Nutrition Policy Institute senior researcher and policy advisor, Wendi Gosliner, was featured in an article in Western FarmPress about a pilot program for San Diego County CalFresh participants to receive monthly text messages about the benefits of California-grown fruits and vegetables. Gosliner worked to evaluate the pilot program in collaboration with the UC San Diego Center for Community Health and the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency. Gosliner is quoted as, “In a text, you have very few characters you're communicating with people, so we wanted to make sure we were using cutting-edge behavioral science to construct those messages to have the most impact." A majority of the program recipients who received messages from September 2020 to March 2021 responded to a survey saying they appreciated receiving the text messages. Gosliner reports, “What we see is that there's definitely a decent-sized population of people participating in CalFresh – now this is just in San Diego County but imagine the entire state – who would benefit from having this kind of information available to them, and there is at least a subset of people who really liked it."
Editor - Director of the Nutrition Policy Institute and Cooperative Extension Nutrition Specialist