“What I love most is to get in that kitchen and have a face-to-face interaction in the classroom, seeing them smile and the ‘aha!’ moments. That’s what I love.”
These are Debbie’s words when describing her nutrition and food safety programs for people enrolled in Cooking Matters programming.
Cooking Matters helps parents and caregivers struggling with limited food budgets learn how to shop for and cook healthy, affordable meals.
Debbie is a caring, passionate and committed extension agent at Tennessee State University. She has a great sense of humor and an uncanny way of warming your heart. If you ever get to chat with her, you will for sure walk away smiling!
After more than eight years of doing 80% face-to-face events to help people stay healthy, watching their faces light up in wonder after learning they should rinse a banana before peeling it and eating it, her world has changed. Now, once a month, she conducts virtual events with Tennessee residents on how to shop and cook on a limited food budget and how to practice safe food handling and hand hygiene while they shop and cook. She always includes at-home activities and safe recipes her participants can do on their own.
YOUR Partner Contribution has helped Debbie respond to her community’s needs during a global crisis.
And Debbie needed you. Her “plate is full.” As a cooperative extension agent, her programs rely heavily on grant funding. Funding that requires her to justify her impact and work-load to keep it. She’s also learning new technology, and her colleagues are relying on her to teach them how to use it.
One thing she’s not worried about? Where she will get the resources to influence her community’s food handling and hand hygiene behaviors. For the past four months, she has relied on the Partnership for Food Safety Education’s Safe Recipe Style Guide to update the recipes they give to participants of their Cooking Matters program.
YOUR investment makes it possible for Debbie, and 13,000 professionals just like her, to access the Safe Recipe Style Guide for free and with full confidence in the science.
“People using our recipes say that this helps them to remember to be safer,” said Debbie.
YOUR contribution is helping households “remember to be safer” especially now as 89% of Americans are cooking more at home than before the pandemic. Debbie has reached thousands of people in the last four months with safe food handling, and there is more to go!
Thank you for dedicating your passion and resources to reducing the rate of foodborne illness with safe food handling and hand hygiene programs!
YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE!
Contact Britanny Saunier to pledge your support or to ask questions.
Partnership for Food Safety Education is a 501c3, Tax ID: 75-2977151
