Our Foundation Empowers You with Our Resources!
Our Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and is dedicated exclusively to empowering you to help consumers live healthier lifestyles. We support Academy members through our scholarships, awards, fellowships, research grants, public nutrition education programs and disaster relief efforts. This month, I would like to share some of our wonderful resources that are available to all Academy members. I am highlighting the resources recently developed through our Nutrition in Food Retail Program Development Fellowship and Future of Food programs.
Our Fellowship program deploys dynamic registered dietitian nutritionists in the US and globally to address the greatest food and nutrition challenges throughout the world. Fellows conduct research and provide nutrition education that improves and sustains nutritional health locally and globally, including robust dissemination activities. Our Nutrition in Food Retail Program Development Fellow, Allison Yoder, MA, RDN, LD and participating stakeholders have developed some exciting new resources for our profession in the food retail sector that are available to all Academy members:
Support for these projects was funded through a grant from Walmart and a grant from Topco.
The Foundation’s Future of Food initiative was launched in 2012 when the Foundation, Feeding America and National Dairy Council came together to raise awareness for food insecurity as a public health issue and to help increase access to adequate amounts of nutrient dense food for all Americans. The Foundation’s FOF program is a platform to share free resources and CPE opportunities for Academy membership and our profession.
Our Sustainable Food Systems Primer for RDNs and NDTRs is a seven-module resource designed to provide practitioners, educators, and students with foundational knowledge on sustainable, resilient, and healthy food and water systems. This recorded webinar series has been approved for 3.0 CPEUs.
In 2018, our Foundation released a curriculum for dietetic interns and students titled, Sustainable, Resilient, and Healthy Food and Water Systems. This curriculum now includes additional resources that educators, preceptors, and students can utilize to support the implementation and use of this innovative, 10-week curriculum:
- An evaluation of the first year of the curriculum’s implementation was published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.
- The curriculum Implementation Guide offers recommendations and guidance for integrating curriculum activities into existing dietetics education programs, including case study examples.
- Two recorded webinars on systems thinking are available on the webinar section of the Foundation’s Future of Food page. One webinar focuses on malnutrition through the lens of systems thinking, and the other focuses on individual, policy, systems, and environmental change in food systems. Both webinars include activity templates and instructional guides, and each is approved 1 CPEU. An evaluation of these resources was recently published in Frontiers in Nutrition.
- The Sustainable Food Systems: Dietetics Program Directory includes dietetics education programs that incorporate content related to sustainable, resilient, and healthy food and water systems.
These resources were made possible through an educational grant from the National Dairy Council.
I want to sincerely thank all of our collaborative partners and donors who have supported these efforts. I urge you to take advantage of our programs that empower you as food and nutrition practitioners. Through the generosity of our donors, we are able to offer tools and resources that can help you along your career path.
Warmly,
Becky Dorner, RDN, LD, FAND
Chair, 2021-2022
Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation
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