Hunger Persists in New Hampshire

During the holidays we traditionally think about providing food to those who can’t afford to provide for themselves. While the holidays are difficult for families with limited incomes, many families must search year-round for food from emergency sources, such as food pantries and soup kitchens.

The New Hampshire Food Bank, the only food bank in New Hampshire, knows the challenges of hunger all too well. Serving more than 350 soup kitchens, shelters, and food pantries throughout New Hampshire, the Food Bank distributed 3.9 million pounds of food last year—up from just over two million in 2004, according to Melanie Gosselin, the Food Bank’s executive director. By supporting the New Hampshire Food Bank, you are supporting an organization that “feeds the programs that feed the hungry.”

New Hampshire’s emergency food system: straining from the need
More than 95,000 people in New Hampshire live below the federal poverty guideline, $20,000 annual income for a family of four. An additional 120,000 people live in households with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level.

The majority of New Hampshire’s poor adults hold jobs, but earn low wages. From 2000 to 2005 New Hampshire experienced a loss of manufacturing jobs and an increase in low-wage retail jobs. We see this shift reflected in the rise in use of federal food assistance programs and food pantries.

Last year 56,338 people received food stamp benefits in New Hampshire, yet only 54 percent of the households eligible to receive the benefits choose to participate in the program. This lack of full participation in the federal nutrition assistance programs strains the already-burdened emergency food system. Even when families participate in the food stamp program, they must still rely to some extent on the emergency food system, since average monthly food assistance benefit per person is $80.56.
 
Studies reveal the extent of hunger and need in New Hampshire
America’s Second Harvest, the organization that provides networks for more than 800 food banks around the country conducted a national survey in 2005 to determine the extent of need in each state. Food pantries, shelters, and soup kitchens reported increases in requests for their services and survey respondents verified their need to visit one or more food pantries a month in order to meet their family’s nutritional needs. Here in New Hampshire:

• 45 percent of respondents said they had to choose to pay medical bills before food
• 42 percent choose to pay for utilities before food
• 27 percent reported paying for rent before food

The recently released New Hampshire’s Basic Needs and Livable Wage Study indicates that a family of four (two parents, two children, both parents working) must have an income of $48,625 to meet their basic needs—is two to two-and-a-half times more than the average low-wage employee earns annually. The study defines the basic needs as food, shelter, heating fuel, transportation, taxes, basic telephone service, childcare, healthcare, and some clothing allowances. It assumes the family prepares all of their food from home and doesn’t count cable television or internet services—living conditions most of us would consider stark at best.

These aren’t temporary statistics occurring only during the holidays. These figures persist throughout the year and are on the rise. Census and federal nutrition assistance program data show a steady increase in individuals and families looking for sources of food to meet their basic needs.

In October the United States Department of Agriculture released their 2005 Household Food Security Study, which indicates the percentage of people who have difficulty buying enough food for their families because they don’t have enough money. The USDA survey reports:

• Nearly 7 percent of New Hampshire households experience food insecurity because they don’t have money to buy enough food to meet their family’s nutritional needs.
  
  
• More than 2 percent report going without food for a number of days at some point during the year because they didn’t have enough money to buy food.

Need for emergency food supplies will continue
Unless these root causes of hunger and food insecurity change, many families in New Hampshire will continue to require emergency food assistance to meet minimum nutrition needs. You can support the New Hampshire Food Bank with donations of money, food, or time. The virtual food drive is a welcome effort to combat hunger in New Hampshire. Every dollar donated to the food bank has the buying power of four meals. Donations of food with high nutritional value and volunteering are all welcome sources of support.

By Helen E. Costello, MS, RD, LD, UNH Cooperative Extension Nutrition Connections Program Food Security Consultant

Costello chairs the Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group of the America Dietetic Association and sits on the advisory councils for both the UNH Center for a Food Secure Future and the New Hampshire Food Bank.

For more information about hunger and food security in New Hampshire:

• Extension’s hunger and food security pages
• UNH Center for a Food-Secure Future
• New Hampshire Food Bank

Statewide Pesticide License Training for Private Applicators

Do you use or supervise the use of pesticides for producing an agricultural commodity on property owned or rented by you or your employer?

Do you apply pesticides on property owned by another person, without compensation other than an exchange of personal services?

If you answered “yes”  to any of these questions, the State of New Hampshire requires you to have a private applicator’s pesticide license. UNH Cooperative Extension will be conducting training sessions for individuals who are not presently certified to apply pesticides and those whose private applicator licenses have expired due to lack of required re-certification credits.

This training is free, thanks to New Hampshire Department of Agriculture’s IPM Grant Program, although participants will need to purchase a manual in order to study for the state exam. Please note: no re-certification credits will be issued for attending this workshop.

Register for training and order your study materials online
Just click on the link below for your county’s training session, or contact Rachel Maccini, Pesticide Safety Education Program Coordinator at 629-9494 ext. 130.

All trainings take place over two consecutive days: Fridays, 4:00 pm – 9:00 p.m. and Saturdays, 9:00 a.m. – noon.

Date	County/Location
December 15 & 16, 2006	Belknap & Carroll Counties Remick County Doctor Museum & Farm 58 Cleveland Hill Rd. Tamworth, NH
January 12 & 13, 2007	Merrimack & SullivanCounties Merrimack Farm & County Store 103 Main Street Bradford, NH
January 26 & 27, 2007	Cheshire & Hillsborough Counties Learning Center, Shieling Forest Old Street Road Peterborough, NH
February 9 & 10, 2007	Rockingham & Strafford Counties Rockingham County Nursing Home 113 North Road Brentwood, NH
February 23 & 24, 2007	Coös & Grafton Counties North Country Resource Center 629 A Main Street Lancaster, NH

                                                   

Presenters include Bill Lord, retired UNH Cooperative Extension fruit specialist; Becky Grube, sustainable horticulture specialist, and Amy Ouellette, agricultural resources educator in Belknap County. In most cases, county Extension educators will lecture at their home county training sessions.
                                               

Changing the Scene USDA/UNH Cooperative Extension program helps New Hampshire schools improve student nutrition and fitness

Robin Abodeely, the school nurse for the 425-student Dr. Crisp Elementary School in Nashua, strolls into a first-grade classroom on “snack patrol.”

“Anybody have a healthy snack to show me today?” she asks. The hands shoot up.

“I brought grapes today!”

“I have a banana!”

“I have an apple!”

Since signing up for Changing the Scene, a USDA school nutrition program, offered to N.H. schools in an enhanced format through UNH Cooperative Extension, Abodeely evaluated her school’s nutrition and fitness habits and spearheaded formation of  a school wellness team, which has since instituted an impressive variety of changes, including:

• Setting up a “Super Snackers” bulletin board with photos of students “caught” eating nutritious food
• Offering nutrition information in the school’s monthly newsletter
• Sending a healthy snacks suggestion list home to parents
• Hosting a full-scale farmers’ market of locally grown foods during a school open house
• Holding a PTO Family Fun Night, complete with jumping rope, salsa dancing, obstacle courses and healthy snacks
• Developing a 20-minute before-school walking program for students, faculty, and parents

Nation/statewide obesity epidemic affects children
“Obesity has reached epidemic levels in the nation and in New Hampshire, rivaling smoking as the number one public health threat,” says UNH Extension nutrition specialist, Valerie Long. “Studies have documented dramatic increases in childhood obesity in recent decades, raising concerns that today’s overweight kids will develop serious chronic illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease and some cancers at an early age, burdening a health care system already stressed to the breaking point.”

Long cites these statistics:

• The latest Kids Count survey estimates 27 percent of New Hampshire children are overweight or obese.
• Public health authorities estimate that 36 percent of children born in the U.S. in 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetime.
• Sixty percent of overweight five- to 10 year-olds already have at least one risk factor for heart disease and 25 percent have two or more risk factors.
• Annual health costs directly associated with overweight and obesity among U.S. children more than tripled in the past two decades.

UNH Cooperative Extension steps in
“Getting to the root of a problem is what UNH Cooperative Extension does best, and when Extension nutrition educators wanted to begin improving the health of children in the state of New Hampshire, that’s just what we did,” says Extension nutrition specialist, Valerie Long.
“USDA had already developed a terrific program called Changing the Scene: Improving the School Nutrition Environment, with a toolkit of resources for local action. Since most children spend a large portion of their day at school, schools are a natural setting within which to influence the health and well-being of children and their families.

“We decided to target school nurses, because parents and community leaders respect nurses as child health advocates.” Says Long, “Collectively, they have the ability to reach large numbers of children. Nurses have knowledge in the areas of nutrition and exercise. They know a lot about the kids and the families of the kids in their schools.”

In early 2003 Long hired Martha Judson, a recently retired school nurse and past president of the NH School Nurses Association, to coordinate the program.

“I posted a note to the N.H. School Nurses’ Association listserv that we’d work with any school—at no cost to them,” says Judson. “I contacted a few schools I thought would have an interest, and then I hit the road, talking up the program one school at a time. Our timing was right. The data on the extent of childhood obesity had just begun making front page headlines.

“Most people call me to their schools because they know they have to do something,” Judson says. “Beginning in the 2006-2007 school year, the federal Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act will require all schools to form wellness teams and develop policy guidelines that promote student health through nutrition education, physical activity, and other school-based wellness activities.

“Our UNH Extension version of Changing the Scene gives schools the help they need to jumpstart the process.”

Changing the Scene: benefits to schools
“The program delivers a lot of value,” says Judson. “In exchange for a commitment of a minimum of 30 hours a year working on the project, Changing the Scene offers participants:

• a tool for assessing their own nutrition and exercise programs
• guidelines for identifying, contacting, and working with all of the groups who need to be actively involved with the school wellness team
• a rich assortment of resources and teaching materials
• ongoing support they need to develop and implement plans for change tailored to their schools’ specific needs and constraints.
• training conferences throughout the year
• one-on-one mentoring and individual meetings with school nurses and wellness teams to keep them up-to-date on the latest nutrition and physical activity information
• tips for attracting media attention and working effectively with the media
• one-on-one mentoring and coaching
• an email listserv
• access to a dedicated Web site for group discussion and sharing resources
• newsletters schools can send home to parents, with a blank page the schools can use to promote their own programs

 
Schools large and small, north and south
To date, Judson says, more then 350 school personnel from 118 schools the length and breadth of New Hampshire have signed on with the Changing the Scene program since its inception in 2003. “About three-quarters of the schools involved have made some changes, and many have made significant change to improve their school nutrition and fitness environments,” she says.

For her part, Abodeely says, “I used the Changing the Scene assessment tool, which revealed that our school was actually pushing junk food. With the best of intent—parents and teachers just want kids to be happy—we had birthday parties with cupcakes and sodas, pizza parties with cakes for dessert, a 100th-Day-of-School party, which featured a mix of  a hundred different pieces of candy.”

“In April, 2004, we had our first wellness committee meeting: The team decided to be proactive, to educate rather than punish, and to promote wellbeing, good nutrition and exercise.

“We kicked off our 2004 school year open house with a farmers’ market in the school cafeteria, organized by Awilda Muniz of UNH Cooperative Extension’s Nutrition Connections program. Local farmers sold corn and apples under a big tent. It was a huge hit.”

“We’ve put up posters everywhere, and filled our classrooms with nutrition and fitness books and supplies.”

Abodeely says having support at the top really helped ensure the program got off on solid footing. “Our school principal at the time, Jennifer Seusing, whose office was decorated with M&M dispensers, said, ‘If we’re going to be a healthy school, then I have to set a healthy example.’ She hired a personal trainer, joined Weight Watchers, and lost 85 pounds.”

Warren Elementary
In some New Hampshire schools, the administrators themselves sign on with the program. Rose Darrow, principal at the 82-pupil, K-6 Warren Elementary School, enrolled her school in 2004.
 
“We do a lot of research-based activities at this school. We’re always doing research,” she says. “When Martha [Judson] contacted us two years ago offering a researched-based program, we jumped at the chance. We already realized child obesity was an up-and-coming problem.”

Darrow says a lot has changed at Warren Elementary in two years. “We serve only fruit for dessert most days now, and we’ve switched to mostly [whole] wheat bread. We’ve become peanut-free. Our cooks have interested in nutrition. They’ve done taste tests of different cheeses and vegetables and taken periodic surveys to see what the children like and don’t like.

“We learned the children wanted more salads in their lunches, so we’ve begun serving more salads,” says Darrow. “They also wanted to go back to white bread; we didn’t go along with that.
We still have soda in the vending machines, but I’m happy to say that water is our biggest seller. It’s a fine balance: We really want change, but we want the change to feel positive.”

Darrow says, “Our fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders are ‘walking across New Hampshire,’ out in the school yard. The school bought pedometers for every child in the program—they love their gadgets! The little ones aren’t officially enrolled in the program, but they follow along anyway.”

“Another change we’ve made: Teachers eat their own lunches in the cafeteria, modeling good eating behavior. The children see them taking their time eating and enjoying their food.

Darrow summarizes her school’s experience with the Changing the Scene program this way: “Overall, we’re more thoughtful than we used to be. That’s what it’s all about.”

Other UNH Cooperative Extension health promotion outreach programs

Liveable, Walkable Communities Explore the vital role community design and development play in citizen health and well-being, including obesity prevention.

4-H Get up and Go Part of a larger statewide initiative, Walk New Hampshire (Walk NH), 4-H Get Up and Go encourages parents and other adults to lace up their walking shoes and join their kids in a walk across New Hampshire.


Nutrition Connections Nutrition and fitness education and support for income-eligible residents. Focuses on dietary quality, food resource management, shopping behavior, food safety, food security, and importance of physical activity.


Matt’s story The story of how one family found help for a health problem from an Extension Nutrition Connections educator to solve individual helped nutrition outreach

Physical activity equipment, school breakfast programs, and school nutrition programs needs assessment Report to the HNH foundation of a statewide survey intended to help the foundation better direct grant money to elementary schools most in need.

by Peg Boyles, UNH Cooperative Extension writer/editor; map by Shirley Clark, MerrimackCounty Family & Consumer Resources/ Nutrition Connections administrative assistant.

For more information:

• To learn more about UNH Cooperative Extension’s Changing the Scene program, email Martha Judson.
  
• USDA Team Nutrition’s Changing the Scene Program (national program)
• Making It Happen! School Nutrition Success Stories