Madison Tower Apartments is a low-income housing facility which serves single senior citizens who have mental or physical limitations. Often, this population tends to lead a sedentary lifestyle coupled with unhealthy meal patterns. The Housing Director contacted the Madison County Cooperative Extension Service to inquire if the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) assistant would come to the facility and educate residents on how to plan, cook, and store nutritious meals with the foods residents receive, monthly, in their senior commodities and food boxes. The director also asked that the SNAP-Ed assistant encourage residents to take advantage of the exercise room she had designed for them, which was not being used at the time.

The SNAP-Ed assistant, with the help of the housing director, designed an eight-week program that included safe food handling, meal planning, and basic cooking, to name a few. To promote the program, promotional flyers were hung at around the apartment community. There were six ladies who participated in the eight-week program. Each week, they would start by sharing what they had learn and practiced since the last meeting as well as what meals they had prepared. The SNAP-Ed assistant would bring new, healthy recipes for them to sample and the participants would also learn a new cooking skill, each week. The participants also received a different cooking tool, each week, which would help them practice and implement their weekly, newfound skills. The last few weeks of the class, the ladies reported that they were making communal meals together and had even formed a walking club. The six of them recruited some of their neighbors that were unable to participate in the program, to join them for meals and walking club. All six ladies reported some weight loss and improved their dietary intake as a group by 83.3%. The director was so pleased with their success that she asked the SNAP-Ed assistant to offer this program quarterly.