Master of Public Health student Katelynn Stroth ’21MPH won Philabundance’s Healthy Pantry Initiative Recipe Challenge this spring for a video project she produced as an intern with Turning Points for Children’s Food and Wellness Network (FAWN).

Throughout the semester, Stroth created 39 instructional food recipe videos—16 of which were for the challenge—that use ingredients from FAWN’s network of community-based food pantries in Philadelphia. With her public health education, Stroth created videos that showcase healthy food options, such as black bean burgers, personal size meatloaf, and a banana and peanut butter snack.

“I’ve never had much experience with a food pantry,” said Stroth. “This experience was amazing because I learned how they’ve had to adjust for COVID-19 doing their pop-up pantries.”

Living and learning in Sacramento, Calif. this year, Stroth was looking for a project that could be done asynchronously for her internship since she’s three hours behind FAWN in Philadelphia. She planned to do one recipe video a month for the internship, but when the first video was well received by clients and Turning Points’ administration, she increased the number to up to three videos per month. However, as the series progressed and they became more popular, Stroth ended up making two to three videos per week.

Stroth found her recipe ideas from her family recipes, as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) recipe websites and Feeding Pennsylvania website. She would make each meal before recording to learn the recipe and her entire family would taste test it. There were five recipes that she joked didn’t make the cut for flavor.

Since the videos were so successful with FAWN’s clients, Stroth will be training two new FAWN interns over the summer on how to make and edit the videos to continue the series.

“It wasn’t easy for me when I got started, so I hope to help them get comfortable with it,” said Stroth. “When I started, I was skeptical on how this would work. Now, I think it’s something that could be carried on to help FAWN’s clients.”