RIT Receives $200,000 Grant to Continue Nutrition Education Efforts

Resources will be used to aid Women, Infants and Children education program

Rochester Institute of Technology has received a $200,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service Agency. The money will be utilized to fund the second phase of a competency-based training initiative for the USDA’s Women, Infants and Children program.

A team of RIT nutrition professors from its School of Hospitality and Service Management worked with regional WIC offices throughout the country last year to train their staff on three fundamental competencies designed to tailor the program to individuals. This year, RIT will be creating self-instructional training modules for the program’s staff to teach and assess those competencies.

The key to the new approach, according to RIT’s Linda Underhill, is flexibility.

“People will be treated as individuals,” says Underhill, the principal investigator of the grant and the chair of RIT’s Health Systems Administration program. “Not only will this new process better meet their needs, but it will be more effective because people will feel that it is a program that is tailored specifically to them.”


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