Arizona’s Empower Program has been selected for inclusion in the third revision of SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States (Toolkit) that will be released in November 2015. The Toolkit review process was conducted in partnership with USDA and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR).

For the third revision of the Toolkit, more applications were received than ever before and a panel of SNAP-Ed peers conducted blind reviews using rigorous scoring. The goal was to find mature policy, systems and environmental change interventions, and social marketing initiatives that could help other SNAP-Ed partners adapt or adopt similar evidence-based approaches in their own state.

Congratulations to everyone who contributes to the Empower Program, which is a collaborative effort throughout ADHS, for this noted national achievement. In our state, the Bureau of Nutrition and Physical Activity administers the SNAP-Ed Program, a nutrition education and obesity prevention grant program, through the Arizona Nutrition Network. SNAP-Ed is funded by the United States Department of Agriculture.