FOOD 4 LIFE

• Sponsoring Institution: National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Project Status: COMPLETE
• Funding Source: OTHER GRANTS
• Reporting Frequency: Annual
• Accession No.: 1010154
• Grant No.: 2016-33800-25585
• Cumulative Award Amt.: $35,000.00
• Proposal No.: 2016-02415
• Project Start Date: Sep 1, 2016
• Project End Date: Aug 31, 2017
• Grant Year: 2016
• Program Code: [LN.B]- Community Foods Project Planning

Recipient Organization
LANTERN COMMUNITY SERVICES, INC.
49 W 37TH ST FL 12
NEW YORK,NY 10018

Performing Department
(N/A)

Non Technical Summary
This project targets emerging adults, aged 18-26, who have aged out of foster care and are living in supportive housing. Due togeographic isolation and financial duress, coupled with a lack of cooking and money management skills, these young adults overuse costly and unhealthy prepared food, often go hungry, and face a future of food insecurity and poor nutrition. Lantern will plan anddevelop Food 4 Life, an evidence-informed nutrition, budgeting and cooking program specifically designed for these young adults,addressing the need by developing skills needed for a lifetime of healthful eating, including choosing healthy ingredients, menu planning, healthy food budgeting, and cooking. Once Food 4 Life has been implemented and tested in New York, Lantern will work collaboratively with the Corporation for Supportive Housing to disseminate information about the program to providersof supportive housing for this age group nationwide - allowing this project to have far-reaching consequences beyond the 85 young adults living in Lantern's sites. The program willenableyoung adults to maintain food security and to develop their skills to be able to eat healthfully into their future.

Animal Health Component

50%

Research Effort Categories

Basic

(N/A)

Applied

50%

Developmental

50%

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
806	6099	3080	100%

Knowledge Area
806 - Youth Development;

Subject Of Investigation
6099 - People and communities, general/other;

Field Of Science
3080 - Sociology;

Keywords

farm to institution

food 4 life

young adult nutrition programming

Goals / Objectives
Lantern's overarching goal is to remedy thedisadvantages our young adults face by enabling themto maintain food security and to develop their skills to be able to eat healthfully into their future. Further, we aim to provide a vehicle for the young adults living in our supportive housing sites to co-create a program with Lantern staff, and for them to have a significant voice in the design of a Lantern program.The project objectives are to:Developa new, evidence-informed nutrition and financial capability program specifically for vulnerable young adults living on their own (Food 4 Life)Engage young adult participants to play a critical role in designing,testing and evaluatingthe curriculum, through focus groups, tenant meetings, and pilot sessionsDisseminate theFood 4 Life program currriculum to supportive housing providers nationwide, through our partnership with CSH

Project Methods
Food 4 Life was envisioned against the backdrop of a critical service gap. There is a glaring need for this programming, especially for those living in supportive housing residences, which are typically located in high-need neighborhoods. While few options for this type of programming exist, even fewer take into account the unique needs of young adults and how they learn. Given the importance and fragility of this developmental period in every person's life, the need is great - as are the opportunities to make a real and lasting difference. Food 4 Life will address the need by developing skills needed for a lifetime of healthful eating, including choosing healthy ingredients, menu planning, healthy food budgeting, and cooking.Food 4 Life will be grounded in hands-on learning activities that match the developmental stage of emerging adults. The planning stage, for which this proposal seeks support, will involve researching best practices related to young adult education, as well as the best methods to develop cooking and budgeting skills, and improve eating habits in this population.Once our research phase is completed, Lantern will focus our energy on the critical task of incorporating the voice of our young adult clients in the design of the Food 4 Life program, ensuring that it resonates with this population. As Lantern's staff work onsite in the apartment buildings where our young adults live, we already have a high level of engagement with this group. Moreover, all of Lantern's staff have been trained in Motivational Interviewing (MI), a counselling model proven to engage and motivate clients towards positive behavior change. This evidence-based, person-centered model, which supports clients' self-efficacy and helps resolve ambivalence toward behavioral change, will be the backbone of our client recruitment and engagement efforts.First, we will organize a series of Focus Groups to mold both the Food 4 Life development process and its curriculum, ensuring that the subject matter and material design reflect the wants and needs of young adult tenants. Our young adults will help us identify the best way to engage them in developing the curriculum, as well as key subject matter to cover and ways to structure each lesson to be as engaging and informative as possible. We also hold regular tenant meetings at each of our buildings, and will include Food 4 Life on the agendas of those meetings to incorporate additional viewpoints. If needed, we will speak one-on-one with clients to get feedback on the Food 4 Life design.During the program planning process, input from the service providers and community-based resources that are serving as our advisors will be critical as well. Our partnerships provide awide array of expertise from different fields and backgrounds - food and young adult service-providers -- to ensure the program is as comprehensive and inclusive as possible. Our advisors' input will enable us to create a well-designed program tailored to young adults coming out of foster care, who currently live in low income communities.To create the Food 4 Life curriculum, Lantern will begin with the USDA-approved Just Say Yes to Fruits and Vegetables nutrition, cooking, and financial capability curriculum. The structure and content of this curriculum, which has been used with myriad populations, is appropriate as a starting point for Food 4 Life, though it needs to be further tailored to have greater impact with young adults. The tailoring process will utilize our research regarding emerging adult brain development and education; proven methods of teaching culinary and financial capability; feedback generated during the young adult focus groups; as well as the advice of our community partners.We tentatively plan to offer Food 4 Life in comprehensive cycles projected to be 10-12 weeks in length, with new participants ideally able to join in any given session. The topics covered will not be cumulative so participants can attend when able without falling behind. We plan also to provide to participants a weekly supply of fresh produce to enhance food security and serve as a teaching and engagement tool. The curriculum would likely involve field trips to restaurants, farms, catering companies, and cooking schools, to expose young adults to new foods and the many branches of the food industry. Ultimately, the goal of Food 4 Life will be to enhance immediate food security for our young adult clients and improve long-term nutrition and financial outcomes well into their adult lives. Each of these components will be discussed during our Focus Groups to ensure their feasibility, and additional methods to educate and engage participants will be assessed.Lantern will hire a Culinary Education Consultant to assist our Director of Nutrition & Culinary Arts with program development and help facilitate these conversations. The consultant, who will bring notable expertise in the field of nutritional and culinary education to the team, will collaborate with staff, young adult advocates, and community partners.In conjunction with the Food 4 Life curriculum, Lantern will ask participants to complete pre- and post- course evaluations, as well as assessments in the year following course participation, to measure its effect. Evaluations will help us to track the program's immediate and long-term impact in areas such as eating habits and money management skills. These evaluations will be developed with considerable input from our Focus Group participants. We will also draw on the expertise of our partners to assist us in designing evaluation tools that will appropriately measure impact.Using the pilot program as a model, Lantern will work with CSH to plan for the national dissemination of the Food 4 Life curriculum. The end goal is to bring the program to nonprofitsproviding programming for young adults who have aged out of foster care and are living on their own nationwide. This partnership will enable Lantern and CSH to connect with other nonprofits to implement the program in diverse geographic regions; conduct ongoing, large-scale evaluations to identify what approaches work best; and provide the national supportive housing arena with a much- needed approach to improve the eating habits and nutritional and financial capability of the vulnerable young adult population.

Progress 09/01/16 to 08/31/17

Outputs
Target Audience:The primary audience reached by the Food 4 Life project were emerging young adults, ages 19-27, who aged out of foster care and live in two of our supportive housing sites in Schafer Hall, East Harlem and Jasper Hall, in the Bronx. Additionally, the Food 4 Life program reached many single adults who also live in these buildings and proved to be the much neededsteady presencefor theweekly culinary workshops and shared meals. In the process of carrying out the classes, we discoveredthat including clients of all ages - not just young adults - added depth to the class and the young adults responded well to having older adults present, who were able to offer additional guidance and structure to the classes. Given that all of our clients are prone to experiencing social isolation, this weekly community event - a cooking class followed by a shared meal - provided an opportunity for residents of all ages to share a meal with neighbors, converse abouttheir own food preferences and knowledge, and bolster the social experience of the building communities. Throughout the duration of the grant, wepiloted sixeight-week series of the Food 4 Life class at two buildings (Jasper Hall and Schafer Hall), reviewed curricula focused on nutrition and culinary education for both high school students and adults, and used that review to develop Lantern's own Food 4 Life curriculum, a nutrition and financial education programthatfocuses primarily on cooking skills, grocery shopping, eating seasonally, and economically. Classes took place once per week at each of the two buildings for each eight-week series, with each class lasting two hours and ending with a shared meal.Each series ended with a class-wide cooking competition whereby participants used the seasonal vegetables available in the Fresh Food Box (a "farmer's market" style market offering local and seasonal selection of fruits and vegetables available to Lantern residents in their buildings) as well as other basic pantry items. The cooking competition gave participants the opportunity to show their cooking knowledge, and an opportunity to experiment and consider the art of presentation and workingtogether. Changes/Problems:There were three major changes thattook place over the past year that have changed the arc of this grant cycle and its outputs: 1)The program expanded beyond the originally intended audience of young adults to include people of all ages. This generational mix served the program well on many levels:a) the young adults have other adults nearby whocan be mentors, authority figures, andcan offer some social support b) the presence of older adults diffuses the frequent tensions between the young adults and creates more of a community building quality within the class, and c) the older adults who participate, many of whom already know how to cook,benefit from sharing the knowledge that they have with the youngergeneration. 2) Wewereunable to maintain consistent meetings with young adults that addressed the development of the program. For this reason, our consultant conducted one-on-one interviews with participants to solicit their feedback. 3) We have not disseminated the curriculum beyond our organization.The curriculum will be available on our website to organization's that request this content, and we aim to expand the program beyond Lantern through the implementation grant that we received from the USDA for 2017-2021. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Among our clients, the Food 4 Life program has supported their use of the Fresh Food Box program because recipes are almost always drawn from items that are made available through this seasonal fruit and vegetables program. Food 4 Life has also prompted significant interest in culinary instruction at Jasper and Schafer Halls, including community cooking and the possibility of culinary arts careers. One of our clients, who had has started his own business selling his home cooked Jamaican food at music festivals andother outdoor events hiredanother client who he got to know through the Food 4 Life classes. Among our staff, the Food 4 Life program has catalyzed a deeper interest in the relationship between whole foods, health, and wellness. Two of the Health and Wellness coordinators attended the Just Food conference this year and one has launched her own catering business. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Starting in January of 2018, Lantern will implement the Food 4 Life program at three of our sites; the program will be continuing at Jasper Hall and Schafer Hall, and will be launched at Vicinitas Hall. During the first year of our Community Food Project implementation grant, we will identify other organizations that will potentially use the curriculum and share it with them to further its reach and more rigorously evaluate the program. During year two, we will partner with one other organization that serves young adults who have aged out of foster care and assist them in the implementation of our program. During year three, we will partner with an additional non-profit organization serving this population to increase our reach, aiming to reach a total of 46 young adults, including 30 Lantern clients and 16 from two other NYC non-profits. By year four, we aim to partner with at least two other organizations nationally that support young adults who have aged out of foster care. The Food 4 Life curriculum and teacher's guide are currently on our website, accessible to organizations that request access to the content. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Over the course of the past year, we have developed a new nutrition andfinancial capability program that will serve the young adult clients in our supportive housing sites. This curriculum includes 75 recipes that are adaptable to each season and is intended to be implemented in three to four eight-session cycles throughout a year; it includes three extra lessons that can be swapped in for the any of the eight core lessons. Our young adults participated in the development of the curriculum by providing input on the types of recipes that were included and what subjects they were interested in learning. In place of focus groups, our participants did one-on-one interviews with our culinary instructor to provide feedback on the class and make suggestions on how to improve the overall program. In May 2017, we learned that we received a Community Food Project implementation grant for the Food 4 Life program to roll it outat our agency and in other supportive housing agencies over the next four years.We will disseminate the curriculum once we have an evaluation plan in place, to encourage organizations electing to use the program use the same evaluation methods that we develop as we start our workshops again in January 2018.

Publications