Featured evaluation project
How Vetri Community Partnership navigated local and federal policy changes through a comprehensive program evaluation.
Expanding Nutrition and Culinary Education in the Philadelphia Area
For nearly two decades, Vetri Community Partnership (VCP) has provided nutrition education through cooking to more than 30,000 people each year across Philadelphia and Camden. VCP’s classes at their Teaching Kitchen, in the community, and through local K-12 schools and universities inspire people of all ages to develop the knowledge and confidence to make nutritious choices and build life skills for a healthier future.
In 2025, changes to federal nutrition education funding created new challenges for organizations providing food and nutrition programming. At the same time, these shifts increased the importance of helping young people build lifelong knowledge and confidence around healthy eating. For the past three years, ImpactED has partnered with Vetri Community Partnership (VCP) to evaluate and strengthen its nutrition and culinary education programs across Philadelphia schools. As Program Director Josh Taton shared, “The partnership has involved deep, thoughtful collaboration, building on each other's strengths, unlike a typical ‘expert-novice’ consultative relationship.”
Evaluating Cooking Classes in Philadelphia Schools
The bulk of ImpactED’s evaluation support has focused on VCP’s classroom-based nutrition education program, which delivers hands-on nutrition education through cooking experiences for K-12 students in Philadelphia, during the school day. The program serves as an entry-point to nutrition and food education, providing an opportunity for students to discover new ingredients, practice cooking skills, and develop a positive relationship with nutritious food.
ImpactED has evaluated the implementation and outcomes of this program across multiple years in order to improve curricula and navigate the transition from what was previously SNAP-Ed programming into a new and generally analogous program, called Culinary Classroom. This was a mixed-methods evaluation approach that included educator observations, focus groups, training assessments, and student surveys to understand both program implementation and student outcomes.
Key findings include:
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VCP educators and school staff agree that the curriculum is mission-aligned, offering a solid foundation of introductory information about preparing healthy food and cooking skills. One educator shared, “The kids seem to be having a lot of fun because I can share relatively basic information but it's really cool and new to them [...] both a cooking part that they love but also just like framing, you know, healthy habits in a more structured way. Kids get really excited about that.”
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Students’ cooking self-efficacy and willingness to try new foods grow significantly over the course of the program.
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Students both enjoy VCP and find the cooking classes valuable. In the 2025-26 school year, 88% of surveyed students said they had fun, and 81% said they learned something new.
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Most students say they “really like” various cooking activities and agree that they have been able to perform most types of cooking behaviors after the program. One student said, “It was interesting because it was a lot of stuff I never saw before. I learned new stuff.”
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Students at schools that have previously experienced classroom-based programming in prior years report even more positive cooking attitudes, a higher readiness for behavior change, and higher cooking self-efficacy after the program compared with students in schools where VCP is operating for the first time.
Concrete Data Provided a Roadmap to Pivot Amid Funding and Policy Changes
The elimination of SNAP-Ed funding brought a lot of uncertainty, but with that uncertainty it also brought an opportunity for VCP to rethink their approach to evaluation without the limitations of what was required for reporting at the state or federal level. As federal funding requirements shifted, ImpactED helped VCP redesign its evaluation approach to focus not only on compliance reporting, but also on the student experiences and outcomes that matter most. The resulting evaluation framework now provides VCP with actionable data to strengthen programming, demonstrate impact to funders, and support long-term sustainability amid an evolving policy landscape.
