Each year, FoodWIse educators teach more than 35,000 Wisconsin residents with evidence-based nutrition programs. By partnering with schools, coalitions, childcare centers, and community organizations, we make healthy choices accessible for individuals and families with low-income. FoodWIse promotes changes for individuals, communities, and systems to make healthy choices easier, improving diet quality, physical activity, food resource management, food safety, and nutrition security.

Our educators introduce children to new fruits and vegetables, teach parents to buy and prepare healthy meals, and support communities in making daily healthy choices where they live, learn, work, and play. Beyond nutrition education lessons, we assist community leaders in developing strategies, systems, and policies for improved health outcomes in schools, farmers markets, food pantries, and more.

FoodWIse is federally funded by the USDA Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education (SNAP-Ed) and the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP).

Caring mom and her son donate items during food drive Beautiful mid adult Asian woman and her elementary age son donate fresh fruit to homeless shelters.

Whom We Serve

Individuals and families with limited income

Community leaders and partners in schools, coalitions, childcare centers, farmers’ markets, food pantries, and other groups focused on boosting access to healthy food options and strengthening local food systems

Ways We Help

Direct Education Classes

Resources for Community Partners on Nutrition and Physical Activity

Partners for Healthier Schools

Helping partners improve access to nutritious foods and physical activity

Spanish bilingual nutrition education with people sitting at a table.

How It Works

We support

We support community partners and leaders: with evidence-based strategies and curricula that uplift local strengths alongside university resources for healthier communities.

We teach

We teach classes: Community partners invite FoodWIse educators to teach nutrition classes for individuals in local schools, community centers, churches, food pantries and other settings in local communities across Wisconsin.

We improve

We improve access to healthy options: Through policies, systems, and environmental supports, we leverage local experience to help make healthy food choices and physical activity practical and available to all community members.

We build

We build connections: FoodWIse staff are hired locally and have a unique understanding, personal connection, and strategic collaboration within the communities they serve. Because we work in counties all over the state, we connect our community partners with resources and with one another.

We help

We help communities achieve better health outcomes: Individuals and families gain education and improved access to healthy, local affordable food.

Success & Impact

Increasing Healthy Food Access, Food Security

Extension’s FoodWIse and Healthy Eating Active Living Programs worked with multi-sector partners throughout 2021 to support policy, systems, and environmental changes. This included work to improve nutrition policies for community meals and systems-level changes that increased access to healthier foods for food bank participants and seniors.

Tending Soil & Sharing Harvests with Growing Together WI

Shifting from direct education to policy, systems and environmental (PSE) change efforts, Menominee FoodWIse Educator Chelsey LaTender saw early efforts of a Master Gardener Volunteer (MGV) in an abandoned plot as an opportunity to develop and learn with the community around garden-based education.

Bridging Cooking Skills & Nutrition with Cooking Matters

Cooking classes bring the whole family to the kitchen to learn techniques and strategies for enjoying healthy, nutritious meals. Through innovative virtual lessons, Polk, St. Croix and Pierce participants in Wisconsin found energy and engagement with Cooking Matters.

Program Participant

Weyauwega

The FoodWIse family cooking classes we attended inspired us to let our kids help more in the kitchen and we are all eating at the table together. Bonding with the kids made them happy.

FoodWIse Nutrition Educator

Milwaukee

I served each participant a slice of green and yellow bell pepper. I asked everyone how the first few bites tasted. One participant said it was the first time she ever tried raw produce. She commented that she liked it. She mentioned that growing up, she and her family always ‘ate with their eyes’. They thought that if it didn’t look good, it wouldn’t taste good.

Program Participant

Polk County

This class was about so much more than I thought! Not only did I learn about eating good food and how to prepare it, I learned about mindfulness around food, new preparation techniques in the kitchen, meal planning – and met an amazing array of recovering women!

Quick Links

For Community Partners

Download FoodWIse Brochure

FoodWIse Impacts

FoodShare Benefits Information

Land Grant University SNAP-Ed Programs

For Individuals

Explore our educational videos

Information on Foodshare Wisconsin

Apply for FoodShare Wisconsin

Get Involved

Host a Class

Host a FoodWIse class in your community. Contact your county Extension staff.

Get Help

Get help with making a policy, system, or environmental change to improve access to nutritious foods and physical activity.
Contact your county Extension staff.