FoodCorps: Tell me about how you came to FoodCorps.

Ailish Dennigan: I majored in Public Health in college and was taking a class on place and health, which had a focus on health equity. I wrote a paper on built environments and their connection to health, and one piece of it was school gardens. FoodCorps came up in my Google search for that, and I ended up volunteering with some service members in North Carolina. I applied to be a service member and didn’t get it, so I farmed for a season in Montana, then moved to Connecticut to work at a local health food store. I grew up in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and was born in Norwalk, which is where I served, so it kind of came full circle. I was familiar with the area from living there for a year, and the second time I applied I ended up at my FoodCorps service site, Norwalk Grows! I think FoodCorps has combined a lot of interests that I had in working with food and learning different levels of the food system. I catered in college and had some gardening experience and some farming experience, and FoodCorps combined that and added the element of food justice for me, which I hadn’t really touched upon in those other jobs.

FoodCorps: What are some of the challenges in food justice that Norwalk faces?

Ailish: There’s a big income gap in Connecticut, with a lot of wealth in sections of the coastline, which is what people may automatically think of when they think of Connecticut. But the opposite is true, too. There are gaps in wealth in the area, which creates a particular dynamic when it comes to perception versus reality of food access and food justice issues here.

One kindergarten teacher said she didn’t realize how many kids weren’t eating breakfast at home.

FoodCorps: What are some of the strengths of that area?

Ailish: I think a lot of people who live in Norwalk value its diversity. It’s a really well-resourced area and it’s very culturally and economically diverse. And what I’ve gotten, at least from a health perspective, is that there are so many different types of professionals—in the schools, hospitals, local non-profits, businesses, farms and museums—really working toward improving the health of children. In general, everyone’s working towards collectively improving the health of kids in Norwalk.

FoodCorps: So tell me a little bit about the Share Our Strength Breakfast After the Bell pilot project and how you came to be connected to it.

Ailish: It was a grant opportunity through Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign which is their initiative that focuses on childhood hunger. My supervisor at Norwalk Grows, Lisa, found the grant opportunity through FoodCorps. She put it on the table and we presented it to the principal at Brookside Elementary and to Food Services. I actually didn’t realize this at the time, but Food Services had emailed all of the principals, looking for interest in a Breakfast After the Bell program, and they hadn’t gotten any responses. Having that relationship with the principal was kind of an essential link—it was an aligned goal. So we wrote the proposal with input from various stakeholders at the school, and we got it!

FoodCorps: Walk me through what the project looks like.

Ailish: Prior to the pilot, we had a traditional breakfast model where kids could come before school and eat breakfast in the cafeteria, and there were about 50 kids doing that every morning. Then during the pilot, we had an average of 118 kids participate, so it was almost two and a half times increase in participation. Kids could grab their breakfast from the grab n’ go cart and then eat in the classroom, so it lengthened the amount of time that kids had the opportunity to eat, instead of rushing straight to class.

One kindergarten teacher said she didn’t realize how many kids weren’t eating breakfast at home. The most academically-heavy part of class, like when kids learn to read, happened in the morning; so if they hadn’t eaten since dinner the night before, and they weren’t going to eat until lunch, they weren’t fueled nutritionally for the most academic portion of their day.

In the short-term, the collaboration gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people—or just build and deepen—relationships. But I think collaboration was really important also for the sustainability of the program.

FoodCorps: Who did you collaborate with on this project? And why do you think collaboration was important in the construction and implementation of the project?

Ailish: Yeah, I think collaboration piece was the most exciting part for me as a service member because it was supported by this community that I’d been building throughout the year. There is a lot of buy-in from the principal, Sandra, who was the main communicator with the school community, and she left time in staff meetings to let teachers know that the breakfast program was happening in their classrooms. I think she pitched it effectively, and if it was just kind of like thrown at teachers, I don’t know if they would’ve been so patient or flexible during the pilot

The vice-principal and the librarian coordinated administering a pre-survey, and the food service staff offered their expertise, training the people running the cart and transporting the meals. Norwalk Grows—my host organization—was also a big collaborator and supporter in making the survey and helping to structure the morning schedule.

And the students were a part of the process—we had a fifth grade Breakfast Brigade, where the students would go around and collect the trash. It was a privilege for them to have a responsibility and to leave class. In addition to wanting to include the students, this was in response to a concern that teachers’ had about mess in their classrooms, so the trash wouldn’t sit there all day, and it didn’t make too much extra work for our custodial staff.

Hector the Custodian was great! He was always there and giving feedback on supplies and sustainability of supplies. He didn’t want to keep asking me for trash bags every time we ran out in the future. At Central Office, Karen was someone who I hadn’t met yet, and she did all the purchasing, that was a huge task that was thrown at her.

In the short-term, the collaboration gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people—or just build and deepen—relationships. But I think collaboration was really important also for the sustainability of the program. Even though I’m leaving, it’s continuing and expanding for this year, which wouldn’t have happened if there weren’t so many people with buy-in involved with the project.

FoodCorps has definitely given me a lens of having more patience and understanding for where people are coming from. Everyone has their own story and priorities and being a FoodCorps service member gave me the liberty to explore those stories with different collaborators. I think in terms of the actual project, I was able to offer support as a FoodCorps service member as a connector between people with differing priorities that maybe wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

The district was very receptive to the model, and they recently secured a large grant that will help to expand the model to the entire district within the school year.

FoodCorps: So what are some of the changes that you observed as part of this pilot?

Ailish: Well, the overall increase in participation was a big one, and creating more of a breakfast culture at the school. Whether or not a student was getting breakfast, they would see the breakfast cart right when walking in as a parent or a student, and there are extra people greeting them as they start their day. We also had the food service staff greeting all the children—not just the ones getting breakfast—they’re not tucked away in the cafeteria. The district was very receptive to the model, and they recently secured a large grant that will help to expand the model to the entire district within the school year. Being a part of the instigating team was a really rewarding piece of my service, and I’m proud of the district for taking on such an impressive expansion!

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Out of all the areas of FoodCorps service, serving in cafeterias and promoting healthy school meals has always been my favorite. Maybe it’s because, in accordance with the unspoken prerequisite of being a FoodCorps service member, I love food and will sprint at any opportunity to surround myself with as much of it as possible. Maybe it’s because my mother was a lunch lady in the only high school in our small district, and I used to spend my mornings before school hiding under the racks of cooling cookies, crumbs littering my overalls, giggling with the other women before I was found and reprimanded. Maybe, and most likely, it’s because I just love being around people. While I’m sure teachers and any adult within hearing distance would prefer school cafeterias to be more systematized and organized (and dare I say disciplined?), I’m the big, gaping exception to that rule. Cafeterias are where friendships are made (but sometimes broken), where Pokémon cards and fidget spinners are the only respectable forms of currency, and where kids get to just be kids. This is why, during my second year of service in the New Brunswick Public Schools, I felt like the luckiest service member in the country to be a grantee of the Share Our Strength Breakfast After the Bell Grant, which funded promotional materials and equipment to increase the number of students eating breakfast in their first period classrooms at school.

Because the school I was serving in was conveniently located directly across the street from Robert Wood Johnson Hospital, Lincoln Annex was informally designated as the “Health & Wellness” school. New school, new year, new programs, and ultimately, a new school culture of health, right? Of course that’s the goal, but as many who work in or with the public school system know, getting school communities on board with health and wellness issues is not always an easy task. This is not because teachers don’t care about the health and wellness of their students, but rather a result of the overwhelming amount of extra duties and testing and reporting requirements piled into a teacher’s job description, often without extra compensation. When I was first introduced to the Breakfast After the Bell program at Lincoln Annex, I quickly learned that teachers and principals alike were unhappy with the time that eating breakfast in the classroom took away from other classroom activities, not to mention the mess it made. Trash bags in the classrooms were full of loose milk, and that’s when the milk actually made it into the trash. Most times it was spilled on top of desks, creating sticky messes that required a longer clean up, either taking time away from breakfast or the following class.

The “Three C’s of Farm to School,” originally written by the farm to school program Vermont FEED, emphasize the importance of collaboration across classroom, cafeteria and community in building a farm to school movement. Similarly, I have made my own “Three C’s of Cafeteria Programming:” keep it consistent, keep it cute, and keep it competitive. For our purposes, consistency meant making sure all parties involved were equally informed, and equally included in the process. The vice principal and I visited each 3rd grade classroom, briefed the teachers, asked for feedback and administered a pre-survey to students asking which breakfast items they’d like the eat the most, which they liked the least, and for reasons why they might not be eating breakfast on a given day. We used this information to create a menu that not only catered to the needs of the teachers (less milky desks, please!) but also — for the most part — the students (pancakes, please!). But most importantly, if we said we were going to do something or show up, we followed through.

Working with the Food Service Director, we decided to use the grant money to begin serving warm options. Our main motivation for implementing a new warm breakfast menu stemmed from many factors: the students’ low participation rates and their complaints about the cereal, the teachers’ complaints about the mess, and our desire to be able to offer options with less sugar and higher protein content. For starters, we piloted the program exclusively in 3rd grade classrooms, half because third graders have a beautiful capacity to embrace new programs with unadulterated excitement (and hey, we wanted to feel good about ourselves) and half because third graders are brutally honest (and we also wanted to make absolutely sure that what we were trying to accomplish would work and be sustainable).

Next, to achieve optimal cuteness, we are planning to distribute “Better Breakfast Bags” to each classroom this fall, including posters and handouts on how to distribute and account for breakfast participants, as well as how to encourage students to eat breakfast every day and create a positive, breakfast-friendly classroom environment. Each classroom will receive a large calendar and stickers so that each day they reach 100% participation, they can record it on the calendar with a bright sticker, making participation a visual and relevant part of the day. Additionally, beginning in the fall, a larger-than-life poster of a fruit smoothie will be hung in the cafeteria, tracking the participation rates of each grade (as the rates go up, so too does the volume of the smoothie).

Lastly: keep it competitive. This can take many shapes, but in our case, we told the students that the classroom with the highest participation at the end of each marking period would receive a prize. After our pilot this past spring, we awarded the winning class with a pizza party featuring a healthy toppings bar. If that’s not incentive, I’m not sure what is.

When I first came to FoodCorps, I had grandiose ideas that I’d be reciting Shakespeare with students in a beautifully landscaped school garden, munching on freshly harvested cherry tomatoes from a bowl, and singing about plant parts as the sun set in the background and butterflies landed on all our shoulders for the most epic selfie ever. But when I first began service in New Brunswick last year, we didn’t have money for bowls, let alone garden space and materials to produce food to put into said bowls. My advice for anyone looking to make change in school meal programs is to be flexible, persistent, and bring everyone to the table. Know that this work is important. Children need to access to healthy school meals, and sometimes this means emailing the principal five times in a row before showing up in her office, sitting outside her door and waving her down on her way to the bathroom in order to schedule a meeting. Be that person. I was that person, and afterwards the principal thanked me for it.

Piloting a new program of this scale in any environment — the cafeteria, the classroom, or the garden — does not happen after one meeting with two people. While the Food Service Director and I were extremely proud of our success, it took the entire school community to make this possible. From scheduling and facilitating meetings between food service, principals, nurses, custodians and teachers, our success is due to many people, including the students. It takes a lot of courage to try new foods and to adapt to new systems. As an adult, I’m not particularly sure how warm and fuzzy I’d feel if some lady came into my class, took away my cereal, and gave me a hard boiled egg. I am humbled by my students’ willingness to trust me when I wave fruits and vegetables before their eyes like a magician, and I am humbled when those same students call me and my magical vegetables out for what they really are: one huge experiment.

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