Food Press 101 is an online “community table” that positions students as change agents who promote local produce and family health. To support students as creators of food literacy content, this project includes the infrastructure for a digital platform, partnerships between students and community mentors, and a toolkit for educators.

Please describe your innovation?

Food Press 101 is a 21st century “community table” that provides a social media platform for students to share and access resources for hands-on learning, empowering students to become critical consumers of food and media literacy. The online gathering space facilitates high school students as they create and share food-related stories, recipes, images and videos. It also offers a forum for students to demonstrate their learning, raising awareness among parents, fellow students, and communities on the importance of food literacy. Food Press 101 includes a toolkit armed with a comprehensive curriculum framework, sample lessons, and relevant resources for teachers and out-of-school time providers to ensure that the content aligns with state standards and research-based best practices in media literacy and health. The project partners classes with community stakeholders including journalists, cultural practitioners, and food providers and lays a foundation for participants to address food issues in their communities and around the world.

What is the problem or situation that your innovation seeks to address?

Despite more than a decade of governmental effort aimed at decreasing obesity by 15% in the U.S., a 2010 CDC study confirmed that obesity in adults and children continues to increase and revealed that no state met the objective of the 2001 Surgeon General’s Call to Action to Prevent and Decrease Overweight and Obesity. These findings affirm that our current approach to nutrition education and wellness is insufficient, and open the door for more innovative and comprehensive approaches. Instead of telling students about nutrition, Food Press 101’s unique technique creates and tests a peer-driven, social platform that empowers students to seek the information in ways that are meaningful to them. Based on outcomes extrapolated from students’ assessments, we will finalize a teacher toolkit and provide open source access to the Food Press 101 platform and learning materials.

What effort have you made to test out your new idea?

Food Press 101 builds on knowledge and partnerships developed for the successful Get Healthy Now Hawaii (GHN; http://fdmportfolio.biggerbird.com/gethealthynow). Research on adolescent empowerment theory suggests that providing youth opportunities to actively and meaningfully engage can positively affect self-efficacy and development. Moreover, evaluations of adolescent prevention programs suggest that two key features of successful prevention are working from youth’s strengths to build their skills and enabling their participation in prosocial experiences. Developing Food Press 101 is an iterative rigorous development cycle followed by efforts to collect efficacy evidence. As components of Food Press 101 are developed, program staff collect formative feedback about content and delivery. These data will be used to modify the content and processes. In addition, measures will be created that align to intended outcomes and used following the development cycle to examine impact.

What is particularly noteworthy or novel about your innovation?

It is increasingly important for students to evaluate and manage complex information as citizens of a global, knowledge-based economy. Food will continue to be a critical worldwide issue throughout the 21st century. Capitalizing on the popularity of social media, Food Press 101 is a new approach to nutrition education. It is student-driven, not teacher driven. Learners do the research, make meaning of it, and share it with their peers in fresh ways. In order to test the innovation in authentic settings, we have secured commitments from Moanalua High School, Punahou School, and Hawaii Charter Schools Network to serve as test sites for our project. Our mentor media journalists include KITV (ABC affiliate), Hawaii Business magazine, and editors from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

What impact do you expect your innovation will have on the problem or situation described in the previous question?

In the short term we expect the social platform and framework to result in students' conversation threads and discussion topics that show active engagement in the process of choosing their food. We will ask participants to compare choices prior to Food Press 101 and after it to shed light on changes in their food choices. Next, we expect to see an increase in use of the curriculum and toolkit that will result in higher quality lessons and learning experiences for students. This will result in student knowledge of better food choices, greater self-efficacy in making food choices, and taking more responsibility for them. The toolkit will allow the project to scale up, reaching all Hawaii high schools with an internet connection. Our hope is that this project goes viral and creates a community with a lifelong engagement in food literacy. This would create lasting change that would create better health outcomes for participants and their families (see logic model).

What other community partners will you need if your innovation is to scale beyond your organization?

The key objective of Food Press 101 is to develop, test and refine a platform and toolkit curriculum guide for use and distribution to schools beyond our initial test partners; Monanalua, Punahou and Hawaii Charter Schools Network and to test whether better outcomes in food literacy are achieved by leveraging the social connectivity of technology with Hawaii’s deep social connections to food in a peer to peer, hands-on, project based model. Food Press 101 can scale because a key objective of Food Press 101 is a digital platform and toolkit that can be used and distributed to any classroom (of appropriate age group) interested in participating.

Why are your organization, partners, and key personnel suited to take on this project?

Melanie Kosaka will lead project design. Her experience includes the previously mentioned GHN, PBS cooking series and digital media projects including Teen Health Pass http://teenhealthpass.com/about.html Staff from Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL) provides expertise in Hawaiian culture-based education, web and multi-media platforms, Out-of-School Time program development, and health standards. Partnerships with media journalists capitalize on existing relationships with project staff. Current food and media programs at partnering high schools inform the project’s approach to keep students engaged in an online community focused on local agriculture, family traditions, and community health.