Minnetonka High School Students Destigmatize SNAP
Our SNAP Outreach Manager, Mesa Siebert, recently worked with a group of 11th grade students from Minnetonka High School on an education and awareness project for their professional studies program, called Vantage. Vantage offers a unique opportunity for high school students to apply their coursework in real-world problems through project-based assignments and community partnerships.
We were pleased to partner with MHS students as they joined us in our mission of ending hunger, focusing their efforts on destigmatizing stigma often associated with enrollment in public benefits programs, including SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Hear from our student project team about their work, including the video they created.
From Our Minnetonka High School Vantage Project Team:
Vantage has many different strands of interdisciplinary studies such as Global Business, Health Sciences, Design + Marketing, and Digital Journalism. We are all in the digital journalism course, and we’ve worked this year on making public service announcements (PSA), creating multimedia feature stories, and writing our own blogs. Along with Second Harvest Heartland, we have also partnered with other businesses to create promotional and informational videos for them as well.
When we found out we would be working with Second Harvest Heartland for our second semester business project, we were really excited. We want to help make a difference through our video, increase awareness of food insecurity, and promote solutions for people who are facing food insecurity. Especially during this pandemic, food insecurity has become a significant problem.
Going into this project, we understood that we had the opportunity to show people a solution for food insecurity. Once we had our kickoff meeting with Second Harvest Heartland and heard about what the SNAP program was, we decided that SNAP would be the best thing to focus our video on.
We learned a lot about SNAP throughout the process of producing the video. SNAP makes it easier for people to go to the grocery store and buy the food they need with a type of card that acts as a debit card. SNAP was formerly known as food stamps, causing a stigma around using SNAP, especially for the older generations. Many people of the older generations think SNAP is still similar to having food stamps and aren’t comfortable going to the store to use SNAP.
We hope that people can learn from our video that SNAP is modified to be easy and discrete, as shown in the video. We also really want our video to help people understand what SNAP is and to raise awareness for the program.