Projects

Project Overview

Each of the 89 state agencies that administer the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) is required to maintain a WIC State Plan, submitted annually to USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service. WIC State Plans outline each state agency’s implementation of the requirements for administering the WIC program. The three main components of each plan include the following: Section 1, Goals and Objectives, detailing operations or aspects of the program that need improvement and guides state agencies’ future enhancements to enhance program effectiveness and efficiency; Section 2, the Local Agency Procedure Manual, outlining how local agency staff will deliver program benefits to participants, including the provision of reports and records to the state agency; and Section 3, State Agency Operations, covering all operations and activities for the state. The operations and activities consist of policies and procedures in the following 11 functional areas:

• Vendor and Farmer Management
• Nutrition Services
• Management Information Systems
• Organization and Management
• Nutrition Services and Administration Expenditures
• Food Funds Management
• Caseload Management
• Certification, Eligibility, and Coordination of Services
• Food Delivery and Food Instrument Accountability and Control
• Monitoring and Audits
• Civil Rights

The goals of this project are to collect State Plan information for all 89 WIC state agencies; build a user-friendly, searchable Microsoft Access database; review, synthesize, and summarize the WIC State Plan policies in each of the 11 areas; and analyze variation in the policy implementation in a national profile report.

Products

Microsoft Access database, national profile report