Cornell Cooperative Extension has been announced as one of 43 nationwide recipients of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Gus Schumacher Nutrition Incentive Program, or GusNIP, Produce Prescription funds.
April L. Bennett, nutrition program manager for Cornell Cooperative Extension said GusNIP is a nutrition incentive program, including a produce prescription program.
“For us, it’s allowing us to take what was a very small two-year pilot for a produce prescription program and take it to a much bigger level,” she said.
This grant will allow CCE to impact more people on a broader scale, including six counties: St. Lawrence, Jefferson, Lewis, Franklin, Clinton and Essex.
The three-year grant will serve over 1,000 patients and provided over $162,000 in food support.
“It’s really looking at not just nutrition and nutrition education, but also food insecurity, and food access,” she said.
Ms. Bennett said CCE felt it was important to receive GusNIP because they had an initial pilot project with Fidelis Insurance Company, and they saw potential.
“We saw tremendous potential, we felt like that grant gave us the opportunity to develop a model that worked, although our impact was very small,” she said. “We weren’t able to serve a ton of people with the funding and the model that we had.”
Receiving the GusNIP grant will allow for CCE to have more staff, and to be able to spread out across the six counties.
“We felt like we were in a really good position to be able to take this funding and take it to the next level,” she said. “We were also really personally interested in applying and getting awarded this grant because typically you see produce prescription programs in more urban areas. It’s a model that has shown that it can be successful and it’s starting to get popular.”
She said typically the programs will be seen in areas of the state such as Buffalo, Albany or New York City.
“Our focus is really on ‘How can this model work in a rural setting?’ because we know our challenges are different,” she said.
CCE received a little more than $350,000, which is more than they asked for.
One of the stipulations, which Ms. Bennett said they planned to do anyway, is that CCE must use more than half of the funding toward serving the intended audience.
“It’s a much smaller percentage that’s going to things like staffing or marketing,” she said.
Ms. Bennett said the majority of funding will go toward the vouchers.
Anyone who gets referred and gets enrolled in the program will be eligible for six weeks of nutrition education workshops and in those workshops, they will receive a $25 voucher that gives them free produce at participating grocery stores.
“We also wrote into the grant that at each of those workshops they would also get a kitchen incentive item so that they’re building their resources each week so they’ll get something that will make it easier for them to prepare fresh ingredients,” she said. “Along with the education, the recipes, they’ll get some actual tangible things to take home so that they will have what they need in order to prepare fresh ingredients,” she said.
Ms. Bennett said they are currently focusing on establishing partnerships in the six counties.
“We already had some really strong partnerships with healthcare providers through the initial pilot, but we needed to go back to those partners and explain to them some of the differences with this new funding,” she said.
One of the biggest differences, according to Ms. Bennett, is that GusNIP is part of a large research initiative, and that organizations that were awarded the grant would be able to collect data so they could measure the efficacy of the program.
Cornell University is taking the lead on the data collection.
Ms. Bennett said they have prioritized redemption sites as being local partners so they can impact the local economy, farmers, and producers.
By late June or early July is when all six counties are expected to go live.
In order to qualify for the grant, CCE had to make the case that food access and food insecurity was a problem in the north country, which data backs up, and that there would be a notable benefit with health outcome, Ms. Bennett said.
“We’re seeing that food access, food insecurity, those are growing challenges,” she said. “In rural communities, we don’t have neighborhood grocery stores like we did a generation or two ago. Things are becoming more centralized, so for folks that don’t have reliable transportation and aren’t able to get out to those big box stores they’re getting their groceries at the Dollar General, the dollar stores, the convenience stores, the gas station, where there are not nearly the options. There aren’t a lot of healthy foods available and the prices are much higher.”
After the program ends, patients are still eligible for any of the other nutrition programing at CCE, and can continue to call and ask questions, and go to different educational opportunities.
“The support will be ongoing even after the voucher program ends,” she said.
Ms. Bennett stressed the way to get involved with GusNIP and CCE is by reaching out and bringing it up to your healthcare provider.
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