Food for Thought: Eating Healthy on a Budget

Posted by on December 11, 2011

Sesame Workshop’s Food for Thought Helping Families throughout U.S.
Witnesses to Hunger member Tianna Gaines-Turner on expert panel to discuss new research

Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization behind Sesame Street, unveiled compelling research today, illustrating how Food for Thought: Eating Healthy on a Budget, an initiative that addresses food insecurity, has been successful in helping families increase their knowledge, beliefs and behaviors around nutrition.

Sesame Workshop hosted a panel to discuss this new research, conducted by The Field Research Corporation and funded by The Merck Company Foundation, December 8, 2011. The panel was moderated by Erica Hill, Co-Anchor of CBS News’ The Early Show at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Panel participants included:

Tianna Gaines-Turner of Witnesses to Hunger
Dr. Jeanette Betancourt, Senior Vice President, Outreach and Educational Practices, Sesame Workshop
Enid Borden, President and CEO, Meals on Wheels Association of America
Mark DiCamillo, Senior Vice President, Field Research Corporation
Vicki Escarra, President & CEO, Feeding America
Rev. Douglas Greenaway, President and CEO, National WIC Association
Ronald Kleinman, M.D., Physician in Chief, MassGeneral Hospital for Children

Launched in December 2010, Food for Thought is a bilingual (English-Spanish) multimedia outreach initiative designed to help support families, who have children between the ages of two and eight, cope with uncertain or limited access to affordable and nutritious food.  The kits were produced with funding and partnership support from UnitedHealthcare and The Merck Company Foundation.  Dr. Mariana Chilton, of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel University, helped to advise the creation of the Food for Thought kits, and the Center distributes them through outreach services offered with our research at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in Philadelphia, PA. Kits can be downloaded at the Food for Thought website.

http://www.sesamestreet.org/parents/topicsandactivities/toolkits/food

In addition to the new research, Sesame Workshop announced it will continue this initiative through the development of an advisory board on poverty in 2012.

We look forward to continuing our partnership with Sesame Workshop to further address hunger and poverty in the United States.