The AZ HSI Consortium is pleased to announce Food and Nutrition Stakeholders (FANS) as an AZ HSI Evidence Based Practice. After careful review from colleagues across the state of AZ, the Food and Nutrition Stakeholders (FANS) was shown to be an effective program in moving the needle towards greater college access, persistence, retention, transfer, and degree attainment for students in Arizona.
Please read below to learn more about the Food and Nutrition Stakeholders (FANS), a program created in collaboration between the University of Arizona and Arizona Western College.
Overview of Institution
The University of Arizona (UA) is a public land grant Hispanic Serving and Research 1 (R1) and institution. A regional UA campus in Yuma, AZ, which opened in 2011, offers students a hybrid education, blending in-person class time, virtual meetings, and fully online asynchronous modalities out of a brick-and-mortar location situated directly across the street from Arizona Western College. Yuma county sits at the southernmost border of Arizona and Mexico and encompasses towns including but not excluded to, Somerton, San Luis, Winterhaven, Gadsden and Wellton. It is also home to indigenous peoples, including the federally recognized Fort Yuma Quechan (Kwatsàan) Indian Tribe and the Cocopah Indian Tribe. The two major economic drivers of Yuma County are agriculture and military activity. In Yuma County, Arizona, 64% of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, nearly one fifth of people live below the poverty line, and 6 out of 10 people have difficulty accessing healthcare services (Health, 2022). Major community health concerns include diabetes, nutrition, physical activity, weight, access to healthcare services, heart disease and cancer. Yuma County is often referred to colloquially, as the “Salad Bowl of the United States” or the “Winter Salad Capital of the U.S.” due to their contribution of more than 90% of leafy greens to the U.S. food system during winter months (Duval, 2025); however, it is estimated that almost 25% of people in Yuma County have low access to food in terms of geographic proximity to supermarkets, also known as food deserts (Health, 2022).
At the UA Yuma campus we serve an almost exclusively transfer student population, of whom the majority are first-generation college students, low income, and Hispanic of Mexican origin. Some of the assets that our students in Yuma possess are strong career aspirations, work ethic, navigational and linguistic skills, and family support. Faculty and staff at UA Yuma work in close partnership with regional community colleges including Arizona Western College and Imperial Valley College to create and sustain robust transfer pathways into UA. Together, we aim to provide high quality degree programs and workforce training for the region’s future nutrition and wellness professionals, including Registered Dietitian Nutritionists, wellness coaches, and other food and nutrition experts.
Overview of Program
Food and Nutrition Stakeholders (FANS) is a group of valued community members who have expressed a shared interest in UA and AWC’s joint efforts to train homegrown nutrition and wellness professionals through a collaborative 2+2 degree pathway. The FANS initiative was established in 2021 with funding from a USDA HSI grant called SALUDABLES, to formalize an already established network of dedicated stakeholders including community professionals, faculty, staff, students, alumni, and prospective and current employers of our current and former students. The role of FANS is to serve as an advisory board for the AWC A.A. in Nutrition and Wellness and the UA B.S. in Nutrition and Dietetics, provide student mentoring opportunities, and facilitate professional networking opportunities. FANS provides a two-way stream of communication and opportunity between our HSI institutions and workforce partners to continuously evaluate and improve student training to meet workforce demands and connect students with professional mentors and experiences to prepare them for careers in nutrition and health.
What data reveals about the effectiveness of the program/initiative?
In 2024, our first formal FANS Annual Meeting was held and had 25 attendees representing 8 organizations. In September 2025, our second formal FANS Annual Meeting was held and had 33 attendees, representing 11 organizations. At each event, attendees worked in groups to share insights into community nutrition, food and health needs, workforce knowledge and skills needed, and opportunities in their organizations for nutrition students and graduates.
Since 2022, we have grown our FANS network to 80 members, representing 15 different organizations in Yuma and Imperial Counties. Of our Nutrition alumni in nutrition, 15 have obtained jobs with organizations in the FANS network. We have also placed 6 graduate students with FANS members/organizations, for 1000+ hours of supervised experiential learning in dietetics per student. We have also placed undergraduate students in 8 for-credit internships.
FANS functions as a reciprocal partnership that connects career readiness and community engagement. For instance, we invited Fern Soto, Cocopah Elder Nutrition Specialist to join FANS and she attended the first annual meeting in November 2024. There, she met nutrition students, who she then agreed to take (n=5) for internships and graduate experiential learning in Spring 2025. In another case, we invited Elena Hildreth, Executive Director Student Nutrition at Yuma Union High School District, to join FANS and she attended the 2nd annual FANS meeting in September 2025; at this event, she expressed willingness to have students work with her in school food service. Within two weeks, we connected with an undergraduate student who was seeking an internship with Elena, and he is completing his first internship with her now.
The data reveal that the program is effective at engaging community members in the fields of nutrition and wellness in Yuma in 1) providing jobs and student training opportunities for alumni and students located in Yuma and Imperial Counties, and 2) providing input to faculty and staff for the continuous improvement of nutrition and wellness related academic programs.
How does this program center servingness?
The effort to formally engage stakeholders through the FANS initiative in our education programs is an effort to advance servingness by fostering a professional community that is student-centered and works in partnership with our institutions to provide mentoring, experiential learning, and career exploration opportunities to students, in addition to ongoing input to faculty, staff and program administrators on current and emerging workforce needs. Our stakeholders include current and future employers of our students, and they share invaluable knowledge about the skills, knowledge, and experiences they are looking for in their organization. Their insights serve as key insights for faculty and staff on topics that students need for the workforce, and to serve the community. Our Alumni and graduate student stakeholders have insights based on what they learned in our programs, and how that translates into the workforce. Our faculty and staff stakeholders offer ideas on how, when and where to implement teaching and learning across the curriculum.