Session Type: Healthy Diets, Healthy Food Systems, and a Healthy Planet

Story sharing is an effective empowerment strategy in promoting health behavior change. As readers become engaged and identify with the characters, they become more receptive to the story�s message and more open to adopting behavior modeled by the story characters. This learning lab will start with an overview of story-making and the principles of creating success stories. Next, facilitators will provide clear steps to create stories with community co-designers and an example of a story seeking to increase food literacy in breast cancer survivors. Attendee groups will then choose a topic, identify three big ideas, and draft a script following a 3-step story arc. Groups will read their story out loud as its characters and complete a story impact survey. A Comic Life demo will be shared. It will end with a Q&A and sharing of resources including �Power of Stories How-To Guide�

This interactive session provides nutrition educators with techniques for refining their counseling skills�a critical component in promoting positive client behavior change. Client-directed counseling training offers specific techniques that can be practiced and utilized immediately. This session is intended to be an introduction that encourages nutrition educators to further explore ways to enhance their counseling skills. Ultimately, with longer term education and practice, practitioners will be more effective and confident, their ability to serve their clients will be much improved, and their clients will leave the sessions feeling more empowered and committed to making healthy changes.

Participants will tour recent nationwide changes in SNAP-Ed partnerships and practices that offer fresh opportunities to capture the collective power of nutrition assistance and other federal programs, state and local projects, and private sector commitments generated by the 2022 White House Conference. After being introduced to new, inclusive tools � such as asset-based needs assessments, multi-sector collaboration, equity mapping, timely dashboards, and electronic reporting � participants will leave with new tools to develop strategies that empower food citizens and community partners to help end hunger, improve nutrition and physical activity, and reduce disease risk in underserved communities.