In Jefferson County, 12% of all youth are Latinx and 27% of the Latinx youth population live in poverty (Kids Count Data Center). The Kentucky Nutrition Education Program in broadly interested in increasing participation rates among Latinx Kentuckians and has developed some multilingual resources to support this goal. At a community event in the summer of 2024, the Food System Specialist met Humana Medicaid’s new Latinx Outreach coordinator. The role of this person is to help the limited resource Latinos in Jefferson County to connect with resources ranging from groceries to housing. The two individuals connected on their shared goals of nutrition education and food access for the Latinx community. Together, they decided to collaborate on a project that used NEP education resources for youth as a way to connect to Latinx families at large. The partners selected Hawthorne Elementary School as a pilot site, because this school is a Public School with a Spanish Emersion Magnet Program where approximately 50% of their population identifies as Latinx and their Family Resource Coordinator is bi-lingual and could support multi-lingual parent communication.

Together, all partners selected the K &1 grade levels as their target audience and recruited youth from those grades to participate in the LEAP Program as an afterschool club where youth could engage in literacy, nutrition and gardening in a bi-lingual/bi-cultural environment. 20 youth enrolled and 19 participated in the seven week program.

To address food security concerns, Humana Medicaid purchased grocery boxes from Local’s Food Hub and Pizza Pub (grocery store purchasing 100% of products from Kentucky farmers). Each week, the grocery box was filled with items that aligned with the LEAP lessons and additional NEP materials were sent home with families to support the youth and families to try and prepare more meals at home.

At the end of the program, parents were asked to fill out a 10-question survey about their child and family’s eating habits and food security during the program. Thirteen of the nineteen households responded. 61% families reported that their child had “significant or some improvement” in their consumption of fresh produce. 84% of families reported saving money on groceries during the LEAP program and 76% of families reported making one or more NEP recipe provided. In addition to improving family food security, this program put $5,000 directly into the hands of small Kentucky farmers through the food purchased for the grocery boxes.

The success of this pilot program has led to the expansion of Humana Medicaid’s supplemental support of NEP programming in Jefferson County. In the 2025-2026 school year, Humana Medicaid, Jefferson Co. NEP and Local’s Food Hub plan to partner again to impact 220 families in three different public schools in Jefferson Co. with large Latinx populations. This expanded partnership will allow NEP to deepen their impact within the Jefferson Co. Public School system and increase NEP’s impact within the Latinx community.