A Webinar on Healthy Food Choices and SNAP

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), once known as the Food Stamp Program, is at the very heart of the nation’s nutrition safety net, serving, in 2013, more than one in seven Americans who are struggling to put food on the table. So, how do you encourage participants in the program to spend their SNAP benefits on healthy food?  This is the topic of a roundtable cosponsored by three organizations that work on nutrition issues: The Altarum Institute, Grantmakers In Health, and American Society for Nutrition.

This Altarum Institute Policy Roundtable will examine innovative approaches, including financial incentives, to encourage healthy food choices by SNAP program participants.  An important part of the discussion will center on the added economic benefit that can occur when more SNAP dollars are spent on local food and circulate in the local economy. Speakers from Altarum’s Center for Food Assistance and Nutrition, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Fair Food Network, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will discuss what is being tested, and what is known to be working, in this critical effort to improve health status through healthier food purchases supported by SNAP.

Speakers:

• Senator Debbie Stabenow (invited)
• Linda Jo Doctor, W. K. Kellogg Foundation
• Dan Glickman, Former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture; Bipartisan Policy Center
• Oran Hesterman, Fair Food Network
• Audrey Rowe, Food and Nutrition Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture
• Loren Bell, Altarum Institute, panel moderator

Respondent:

• Faith Mitchell, Grantmakers In Health, moderator

Registration site  for both in-person and Web participants.