This summer, the New Jersey Healthy Kids Initiative (NJHKI) collaborated with the Franklin Township Police Recreation Department’s FranklinFit afterschool program to offer 30 township middle school and high school students culinary nutrition lessons. The lessons were developed by Institute for Food, Nutrition and Health (IFNH) student ambassadors and taught by Peggy Policastro, director of Behavioral Nutrition at IFNH, and Alison Brown, NJHKI project research manager, with support from NJHKI team members, including Erin Comollo, Faith Qualshie and undergraduate intern Alisa Stellini.
FranklinFit founder Detective Bobby Brown is a veteran and police detective for Franklin Township. In spring 2021, he started a youth CrossFit affiliate for the township and its surrounding area.
Franklin is an incredibly diverse community, both racially and socio-economically. After reflecting on George Floyd’s death and the aftermath that ensued between communities and police, Brown approached CrossFit with the intention of starting his own youth affiliate at his police department. CrossFit waived the application fee and granted him CrossFit affiliation.
The goal of FranklinFit was to foster positive relationships between the community youth and the police department. Brown’s hope was and is that the program provide not only a safe space for kids to hang out, but that the relationships between the kids and officers would serve to disrupt and reroute the path that kids can sometimes take toward delinquency and future police intervention.
Brown’s wife, Alison, a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist and research project manager for NJHKI, thought that teaching culinary nutrition lessons to the young athletes would be a great opportunity for them to learn how to improve their fitness via nutrition, and for NJHKI to work with their targeted population.
NJHKI conducted three one-hour classes over the summer for both middle and high school students. The goal was to provide culinary nutrition education and teach the kids different recipes that were low-cost and had minimal ingredients/equipment. The nutrition program aims to determine, when delivered as part of a police-run physical activity program, what impact does culinary nutrition literacy lessons have on adolescents’ culinary nutrition literacy, skills, and self-efficacy.
The program has since expanded from one class once a week to two classes twice a week, serving middle school and high school students.
IFNH ambassadors who developed the lessons and recipes under the guidance of research directors Peggy Policastro and Alison Brown, and Erin Comollo, an education specialist include: Melonnie Esguerra, Jessica Van Wie, Sarah Davis, Julia Aziz, Nicole Mejia, and Ashlyn Burns-Lynch all SEBS’22 and Erin Ormsby (SEBS’23) and Alisa Stellini (SEBS’23). The students were mentored through the research process and Policastro and Comollo are currently working with the current NJHKI Student Ambassadors on mixed methods data analysis, intending to publish research posters.
This collaboration between the community and NJHKI exemplifies how the work is aligned with the Rutgers Academic Master Plan’s Pillar II: Innovative Research, Pillar III: Student Success, and Pillar IV: Community Engagement. In addition to studying the impacts of the culinary nutrition lessons, NJHKI has sought to understand the unique program’s impact on student attitudes towards fitness and police.
