SNAC Year-End Update

This year, SNAC continued to engage with stakeholders throughout the state who are interested in advancing our mission: to coordinate and align efforts among state and local agencies to enhance and promote lifelong wellness through innovative partnerships that support physical activity and nutrition in all Hoosiers, with a focus on limited-resource and historically oppressed populations.

As in previous years, we continued to provide a monthly SNAC newsletter with resources and important state updates related to nutrition and physical activity opportunity access. These newsletters are very well-received and many members mention that they pass the resource along to colleagues to spread the information. Quarterly meetings continued this year as well. We welcomed a wide variety of speakers at these meeting to share about their work and how it impacts their region and the state. The average attendance for these meetings was 51 people. Meeting minutes, recordings, and resources are sent out after each meeting.

One new concept that we tried out this year was the dialogue session. We hosted 12 dialogue sessions to encourage peer learning and networking around a wide variety of topics that were chosen after consulting SNAC members. In each session, there was a grounding presentation followed by time to discuss in small groups of 3-4 people. Information, suggestions, challenges, and successes were all gathered and story maps with common ideas were created. Themes were then developed to understand and best guide the strategic direction of SNAC and the SNAP-Ed program in the coming years. All the information was compiled into a final report.

Our interest and evaluation survey also went out at the end of 2022. The goal of this survey is to understand interest and involvement among SNAC members to deliver relevant content and events. These results were analyzed along with the dialogue session report and story maps. From this comparison, it was determined that SNAC will continue to provide monthly newsletters, website updates, student networking events, and social media engagement in this next year. To address SNAC members’ desires to learn more about a variety of topics, we will also be offering 10 webinars this year. Read more about our evaluation results.

This year has been one of growth, learning, and listening. We are very excited to move into 2023 to work alongside our partners to coordinate and align our efforts to promote nutrition access and physical activity opportunities through a community-driven lens.