Graduate Students Team Up With Morningside Urban Farm To Make a Difference

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At Morningside Urban Farm, our community garden and health education center in Southeast Roanoke, graduate students from Virginia Tech's M.S. in Nutrition and Dietetics program have made a big difference in a short amount of time. The work they've done will help people in our community better understand and improve their own health.  

Graduate students pose in front of Morningside Urban Farm sign
Graduate students Evita Huang and Sara Luna at Morningside Urban Farm, as part of their supervised practice rotation with Community Health and Outreach.
Student picks fresh basil at Morningside Urban Farm.
Graduate student Evita Huang picks fresh basil from the farm. She later used it to create fresh pesto sauce.

Before 2019, the Urban Farm wouldn’t typically have dietetics students on the team to help out. But when Virginia Tech began building a new Future Education Model graduate dietetics program—one of the first in the country to be officially approved by the Accreditation Council on Education in Nutrition and Dietetics—they approached us to find out whether we could provide learning opportunities in additional settings.  

“The Future Education Model requires supervised practice in a variety of settings, and we realized we could provide all of the needed opportunities if we managed the program with VT in a partnership,” says Susan Carter, clinical nutrition director. She and Pat Byrd, senior director of Carilion Dining and Nutrition Services, led the development of the program partnership. 

VT's dietetics graduate program was just the fifth in the nation to be accredited in the Future Education Model, and today is still one of only 22 such programs. (By 2024, registered dietitians will be required to have a graduate-level degree to sit for the credentialing exam through the Commission on Dietetics Registration).

Program preceptors pose together for photo.
Jeannine Simon and the program's preceptors at a training workshop in August 2019.

A Big Impact

"The Community Health and Outreach team has an amazing amount of ideas, and our students were excited to help bring some of those ideas to fruition," says Jeannine Simon, nutrition and dietetics supervised practice coordinator. "They were able to do a lot of great work in a short period of time."  

Student poses with theme meal food she prepared for Rescue Mission leadership.
Graduate student Evita Huang produced a theme meal for members of the leadership teams at Roanoke Rescue Mission and CHO to educate participants on the benefits of supporting local farmers and consuming in-season produce.

Some of the projects the graduate students have accomplished include: 

  • A full farm-to-table cookbook designed to help people learn about nutrition, food safety and how to grow and preserve food at home 

  • A plan for using each chapter in the cookbook as a class for teaching in the community  

  • Webex classes that address real, assessed needs in the community 

  • A theme meal for major stakeholders at the Roanoke Rescue Mission, using produce donations from Morningside Urban Farm, to facilitate a greater understanding of the benefits of supporting local farms and consuming more in-season produce

  • Short recipe how-to videos using harvests from the Farm (see one below; we also share these videos on our Facebook page and Carilion Living!)

“Our students take lessons from the classroom and gain hands-on experience while really giving back to the community, which has been very fulfilling for them,” says Kristen Chang, assistant director of the program. 

They've also helped Dining and Nutrition Services collect data on malnutrition in hospital patients so that we can work to improve outcomes for those patients. Having the students to help with this has saved the clinicians a lot of time, says Jeannine.

And while our organization, the students and VT all benefit from our partnership on this program, above all it’s about our patients and our community, Susan explains: “In the big picture, the registered dietitian is the nutrition expert not just for the health care system but for the community as well.” 

The important work that the students have been helping our dietitians with proves just that.  

Want to know more? Contact Jeannine Simon, nutrition and dietetics supervised practice coordinator, at csimon@carilionclinic.org or 540-981-7552 with questions.  

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We partnered with Virginia Tech on one of the first accredited Future Education Model dietetics program in the country.
Our graduate students from the program have helped us do a lot of important work in our community.
To meet the requirements of the Future Education Model, the students practice in a wider variety of settings, including Morningside Urban Farm.
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Graduate students pose in front of Morningside Urban Farm sign.
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Graduate students pose in front of Morningside Urban Farm sign.
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From the first semester  all the way through graduation, students in Virginia Tech’s M.S. in Nutrition and Dietetics program integrate learning in classrooms with application at supervised practice sites. This way, they constantly receive and apply practical feedback. (In the traditional model of education, students start with coursework, finish their required classes and then do most of their supervised practice as a last step before sitting for their exam.) 

“Carilion and VT demonstrated a lot of initiative with this partnership – to be willing to take that big step before there were any other model programs out there to help us figure it out,” says Kristen Chang, assistant director of the program.   

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A Trailblazing Partnership