Identifying Opportunities to Deepen the Integration of Social Justice Within SNAP-Ed Efforts

PHI’s Center for Wellness and Nutrition (PHI CWN) works to eliminate health disparities and promote equitable practices across the most vulnerable communities.

Since Federal Fiscal Year (FFY) 2022, PHI CWN has been conducting a formative evaluation, adding a racial equity lens to the SNAP-Ed Evaluation Framework. In FFY 2023, the evaluation efforts expanded to explore racial equity among SNAP-Ed eligible adults.

Building off the work started in FFY 2022, PHI CWN conducted the FFY 2024 evaluation, focusing on the perspective of implementing agency (IA) staff through a health and racial equity workforce assessment. In partnership with North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, PHI CWN conducted a workforce assessment of racial equity across IAs in the three states.

Grounded in the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA) Guiding Principles to Embed Equity in SNAP-Ed, the goal of the assessment was to better understand current strengths and identify opportunities to deepen the integration of social justice and equity within SNAP-Ed efforts. The assessment examined each of the six Guiding Principles:

• Centering People
• Authentic Community Engagement
• Starting with Strengths
• Impact Over Intent
• Integrity, Transparency and Accountability
• Cross-Sector Partnerships

Results revealed that SNAP-Ed implementers across the three states know, respect and trust their communities and partners, and are strongly focused on achieving meaningful program outcomes. However, to more fully align with ASNNA’s Guiding Principles, the findings pointed to the need for increased investment in compensating and authentically engaging community members, allocating funding toward strengths-based approaches and implementing policies that ensure all staff receive regular training and ongoing professional development in equity, racial justice and power dynamics.

Recommended Actions to Improve Health and Racial Equity in the SNAP-Ed Workforce

To center equity throughout the stages of program implementation, several recommendations are proposed:

• Meaningfully involve community members in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of programs
• Create opportunities for qualitative feedback from community members
• Prioritize trust building with community members
• Prioritize recruiting nutrition educators with racial and ethnically diverse backgrounds
• Provide community engagement activities that share decision-making with the community
• Continue fostering cross-sector relationships to reach more people
• Engage with IAs throughout the region to share resources and problem-solve together

Recommended Trainings and Professional Development Opportunities

• Power dynamics, health equity, and racial justice (annual, required training)
• Authentic community engagement overview & approaches
• Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR)
• Approaches to collecting and using continuous feedback data for decision-making and program improvement
• Asset-based community development
• Facilitating and mobilizing Community Advisory Boards
• Ethical storytelling and asset framing
• Assessing unintended impacts of PSEs through evaluation methods (e.g., ripple effect mapping, outcome harvesting)

A version of this impact story first appeared in the CWN 2024 Impact Report.