaged 775 volunteers from corporations, civic groups, community associations and academic institutions to assist in the monthly mobile food pantry and cooking classes. C. We have also increased our community-based program partners to promote programmatic sustainability and participant self-reliance. They are as follows: 1. Food Procurement Partners: The Atlanta Community Food Bank (MOU), The American Culinary Federation (MOA), Georgia Greens, Royal Foods, Second Helpings (MOU) and Sprouts Farmers Markets. 2. Program Execution Partners: The Atlanta Braves HomePlate (MOA), Atlanta Fulton Family Connection (MOU), DoorDash (MOA), MUST Ministries (MOU), Victory for the World Church and Wellstar (MOU). 3. Facility and Municipal Partners: Atlanta Public Schools, Atlanta Technical College, City of Atlanta Parks and Recreation Department (MOA), The DeKalb County Board of Health, First Congregational Church of Atlanta (Lease), Exchange Park Intergenerational Center, The Fulton County Department of Health, Fulton County Public Schools, Fulton County Sheriff's Department, Georgia State University (MOU), Hands on Atlanta (MOA), Oak Hill Child, Adolescent & Family Center (MOA), Rosel Fann Recreation Center (MOA) and Tri-City High School.?

Publications