Unhealthy local food environments threaten the health and well-being of young people, and exacerbate health disparities in lower-income populations and communities of color.  

Researchers at the UConn Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health and the Hispanic Health Council (HHC) believe engaging youth in the design and delivery of a program to improve their food environment is a path to impactful and lasting change. 

This belief was at the center of a two-year community-based participatory research project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Throughout the project, the UConn and HHC team trained two cohorts of students from Hartford Public High School to be Adolescent Citizen Scientists (ACS) with the goal to identify, prioritize, and co-design a program to address the unhealthy food environment they experience. Topics covered in the training program developed by the researchers included nutrition, health equity, food marketing, research, program co-design, and communications.

The ACS applied their newly-developed skills to assist in designing and implementing focus group research to identify barriers to healthy eating that their peers experience. Based on the research findings and consultation with the program’s Community Advisory Board, they identified a feasible and potentially impactful program for co-design: Food Resource Guides to address food insecurity among students and families in the Hartford Public High School community and throughout Connecticut, which were widely disseminated in May 2026.

“The Adolescent Citizen Scientists were our collaborators at every stage of this project,” says Fran Fleming-Milici, Ph.D., director of food marketing initiatives at the UConn Rudd Center and a principal investigator for the ACS program. “They utilized their training to identify the problem they wanted to tackle and were instrumental in designing a final project they were passionate about.”

In addition to Fleming-Milici, key collaborators on this project included Sofia Segura-Pérez and Ashley Hernandez at HHC; Jennifer Harris, Ph.D., at the UConn Rudd Center; and Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, Ph.D., at the Yale School of Public Health.

Now, the research team is sharing the resources they developed and the lessons they learned from this project to help community partners and researchers who wish to engage high school students in the design and delivery of community-engaged programs to improve their food environment. Specific materials the team developed include:

• Training modules to teach students about nutrition, food marketing, health equity, research methods, program co-design, and how to design a communication plan. 
• Suggested procedures for conducting focus groups with high school students to identify barriers and opportunities for improving their food environment. 
• A case study of the design and implementation of the students’ final project: Food Resource Guides for families experiencing food insecurity 

These resources can be adapted for use in different environments and may be of interest to high school and middle school teachers, counselors, and staff who conduct programs with youth; youth organizations and community groups; and researchers conducting community-based participatory research. 

“We are grateful for the support we received from community groups and school staff throughout the project and are incredibly proud of the adolescent citizen scientists’ work,” says Fleming-Milici. “We’re excited to share the lessons we learned and the resources we created with the hope that others can develop programs in their own communities.” 

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