Over the last three years, the Kentucky State University SNAP-Ed team has grown and achieved many goals. One theme I try to continually instill in this team is to always keep looking for additional ways to serve and reach. We’ve developed more than 100 community partner relationships, taught 1000’s of face to face programs with youth and adults, and volunteered many hours within our communities as a KSU employee, but also as a member of the community that wants to be involved.

Our first year we focused on community partnerships, honing our craft of program delivery and curriculum knowledge. Once that was comfortable, we moved on to offer a KSU signature program known as Rookie Cooking Camp. The camp teaches nutrition, basic cooking skills, and introduces youth to a world of local food through field trip to the farmers market or possibly a meat processing center! This year, we were a little comfortable going into the spring. We had a few projects in mind and camps planned, but nothing that was really going to stretch our growth…until COVID-19.

For a program like SNAP-Ed, COVID-19 could’ve been the end of something beautiful. Our program is designed for social interaction, face to face learning and hands on skill building. We cannot deny that this period of social distancing and work at home policies have influenced our programming. But it has also pushed us back out of the comfort zone and into new realms of reach and programming opportunities! This team is resilient. We knew that our primary outreach tool would now become the internet. Thanks to a pilot program conducted last year by our sister extension university, UK, we had some learning tools already available to us to push forward into the world of online programming. We moved our adult curriculum to a medium that could be used in platforms such as Facebook Live and Zoom and started recruiting.

Presently, we have four counties offering online adult programming. We have created a series of videos for youth produced by KSU called “Happy and MP” that has had more than 3,000 views and has been shared more than 50 times. Several partners shared on their Facebook sites. Going forward into the fall, SNAP-Ed is offering an online series called Organwise for elementary schools. We currently have nine schools signed up to partner. This is a great opportunity to maintain our community partnership and continue to offer nutrition education wherever students may be learning.

This pandemic has taught us many things about the world, programming and ourselves. Most of all, it has taught us that comfort is the enemy of achievement and this team will continue to learn and grow in order to serve those that we are called to influence for a better tomorrow.