New and expecting mothers in the Jackson area will soon have a free opportunity to sharpen their skills in the kitchen and at the grocery store. The Washington/Clarke County Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) has teamed up with Friends of Alpha Women’s Resource Center to bring the “Today’s Mom” nutrition education series to the community this fall.
The six-week class is built specifically for moms and moms-to-be, offering practical, hands-on guidance rather than abstract advice. Organizers say the goal is to help participants walk away with real tools they can use every day, from planning a week’s worth of meals on a budget to knowing which shortcuts still keep dinner nutritious on a hectic weeknight.
What the program covers
Sessions are designed around the everyday realities of parenting, particularly for mothers juggling work, childcare and household responsibilities with little time to spare. Participants can expect to learn how to prepare simple, nutritious meals that fit a busy lifestyle, along with strategies for making healthier choices even when the day gets away from them.
The curriculum emphasizes meal-planning skills and the kind of practical nutrition knowledge that translates directly into grocery-store decisions and family dinners. That means reading labels, stretching ingredients across multiple meals, choosing the most nutritious options at the lowest cost and building habits that survive a toddler’s schedule. Instructors work from the premise that good nutrition is not about elaborate recipes — it is about repeatable routines that a busy household can actually keep.
The class will be led by Shannon Whigham and will meet weekly on Thursdays from 11 a.m. to noon, running from Aug. 20 through Sept. 24. The midday slot makes it easy for mothers with school-age children to attend after morning drop-off, and the once-a-week rhythm gives participants time between sessions to try what they have learned at home and bring their questions back to the group.
A companion fitness class: MomStrong
Moms who want to make a full morning of it can also sign up for MomStrong, a fitness-focused class offered by Alpha Women’s Resource Center immediately before the nutrition session. MomStrong runs from 10 to 11 a.m. on the same Thursdays, Aug. 20 through Sept. 24, giving participants the option to pair movement and exercise with nutrition education back to back.
The pairing is deliberate. Exercise and diet reinforce one another, and for new and expecting mothers the combination addresses the two areas where medical guidance changes most — what to eat, and how to move safely as a body recovers and changes. A mom who finishes a workout at 11 and walks straight into a nutrition lesson needs no extra trip across town, and the shared schedule builds a small community of women who see each other every week for two hours instead of one.
No cost to attend
Both the Today’s Mom nutrition series and MomStrong are free to attend, removing a common barrier for families who might otherwise skip programs like these. For young households stretching every dollar, the cost of fitness classes, dietitian visits and structured programs can put them out of reach; offering both at no charge means the only investment required is an hour or two of a Thursday morning.
Free also matters for reach. Programs aimed at mothers of young children live or die on turnout, and the families who would benefit most from nutrition education are often the ones least able to pay for it. By eliminating fees, the organizers have made the program accessible to every household in the area, whether a mother is on Medicaid, working two jobs or simply watching her grocery bill climb.
Who is behind it
The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program has a long history in the United States as the federal government’s flagship nutrition education effort for limited-resource families. EFNEP operates through the nation’s land-grant university system and, in Alabama, through the Extension network that connects county offices to university research. Its educators teach food preparation, food safety, budgeting and healthy eating to families with young children, and its class formats are built on decades of evidence about what actually changes behavior at home.
The Washington/Clarke County EFNEP unit brings that programming to a stretch of rural southwest Alabama where such resources can be thin. Washington and Clarke counties are largely rural communities where the nearest full-service grocery may be a drive away and where family budgets run tight; putting a six-week series directly into Jackson — the county seat of Clarke County — saves participants the travel that often stands between rural families and continuing education of any kind.
Friends of Alpha Women’s Resource Center provides the other half of the partnership. Alpha Women’s Resource Center serves mothers and expectant mothers in the area with support services and practical assistance, and the Friends organization backs that mission in the community. Hosting Today’s Mom fits the center’s focus on equipping mothers at one of the most demanding seasons of life, when nutrition matters more than almost any other time — for a pregnancy’s development and for the energy a mother needs to care for a growing family.
Partnerships like this one are how small communities deliver services their own budgets cannot. The Extension program supplies the curriculum and the trained educator; the resource center supplies the trust, the facilities and the network of mothers who already rely on it; and the result is a program neither organization could have mounted alone.
Why it matters for mothers in Jackson
The need such programs address is real across Alabama, where rates of food insecurity and diet-related health problems run above national averages and where young families are among the most affected. Nutrition education aimed specifically at mothers carries an outsized return: the person planning, buying and cooking a family’s food shapes the eating habits of everyone at the table, including infants and children whose tastes are still forming.
For expecting mothers, the stakes are even more direct. Prenatal nutrition influences a pregnancy’s course and a baby’s start in life, and the guidance a mother receives in a class like Today’s Mom — straightforward, practical, free of judgment — is the kind that sticks. New mothers, meanwhile, face the challenge of feeding a household on limited sleep and limited time, which is precisely the situation the curriculum’s shortcuts and planning strategies were designed for.
Participants in EFNEP classes typically graduate with more than knowledge: many walk away with practice cooking the recipes themselves, sample meal plans matched to real budgets and a certificate documenting their completion, which can be a modest but meaningful credential for a mother building confidence and a résumé at the same time.
How to take part
The series runs Thursdays, Aug. 20 through Sept. 24, with MomStrong at 10 a.m. and Today’s Mom at 11 a.m. Mothers and mothers-to-be in the Jackson area can reach out to Alpha Women’s Resource Center or the Washington/Clarke County EFNEP office for details and to reserve a spot. Space in classes of this kind is usually limited, and organizers encourage early sign-up — particularly for anyone wanting to attend both sessions and make the most of the full two-hour Thursday morning the partners have built.
Six Thursdays, two hours each, and no cost at all: for mothers in Jackson, it is a short course in one of the most practical subjects there is — feeding a family well on what a family actually has.
The shape of a session
Anyone who has never attended an EFNEP class often imagines a lecture. In practice, sessions are built around doing. A typical meeting might open with a short discussion of the week’s theme — say, planning five dinners on a fixed budget — and move quickly into demonstration and tasting: the educator prepares a simple recipe in front of the group, participants take part in the steps, and everyone leaves having eaten a dish they could reproduce for their own family that week. Handouts, recipe cards and small take-home activities carry the lesson into the kitchen between meetings.
That format is why the Thursday schedule matters. A mother who learns a recipe on Aug. 20 has seven days to cook it, discover what works for her household and return on Aug. 27 with real feedback. Over six weeks, those iterations build a repertoire — the quiet accumulation of dishes a cook can make without thinking, which is what nutrition education is ultimately trying to produce.
MomStrong operates on the same principle of practicality. Rather than a gym routine that requires equipment and a membership, a class designed for mothers emphasizes movement that fits the season of life its participants are in — strength and conditioning scaled for postpartum recovery and for the physical demands of carrying, lifting and chasing small children. It is exercise built for the participants rather than the participants built for the exercise.
The value of doing it together
The back-to-back structure also creates something harder to measure: a peer group. Mothers of newborns and preschoolers are often isolated — at home, out of the workforce or working around schedules that leave little room for adult conversation. A standing weekly commitment with the same faces builds friendships that outlast the program, and the conversations that happen over a workout and a cooking session — about pediatricians, childcare, budgets and sleep — are among the most valuable resources a class like this can offer.
Community programs across southwest Alabama have leaned on that insight for years. Whether the subject is nutrition, parenting or literacy, the programs that retain participants tend to be the ones that treat the class as a gathering rather than a course. The partnership between EFNEP and Alpha Women’s Resource Center is structured exactly that way: two organizations, one morning, and a room full of mothers who come for the information and stay for the company.
For Jackson, the series is also a small marker of what collaboration can deliver in a rural county seat. Neither nutrition education nor fitness programming is commonly available free of charge in communities of this size, and a six-week run of both, back to back, represents the kind of resource residents of larger cities might take for granted. The hope of the organizers, as with any program of its kind, is that a successful fall series becomes a recurring one — and that the mothers who fill the first class become the reason the second fills too.