EFNEP Helps Alabama Families Help Themselves

If you’re a stay-at-home parent with little money and even less experience when it comes to serving your family nutritious meals, EFNEP can help.

The national Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) is an expansion of an Alabama pilot program that tested ways to teach homemaking skills and provide nutrition education to limited-resource families. Alabama’s study was used as a model for EFNEP in 1968 when the federal government appropriated money for a nationwide nutrition education program.

"EFNEP’s goal is to provide nutrition education programs aimed at increasing the number of healthy, well-nourished children, youth and families, and to decrease the number of low birth weight babies born to Alabama’s low-income women," says Dr. Josephine Turner, Extension program specialist.

Alabama’s EFNEP program, which reaches almost 25,000 people a year, pairs a county program assistant with a homemaker. The program assistant travels to the home and works with the homemaker to teach food preparation skills. Homemakers learn how to plan nutritious meals, stretch food dollars at the store and use good food safety practices when preparing foods.

The program assistant also helps homemakers use the resources available in their kitchen to cook foods their family will enjoy. EFNEP recipes are simple and make use of common household items, such as empty cans, for measuring when accurate measuring devices are not available.

EFNEP programs include Today’s Mom, which focuses on the specific nutritional needs of low-income pregnant women and new moms, and the 4-H DOT program. Diet’s Our Thing (DOT) is a program geared to teach children the importance of good nutrition and how to prepare tasty, nutritious meals. Six counties have a DOT program.