COMMUNITY NUTRITION PROJECT INSTRUCTIONS

Overview

Each of us resides in some sort of community. It may be a suburban neighborhood, a rural farm area, or a large city. Your neighbors may be retired couples, or widows. They may consist of young, active families or families with teenagers or college students. Whatever your situation, there are opportunities for the Public Health Nutritionist to positively impact communities. All communities, in some fashion, have community events.

Some offer good old fashion ho downs, others host summer carnivals, some are the home of their State or County Fair, while others have simple Community Days. Some communities sponsor Heritage Days or a Heritage Week remembering the reasons for which their towns were founded. One thing is for sure - each of these events offer food! As you have studied these various chronic diseases you have learned about their risk factors and their recommended therapeutic diets.

The purpose of this project is to develop a plan to educate vendors about offering healthy food alternatives at a local community event.Your plan will include guidelines to be presented to vendors who offer food at these community events. The outcome of this project is to educate vendors in your community about the risks of chronic disease and to show vendors how they can play a role in lowering the risk of chronic disease.

This project includes three parts: 1) Selection of Event/Vendors, 2) Written plan and 3) PowerPoint Presentation. (Be sure to review "How to make a power point presentation" which is included in this section under Community Nutrition Project.)

Part 1: Select Event&Vendors:

Identify a local community event and the types of vendors you are targeting at a local community event.It may be a local carnival, county fair, church sponsored event, etc.The community event and vendors may be fictitious or hypothetical.

Part 2: Written Plan

You are a Public Health Nutritionist.You will write a 3-5 page, double spaced, written plan, due by 11:59 p.m. (ET) on Sunday of Module/Week 7.

1. Identify the local community event and type of vendors you are targeting in the written plan.

2. Outlinetwo different chronic diseases and discuss why they are a health hazards to the local community.Explain why it is important for these vendors to know about these hazards.

3. Explain how foods offered by the vendors at the community event, increase the chronic disease risks.Make a connection between foods commonly sold by these vendors in your local community to the chronic diseases.

4. Present the demographics of your targeted community and their risk of disease development.

5. Justify and explain why you, a Public Health Nutritionist in your community, need to educate vendors for the local community event.Explain how you will educate them.What type of guidelines will you promote? What advice will you give?What does the vendor need to be educated about?

6. In your rationale for this educational presentation to vendors, explain how vendors could benefit from this training.What's in it for them?

7. Cite all references used for content information in current AMA format.

Part 3: PowerPoint Presentation

The PowerPoint Presentationis the training tool that will be used to educate and persuade vendors to want to be involved in this type of program.

The presentation is to be developed and ready to present to vendors. Please review "How to make a power point presentation" prior to developing your presentation. This will provide helpful tips and hints which can then be reflected in your grade. It should include the following:

1. A brief education for the vendor about the chronic disease. Be prepared to include some type of "sales pitch" to the vendor in this presentation. Part of your job is to make them want to change or adjust their offerings.

2. An outline recommendingfood alternatives. This section should be complete with recipes, healthy substitutions, and any other information that may entice the vendor enough to include these offerings.

3. Provide the vendor with three healthy substitutionsto include on their menufrom which consumers can choose.

4. Be sure to include marketing tools to help the vendor "sell" this concept to community members. This most likely will be slogans, signs or any other eye catching sales appeal idea. Develop some examples for the vendor so the work is already done. Make your slides creative, colorful and eye-catching to show these examples.

5. Use current AMA to cite information used on PowerPoint slides, and create a final slide to serve as your reference page.