Success StoryHello Bites



Hello Bites

Author: Nancy Owens

Planning Unit: Allen County CES

Major Program: Accessing Nutritious Foods (general)

Outcome: Long-Term Outcome

In Allen County, youth are not eating the recommended daily fruits and vegetables like they should be. As recommended by my plate. The Allen County Cooperative Extension Office, Allen County Health Dept., Need More Acres, Allen County School System, Core of Scottsville, and Dugas Park have joined together to create C.H.A.T.  (Community Hunger Action Team).  Our focus was to work with the children of the community to introduce a new vegetable every week and to take a hello bite even if they had already tried the vegetable. And even though some of the children were eating vegetables already, in most cases it was the same few vegetable every time. When I asked parents about introducing new vegetables to their children at home, only about 10% of families said that they had tried.  The other 90% said that they knew their children wouldn’t eat them so they didn’t bother trying. Some felt that if they didn’t like the vegetable than their child wouldn’t like it either.  With this information, I worked with the Core of Scottsville, during the summer months, to increase the children’s vegetable and water intake, while also focusing on physical activity and decreasing screen time. I worked with 78 youth in total, and 52 of the 78 graduated the program. Each child was giving a pedometer and each Friday during the months of June and July, the kids would walk from the Core of Scottsville to the Extension office, which is about half a mile one way. I taught the curriculum farm to table, with which the goal was to get the children introduced to a lot of different vegetables. The vegetables were introduced in the following order, June 7 broccoli, June 21 Swiss chard, June 28 cucumbers, July 12 Squash, July 19 pepper and tomatoes, and on July 26 farmers market set up inside the Allen County Cooperative Extension Office, after each child did a sampling they got to choose vegetables that they could take home to share with the rest of their family. During the program 100% of the youth tried the Hello Bites. There was 90% change in the diet quality, 80% improvement in decreased screen time, 80% improvement in kids eating more vegetables. 75% of the kids will try new vegetables as in taking the Hello Bite after the program ends. Besides these meetings, the C.H.A.T.S team also went to all the schools in the district and 3500 students got to do a vegetable sampling of kale, Swiss chard, carrots, turnips, radish, squash, zucchini, pepper, tomato, watermelon, kohlrabi, Brussels sprouts.  Some of the students got to tour Need More Acres Farm. Also the students from the Core of Scottsville got to tour Need More Acres Farm.






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