Grant Applicant: Diversify Dietetics

The feature below is brought to you by Diversify Dietetics, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Paint Love, please visit their website: here. 

Registered dietitians nutritionists (RDNs) are the nation’s nutrition experts. We are the healthcare providers you come to in order to  learn how to navigate eating out when your child has a life-threatening food allergy, when you’re diagnosed with gestational diabetes during your first pregnancy, or when your friend is in a traumatic car accident and placed on a feeding tube as his only source of nutrition. We can be found in every hospital caring for patients, every school system creating healthy meals for kids, and pretty much at any other community organization or corporation that has anything to do with food.

If you’ve eaten a meal anytime lately (read: all of us!) an RDN has influenced your food choices somewhere along the way. But here’s the problem: our profession is comprised of only 9% professionals of color. We do not reflect the diverse populations that we serve. This lack of diversityin our profession has persisted for years. For some groups, such as for African Americans, the number of students choosing to study nutrition in accredited programs (the only pathway of becoming an RDN) has fallen in recent years.
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This lack of diversity affects the quality of care that we give to the clients, patients and students that we serve. When there is less diversity amongst healthcare professionals, research has shown that the care for patients and students of color also suffers. Our patients and students are more receptive to taking recommendations from providers that look like them because they feel that the provider or educator might understand them and their needs better. The nation’s population is rapidly becoming more diverse and needs its food and nutrition healthcare experts to reflect its diversity.

How do we create a more diverse RDN workforce?
It’s simple: by increasing the number of dietetics students of color. Except that it’s not so simple: the educational pathway to dietetics is not an easy one. It requires a student to complete a bachelor’s degree in a science-heavy curriculum, with courses such as biochemistry, metabolism, microbiology, organic chemistry (I and II!). Students must also compete to be accepted into a post-baccalaureate internship, where only about 50% of students who apply are accepted. These internships are not only unpaid, the students usually have to pay tuition to attend. This all culminates to the largest exam any of us RDNs ever take: The Registration Exam for Dietitians. If you don’t pass this exam, you don’t become an RDN.  Oh yes, and in 2024, a master’s degree will become the minimum requirement to become an RDN.

All of this means: barriers along the way for students of color who want to become RDNs. This is where Diversify Dietetics comes in. After all of this seemingly bad news for students of color it was time to See Beautiful!

Diversify Dietetics’ mission is to increase diversity in the field of nutrition by empowering students and young professionals from underrepresented minority groups to join the next generation of nutrition experts. We are aiming to achieve this by creating a community for students, professionals and educators, dedicated to increasing ethnic and racial diversity in the field of nutrition and dietetics.
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In just our first few months of launching, we have connected with hundreds of current students and dietetic interns of color, finding them where students are these days: on Instagram and Facebook. We are offering free or low-cost, high quality programming that uses social media and technology to extend our reach. Some of the programs are our RDN Spotlight Series, where we highlight RDNs of color, because we believe representation matters. We are also recruiting mentors and mentees for our 2018-19 Mentor Program. Our program is a little different from other mentor programs, because where we don’t see success in a current method, we always aim to go beyond the status quo and find a more effective way. We have also launched our “Feed Me the Facts” Facebook Live Series, which covers topics and offers resources critical to the educational success, specifically targeted to students of color. ​

Tamara Melton with her students at Georgia State University

We have also connected with hundreds of educators- which is critical to our mission. Educators are the gatekeepers- the ones who get to decide who is accepted into these accredited dietetics programs and internships. Using ideas stemming from our own lived experiences, and from the feedback from the students we’ve connected with, we are developing training webinars and workshops for dietetics educators to better prepare them for recruiting, retaining and supporting students of color. These professional development experiences will include such skills as unconscious-bias training for faculty, admissions committees and preceptors, will showcase effective recruitment techniques, and will offer examples for promoting cultural and structural sensitivity throughout the curriculum and in student advisement.

If we are selected for to receive the See Beautiful grant, we will be using this support to host our first large-scale Educators’ Workshop during this fall’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo (FNCE). FNCE is the largest annual conference for RDNs; it will allow us to offer this workshop to educators from all over the country. We will then tweak the workshop based on evaluations from our attendees and our own observations. The funds generated at this first workshop will provide us the capital needed to refine and offer an improved and more focused workshop to educators on their campuses all around the country.
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All of these initiatives will help us to increase the number of RDNs of color, and better serve all of our patients, clients and students. We are so excited to have found the See Beautiful community, and are thankful for this opportunity to share our story!
You can read more about the co-founders of Diversify Dietetics, Deanna Belleny and Tamara Melton, here.

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Written by Tamara Melton, Co-founder of Diversify Dietetics 

Edited by Rachel McLeroy for See Beautiful