Research supports that what and when we eat can impact our decision making, energy, and mental clarity. Protein for All™ program started in the Family and Juvenile Court system to help parents entering in the court system. The actual program is simply to offer a protein-rich snack, such as a protein bar, to someone who needs to be at their best. This can be applied in high stakes situations or daily situations as meeting with your boss or your teenager where it would help to be at your best.

Within a dependency court, research by Protein for All champions has shown that parents often arrive at court with little or no food, even though they are often in the court building all day. The lack of protein-rich food pushes their physiology to support decision-making from the reactive part of the brain verses the responsive part of the brain. This increases the parents’ sense of trauma and taxes the courts staff’s emotional and mental resources, increasing the effects of secondary trauma by the court staff. The simple and compassionate action of offering protein and ensuring that parents have sufficient brain fuel to fully participate in the life changing decisions is the basis of the Protein for All Program.

This free toolkit is a guide for starting your own Protein for All program for your organization. The toolkit includes a brief history, questions and steps that most organizations need to address to begin a program, suggestions on how raise funds for protein snacks, as well as templates and info-sheets.

There are four program components to the program:

1.     Education – The science of how food and mood are related

2.     Champions – One individual or a community of people can make a difference

3.     Protein – Understanding what snacks are helpful and how to fund the program

4.     Systems – How and why to collect data