Harvesting Healthy Habits Program Expanding Outreach Through CSU GUIDE Award
Working as an intern for the Harvesting Healthy Habits in Long Beach program, Ximena Sifuentes has helped teach community children and their families about the importance of healthy eating habits and growing food.
“This fellowship has definitely solidified my passion for helping the community, specifically children.”
The purpose of Harvesting Healthy Habits, housed in the Center for Latino Community Health in the College of Health and Human Services at CSULB, is to provide students with research and hands-on learning experience -- while developing and implementing interventions that aim to improve eating patterns and healthy lifestyles among underserved children and their families. This past academic year, the program implemented 24 program sessions in the City of Long Beach as part of a USDA funded grant. Just last spring, the program served 204 community members in Long Beach and surrounding cities. Preliminary results demonstrate that child participants are improving their nutritional knowledge, nutrition label reading skills, and increasing their daily vegetable intake while reducing their consumption of sugary drinks.
The number of community members impacted by Harvesting Healthy Habits will continue to grow thanks to additional funding recently awarded to the program through the 2026 CSU GUIDE (Growth in Undergraduate Innovation, Discovery and Engagement) Initiative. This funding initiative aims to enhance undergraduate student engagement across the system and promote innovative, inter-campus faculty collaboration, while preparing students through experiential learning.
As a Harvesting Healthy Habits Student Fellow, Sifuentes has immersed herself in research and community work that aligns with the mission of Harvesting Healthy Habits and the Center for Latino Community Health, while pursuing her undergraduate degree in public health. Specifically, she has studied associations between nutritional knowledge and sugar-sweetened beverage intake among ethnic minority children and their parents. Through Harvesting Healthy Habits, Sifuentes has led workshops on healthy eating and sustainable gardening practices for community children grades 3 to 5 and their families.
“It’s always nice to hear from the kids that they are making the snacks they learned about in our sessions – whether it be a smoothie recipe or a salad. It’s evidence of the fact that we are actually impacting what they eat and how they think about their health.”
“We are excited to continue to provide students in the college opportunities for hands-on learning,” said Dr. Melawhy Garcia, Associate Professor in the Department of Health Science and Director of the Center for Latino Community Health. “We are also really excited to continue to expose our college students to serving underserved communities and addressing health disparities, such as obesity.”
The Harvesting Healthy Habits interventions consist of four, 2-hour weekly group sessions with three components: nutrition education, food demonstration, and gardening activities. It also includes two, 2-hour group sessions of nutrition education designed specifically for parents.
“A lot of our students who come to work for Harvesting Healthy Habits are from the communities that we serve,” said Natalia Gatdula, MPH, Associate Director of the Center for Latino Community Health. They go out into the community and implement these interventions that are really meant to strengthen the health of our communities in Long Beach, while aiming to minimize the detrimental effects of poor nutrition or lack of physical activity.”
Speaking on behalf of herself and her son, one parent participant wrote to Harvesting Healthy Habits:
"Muchas gracias por esta experiencia tan bonita, aprendimos mucho pero sobre todo empodero a mi hijo a comer más saludable y a preparar sus meriendas saludables! Conocimos personas maravillosas! Muchas muchas gracias. Déjenme saber si hacen más actividades."
Translated to English: "Thank you so much for this wonderful experience! We learned a lot, but most importantly, it empowered my son to eat healthier and prepare his own healthy snacks! We also met some wonderful people! Thank you very, very much! Please let me know if you offer more activities in the future!"
In addition to the interventions, another component of Harvesting Healthy Habits is data collection and student research. As part of the new CSU GUIDE funding, Harvesting Healthy Habits has the opportunity to prepare a proposal for major extramural funding.
“In order to scale this up and test it as a larger trial, this [CSU GUIDE] funding will allow us to train students, and then run a pilot randomized controlled trial that will position us to apply to NIH funding,” said Dr. Melawhy Garcia. “It positions us to collect more data that we need to justify a larger trial. We see the impact it is having on the local community – we know that they are learning, and now hopefully we’ll be able to scale it for other environments.”
