Promotion of Penn State Extension: Utilizing Cooking Demonstrations to Encourage Healthy Dietary Practices Fellow: Samantha Zlotorzynski, Pennsylvania State University Team Work Plan Fellow Report: Since December we have been staying on track with connecting with farmers markets across the state of PA. We have dates locked in with educators and are excited that we have reached locations in all regions from the PDA map. The resource page we have created includes recorded food demonstration videos, articles, health fact sheets, and other Extension programs both in-person and online. The second part of this project is the Let's Cook at Home Herb and Spice webinar. That is loaded onto our page for registrants to register and currently have around 20 signed up. We are encouraging people to attend that webinar for additional information aside from the farmers market demonstrations. Our peer review team will have the powerpoint slides in their hands in a week to review our work so we are ready to present in June. We have a set of recipes for the farmers markets but we did submit a few more to our peer review team to approve for on-site demonstrations so we have more variety and also are being inclusive to all community members. The educator tool kit is still in the works. Goal is to be complete by April-May so we can teach educators to use it and review the materials being sent out into the communities at doing the food demos. The tool kit will probably have small changes as we learn through the process of actually doing these demo's at various locations. We want this tool-kit to be easily adaptable to other states for future use. The case statement is with the graphic designer through extension foundation so we are waiting to hear back from that team once it is finalized. We have currently been sharing a Word doc of the case statement to potential partners for now, so we can explain what this program is about. We have finalized marketing to purchase sandwich boards with logos to promote the program at the farmers markets, they are going to prepare a flyer and other digital ads to promote and we can pass that along to partners for them to share on their social media pages and newsletters. They have also ordered our index cards that point out program objectives with a QR code that takes them to the resources page in hopes they explore and sign up for extension programs or even utilize our resources. We have also reached out to a few other markets to make sure we have some rural and urban markets to possibly capture some physical demographics at various markets. We are still waiting to hear back from those markets. We are also working with county level health inspectors to see how we can get approval to do a food demo with samples. They have sent documents we just need to find licensed kitchens to prepare samples in. Our evaluation is with the peer review team now. We are waiting to hear back. Everything seems to be on track. We have 1 market set up for May and others will fall into the regular season of June-August.
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