The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - Education, or SNAP-Ed, was launched in 1992 as the nutrition education arm of SNAP, the nation’s largest and oldest nutrition assistance program that provides economic benefits to low-income individuals and families.

Formerly known as the Family Nutrition Program and Food Stamp Nutrition Education, the program that began with just seven states providing nutrition education is now in its 30th year and active in all 50 states as well as the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands and Guam.

The UGA SNAP-Ed program, working in collaboration with UGA Cooperative Extension and a network of federal, state and local resources, is a vital part of the national mission to eliminate diet and physical activity-related health disparities among low-income Georgians.

The program, which includes a multidisciplinary research and outreach team of faculty, staff and students from three colleges, reaches more than 3 million low-income Georgians a year through four major interventions.

As part of the 30th anniversary celebration, the UGA SNAP-Ed team was recently highlighted by the national SNAP-Ed program’s webinar series for its innovative Food e-Talk curriculum, a smartphone-based online nutrition education program that launched in 2020. “It’s exciting to see UGA SNAP-Ed highlighted and honored as part of the 30-year celebration,” said Allisen Penn, associate dean for Extension and outreach in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “UGA SNAP-Ed has the first asynchronous, online evidence-based curriculum in the country. The innovations developed by principal investigator Jung Sun Lee and the UGA SNAP-Ed team increase healthy eating behaviors and reduce obesity among SNAP clientele in Georgia and inform SNAP-Ed across the country.”