Up Front

New Center for Nutrition Open House Today

The Center for Nutrition and Activity Promotion (CNAP) is holding an open house today, Dec. 7 from 3 to 5 p.m., at its suite of offices in Room 201, 25 Main.

CNAP is the umbrella organization for six programs, the largest of which is the Sierra Cascade Nutrition and Activity Consortium (SCNAC), with an annual budget of $1.6 million. The total budget for all six programs is almost $2 million per year. The six programs provided $236,000 in student wages for interns and other student employees of the programs for the 2005–2006 year.

SCNAC provided 90 percent of the student wages, and the other programs—including OPT for Fit Kids, Safe Schools-Healthy Students, StepFit and 5 a Day—provided the remaining 10 percent. The total payroll is the largest payroll for a grant-funded program at CSU, Chico.

Students are paid to prepare nutrition education and physical activity promotion materials and implement the use of them in more than 50 schools and community agencies in Northern California. They come from many different departments, including Nutrition and Food Sciences, Nursing, Health and Community Services, Kinesiology, Recreation, Sociology, Art, Communication Design, Business, Education, Child Development, and Liberal Studies.

“The service-learning experience that students receive is immeasurably important to them,” said Cindy Wolff, director of CNAP. “It provides a venue for the application of information from their academic programs.”

Stephanie Bianco-Simeral, a first-year faculty member in Nutrition and Food Sciences, works with Wolff in the supervision of the student interns at the center. “We especially encourage faculty who may be interested in the training materials we’ve developed and in the model we’ve created for supervision to come to the open house. It was a challenge to develop these materials and ways of organizing students into teams that ensure that experienced interns help supervise new interns, and we’d really like to share them with others.”