Feeding a crowd in Hawai’i

On Monday, Hawaiʻi service members came together to beautify the Waimea Elementary School garden and prepare a locally-sourced meal for 100+ volunteers. Students, families, teachers, staff, and community members spent the morning planting native plants, working in the garden, and painting the campus. The lunch featured produce from local farmers, including kalo (taro) harvested from the school garden that morning!

Long-distance gardening in Arkansas

A FoodCorps elementary school in Springdale, AR donated garden beds to another FoodCorps elementary school — all the way in Van Buren, 70 miles away! On the day of service, many Arkansas service members worked to get the garden beds taken down from Bayyari Elementary, transported 70 miles, and rebuilt at Rena Elementary. Rena had no garden beds before Bayyari’s donation, so this will make a huge difference to the school!

Walking for Peace in Washington, D.C.

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The post VIDEO: What do CT students think of healthy food? appeared first on FoodCorps.

On Friday, November 6, the School Nutrition Association of Connecticut (SNACT) organized their annual Conference and Industry Trade Show to facilitate the connections of leaders and advocates in CT school nutrition, and learn from one another about healthy school meals.

“It is an absolute privilege that we get to serve you two out of three meals a day,” proclaimed Groton Food Services Director (and FoodCorps site supervisor) Ernie Koschmieder to a panel of Connecticut students at the conference. Mr. Koschmieder facilitated the panel to highlight student voices for the benefit of food service directors and staff from across CT, in the planning of their menus for the following school year. What all of these passionate people know is that with great privilege comes great responsibility.

The conversations, both during the conference portion and at the food show following the conference, were abundant with questions about whole grain and vegetable servings, shorter ingredient lists, and the rich nutritional content of foods potentially being served to our communities’ youth. Though price is always a central concern for school meal purchasers, the focus for these CT staff is, of course, our students.

In a video shown to all conference goers, a third grade student from Hartford remarked “Healthy school meals are important because they give me energy for the day.” This quote embodies the important work that happens in our school kitchens and cafeterias across the state; feeding kids who may not have access to healthy food at home so that they can succeed in school.

As FoodCorps Service Members, we work to build a bridge between food services and students. In Connecticut, 20 Service Members are partnered with school districts and community based organizations across the state to connect kids to healthy food in school. Each of us internalize the FoodCorps vision as we strive to build relationships with students and staff, teach hands on lessons in the classroom, and foster a school wide culture of health. We are creating a future in which every school is a healthy school and every child is well-nourished and ready to learn. With the construction of school gardens, the introduction of local produce on school menus, nutrition-based curriculum, and extracurricular garden-based programming, I feel like I am doing my part in cultivating student health and helping our learners grow into leaders.

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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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NORWALK, Conn. – Norwalk Public Schools has been awarded a $52,000 grant from the American Association of School Administrators. The grant money will fund equipment needed to expand a “grab ‘n go” breakfast program piloted last year at Brookside Elementary School to a majority of schools across the district.

Norwalk Grows and FoodCorps provided Norwalk Public Schools with the opportunity to launch the Brookside breakfast pilot through a Share Our Strength/No Kid Hungry mini-grant. Instead of serving breakfast in the cafeteria, the grant helped pay for a cart filled with food that students could grab on their way into class in the morning.

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Katie Alderman is a recent college graduate passionate about healthy food and community empowerment. Both of her parents are teachers, and she has always valued early childhood education very highly. She believes that all kids can succeed, and thinks that access to healthy food is a huge step towards this success. She grew up in Milford, CT, and is excited to work with children in the neighboring city of New Haven. Before serving with FoodCorps, Katie worked at the Greater New York YMCA Camp and was active in sustainability work at her college.

Allison Aron grew up in Madison, Connecticut. She recently graduated from Keene State College with a bachelor’s degree in Health Science Nutrition. She is recently certified with Early Sprouts training and was given a Nutrition Community Service scholarship from the community service she was a part of throughout her college career. She studied abroad her sophomore year of college in Limerick, Ireland. She was so grateful for all of her experiences traveling across Europe, but felt a lack of substance with her time just being a tourist and not an active part of the communities she was visiting. As she returned back to Keene State, she became an active part of the Alternative Spring Break program, where she was a participant on two community service trips and a leader on her last trip. Through this program she fell in love with community service because she felt like she was working alongside community members of this new place she was visiting. More locally, she volunteered on an organic farm in New Hampshire and was a nutrition intern at the Keene Parks and Recreation.

Christopher Cane is interested in building equitable, sustainable community. His work focuses on the intersections of environmental and social justice and access to the resources, education, and cultural exchange that is necessary to make change. A recent graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston with bachelors’ degrees in Environmental Anthropology and Studio Art – Chris thoroughly enjoys creative problem solving. Before serving with FoodCorps, Chris volunteered with Boston garden-based and nutrition education organizations like The Food Project and The New Garden Society, and worked at a Preschool-Kindergarten on Allandale Farm called The Apple Orchard School as a gardener and garden-based educator. In 2014 he started Achorn Circle Studio and rooftop garden in Jamaica Plain, MA – a collectively owned and managed artist space that has helped to reactivate a previously un-used garage and vacant lot with garden skill-shares, public film screenings, and art. Chris is very excited to work with the community in Bridgeport, CT.

Caitlin Dean has a bachelor’s degree in Early Childhood Education with a minor in Anthropology as well as a teaching license for kindergarten through fourth grade in the state of Arkansas. While attending Arkansas Tech University she took several Anthropology courses, one of which being Anthropology of Food that introduced her to the FoodCorps program. Since graduating from college in December 2016, she has been working at an afterschool and summer program with 26 kindergarten through second grade students. She is looking forward to the move with her pug, Lola, from Arkansas to Connecticut for her year of service.

Renee Delauter grew up in a small town in Frederick County, Maryland. She is a recent graduate from Shenandoah University in Winchester Virginia where she received bachelor’s degrees in Public Health and Biology. In college, Renee was the public health club president, where she organized events on and off campus. Renee volunteered with The Boys and Girls Club, teaching an after school program with lessons in nutrition and exercise. She interned at the free medical clinic in her community, working with underserved population. After participating in a Global Experiential Learning trip through school, Renee confirmed her passion for teaching nutrition and exercise to underserved populations.

Abby Dubois spent her undergraduate career studying Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut, and this is where she discovered her passion for giving back to the community. Abby has always loved working with children, and the opportunity to merge her interests in food security, public health, community work, and the betterment of children’s lives is truly a dream come true. Abby places great value on relationships, and she credits her success to the people she has met who have formed the person she is today.

After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree in Food Science, Nicole Glick went on to intern at an organic vegetable farm in New York State. It was there that her passion for local, ethically sourced and sustainable food took flight. She wants to see America’s food system transform into one that cares for the environment as well as its citizens. Working with children has been a passion of hers for many years and she is excited to take on this next challenge with FoodCorps!

Natalie Glidden is a Certified Adult & Children’s Yoga Teacher & Level 1 Herbalist. She has studied Fine Arts, Organic Gardening and Early Childhood Education. Before coming to FoodCorps she was a Doula and an educator at her service site Massaro Community Farm and Two Coyotes Wilderness School. Natalie has worked for years as a baker and natural foods chef at Edge of the Woods and New Morning Natural Market where she grew her passion for healthy eating. She grew up in Seymour, CT and will be serving not far from her hometown. She has three children Elijah, Juniper, and Ivy whom she homeschooled in their early years. They were very active in the CT Homeschooling Community and she volunteered with them at Mad Mares Farm in Bethany, CT.

Monica Houghton grew up on a vegetable farm in New Hampshire. When she moved to Providence, Rhode Island for college, she recognized the links between public health and access to healthy and affordable food. She is a recent graduate from Providence College, where she received dual degrees in Health Policy and Management and Public and Community Service Studies. She is passionate about respectfully building capacity for communities to grow local food systems that value the environment, producers, and eaters. She is so excited to be living and working at New Britain ROOTS in Connecticut this year and working to connect youth with opportunities to learn about and engage with local food!

Alexandra Jannello is a recent graduate of the agricultural school at the University of Connecticut. She has a bachelor’s degree in Resource Economics with a particular interest in food policy and nutrition education. The highlight of her college experience was spending time in Florence, Italy where she studied the health benefits of the Mediterranean Diet and learned about the school lunch program in the city. Alexandra grew up in Long Island, NY and is excited to be returning to Connecticut to serve with FoodCorps. She hopes to make a difference in the community and have fun along the way!

Alyssa Jones is a recent graduate of the University of Vermont where she studied Environmental Science and Community Development. While in Vermont she cultivated a passion for agriculture and the ability that it has to empower communities. Alyssa is a Connecticut native and grew up in the Greater Hartford area. She is very excited to start her career in a city that has been central to her life. Before FoodCorps Alyssa participated in the WWOOFing program, spending two months living and working on organic farms in Washington D.C. and Northern California. Working with Hartford Public Schools would mean following in her father’s footsteps, and she cannot wait to bring her own unique skill-set to the community.

Mai Kader is passionate about health promotion and health education. She has a bachelor’s degree in Public Health, Bachelors of Health and Sciences from Southern Connecticut State University. She grew up in Berlin, Connecticut, and she is excited to go out to schools in the New Haven Public Schools to make a difference. She has always wanted to help people in different communities before she left Berlin. Before serving with FoodCorps, Mai interned at the East Shore District Health Department focusing on health education to communities in Branford, North Branford, and East Haven. She also was a camp counselor at the YMCA Camp Sloper in Southington, Connecticut for three years.

Brandee Kitzmiller is a nutritionist with a special interest in adolescent nutrition. She has a bachelor’s degree in Public Health and Nutrition from George Mason University. During her college career she aimed to spread nutrition education across her campus. She also worked with the Early Identification program where she taught public health and nutrition classes to middle schoolers. She loves gardening and finding new ways to prepare the different foods she has grown.

Tara Mahoney is passionate about food and teaching. She graduated from The Culinary Institute of America with an Associates Degree in Culinary Arts and will be going to Central Connecticut State University to get her Bachelors in Hospitality and Tourism. She plans on getting her teaching certificate after finishing school. Tara teaches cooking classes at Naugatuck Youth Services, substitutes in the cafeteria Naugatuck Public schools, and volunteers at No Kid Hungry’s free summer meal sites.

Annie Nusbaum is a recent graduate of Eastern University with a degree in Philosophy and calls the small-but-charming town of Oxford, Pennsylvania home. Growing up in rural PA, Annie was surrounded always by fields and fields of crop and the farmers who worked them and spent her own summers out in her family’s backyard garden. She spent much of her time during college tutoring both her peers at university and elementary students, affirming her passion for and joy in education. Annie’s studies in philosophy and the time she spent learning about community development, sustainability, and the earth with the Creation Care Study Program in Kaikoura, NZ have combined to form a unique worldview wherein human person, community, place, and the ways we interact with the earth (especially through food) are deeply connected, and crucial to who we are.

Emma Rotner grew up gardening and with a strong connection to food and the food system, which led to a strong passion for food justice and food equity. She has a bachelor’s degree in Environment Studies and International Relations from Connecticut College. Emma is extremely excited to return to Connecticut, to serve in a community close to where she attended college. Before serving, Emma received a fellowship from the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Institute, where she researched and wrote case studies on how colleges and universities can work within their communities, regions, and states to increase food access, security, and sustainability. She also worked as a campaign organizer for an environmental non-profit. She is excited to work with kids and foster stronger relationships to food and food security.

Erica Shoenberger is from Lancaster, PA. She graduated from Eastern University near Philadelphia with a BS in Biology and minors in Environmental Science and Chemistry. She loves working as a nature teacher at a summer camp in the mountains, teaching science clubs, running, hiking, playing the guitar, having campfires, and playing card and board games. She is excited to serve in Norwalk CT this coming year!

Amy Swanson grew up in the rugged and pristine landscapes of Oregon, where she learned the great joy of having a connection with the natural world. She spent two years studying Horticulture and Visual Arts at Chemeketa Community College, simultaneously pursuing a personal course of study in Holistic Nutrition and Body Mindfulness. Her passion for uniting people through the experience of growing and preparing fresh foods together began after work trading on permaculture farms in Europe. She has since worked as a volunteer within her community for organizations such as School Garden Project, Willamette Farm & Food Coalition, and Whole Earth Nature School.

Lauren Timms is a recent graduate of James Madison University with a passion for nutrition education and encouraging active lifestyles. She has lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia all of her life but is looking forward to spending this next year exploring New England. Before serving with FoodCorps, Lauren interned at Operation Smile and worked as an instructor at Young Chefs Academy. She is excited to help introduce kids to new fruits and veggies!

Jaime Traverse has a Nutritional Sciences degree from the University of Connecticut and has worked in a variety of settings, including Billings Forge in Hartford where she assisted teaching the youth food justice program. She also worked on a student-run vegetable farm, where she learned the basics of growing and helped lead others in growing and harvesting food. Recently, she worked in Hartford teaching kids and adults about nutrition and cooking. As part of a big family Jaime moved around as a child and was exposed to many different food cultures, which exposed her to many different flavors. She is excited to continue to work with children and spread awareness of food justice through local communities.

The post Meet this year’s FoodCorps CT Service Members! appeared first on FoodCorps.

NAUGATUCK — Healthy choices are on the menu at Hop Brook Elementary School as a new program this year aims to convince students to fall in love with healthy food and eat it every day.

Amy Swanson, an AmeriCorps volunteer from Oregon, is launching a FoodCorps program at the school.

Swanson chatted with kindergartners during lunch Tuesday, handing out kale stickers to students eating healthy vegetables. School lunch includes a choice of two fruits or vegetables, but most kids go for the grapes and pineapple over cucumber and broccoli, Swanson said. Although fruit is good, Swanson’s hoping to promote vegetables, and started with a green pepper tasting on Wednesday.

About 90 percent of children nationwide don’t eat enough vegetables and 60 percent don’t eat enough fruit, according to FoodCorps’ literature.

Read

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There are two more days of school left and I can feel the excited energy all around me, remembering what it felt like — that last bit of school at the end of the year. Recalling the mixture of feelings that happen right before finishing something: that  moment of personal recognition of your growth and development — excited to collect a deserved break from all the energy it takes to relentlessly focus on the tasks at hand. Anticipating the achievements of experience, you must move forward. Slightly fearful, a touch of sad nostalgia, happy anticipation -— all bubbles up as you march on into the summer, into the future. Those warm long days filled with color and sunshine to ease any worries about all the changes to come. New teacher, new classmates, new friends, new work to learn. Today, I’m not so different than my students.

So here, I celebrate. We have our very first harvest from our brand new Mayberry garden, we make salsa with our freshly picked cilantro, we graph our vegetable preference changes, we make a big salad from the garden for everyone in the school to try on the last lunch together, and make special frozen yogurt on the last day of Sprout Scouts.

I yearn for some sort of grand epiphany, some moment to wrap me up and seal the envelope of the past year — but I realize that will never come. It’s all the little things. I receive thank you cards, unending embraces, and hear the validation of a Sprout Scouter tell me she, “…hopes to be a FoodCorps service member one day.” So I wander into the garden, pick some herbs with the school librarian, a newly made dear friend, and I smile gracious thanks for the bounty of this year’s hard work as I watch the sun break up the cloud over the playground in awe. 

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We can’t seem to make up our minds. 

Justice, it turns out, is a lot like love or obscenity: I know it when I see it. So I’m going to tell you my experiences, and I want you to ask yourself: is this justice?

I’m an attorney. I’ve always been attracted to the romantic image of a social justice warrior, so becoming an attorney made sense: the laws and lawyers are part of the justice system, after all. So I went to law school, passed the bar, and started working for Legal Aid in Arkansas. We provided free civil legal services to the same families that get free lunches in our schools. Our slogan was “equal access to justice.”  

I was part of the housing department, which essentially meant I defended clients against evictions and foreclosures. It was high-stakes, fast-paced, and litigation heavy. Poverty is not a defense, and housing not a right, so it was often a sad job, too. I learned quickly that, for all the good work we were doing at Legal Aid, our slogan was still incorrect: we provided equal access to the courts, not justice.

Let me give you one day in the justice system, you tell me where the justice is when you see it.

My clients were a married couple with two kids, husband and wife both members of the working poor. They were renting a small, two-bedroom house, and didn’t pay rent for March. The landlord had made some alterations to their house that let in water through the roof. Their son’s room grew black mold which aggravated his asthma, and they spent their rent money on emergency room medical care when his asthma became deadly. They told the landlord, and he didn’t fix it. Their landlord was evicting them immediately for non-payment of rent, and they came to me to defend them long enough to find a new rental property and recover their medical costs. Defending them was justice, right?

I thought so. I was all geared up, collected expert testimony, took photos, tallied up medical bills, coached my clients. I prepared a brutal cross examination for the landlord, filed aggressive pre-trial memoranda — I wasn’t leaving that courtroom until my clients had everything they were asking for.

And then, the morning before the hearing, I saw the landlord on a bench outside the courtroom. White, 60’s, shaking, hunched over, red eyes rimmed with tears. He had on a thin blue windbreaker that said security guard in gold letters across the back. I knew he wasn’t employed as a guard anymore — he was afraid to be there, and this jacket was like armor for him, the costume of someone stronger, more fearsome.

And it dawned on me — this rental property might be his sole source of income. Could he afford to help my clients out? Where was he going to live when he defaulted on his mortgage because I made him wait to get paying tenants? Did he also have medical bills? Was there anyone who would remind him he was still worthwhile after I unleashed the cross-examination I had prepared? More than that — there was no law in Arkansas at the time that obligated a landlord to provide a safe living space. Whatever righteous fire I had felt was extinguished.

High medical costs and low wages were the real enemies in the room that day. Both my clients and the landlord were victims of the same imbalance of power that I couldn’t reach from where I was standing.

I left the firm a few months later. When I signed up with FoodCorps, I wasn’t looking to change the world or do anything terribly important. I certainly wasn’t thinking about justice. I just wanted to be happy. I like playing with kids, in the dirt, full stop. But what I’ve learned in my two years as a service member is that FoodCorps has achieved justice in a way I never could as an attorney, and that’s what I hope to share with you today.

As a FoodCorps member, I’ve watched kindergarteners learn that soup really starts from dirt, not a can, and learn how they can control what they eat by inventing their own recipes. Is that justice?

There was the fifth grader who asked if he could grow plants at home. When I offered him a seedling someone else had already started, he said, no, thank you, miss, but do you have seeds? I know I can start it from seed, and I want to show my family how easy it is so we don’t have to buy it. Is that justice?

There was the fourth grader who approached me during class and asked if our next taste test could be green peas. And I asked, do you like green peas? And she said, I don’t know, but I want to find out. Is that justice?

There are the seventh graders who come up to me in the hallway now, excited to show me the labels of processed food that isn’t made with GMOs or has a healthy balance of calories to sugar and fat. Is that justice?

There are the multitudes of children who recognize, birds, bees, bats, butterflies, worms, pill bugs, praying mantises, wasps, spiders and fish as our food allies, and understand that choices they make can help or hurt them. Is that justice?

There was the eighth grader who interrupted my nutrition class – hold up miss, hold up. He got out of his chair, stood on his desk, waved the nutrition facts for mozzarella sticks in the air and asked: why would the cafeteria serve these to us? Is that justice?

Through education, experience, and access, FoodCorps changes the balance of power in favor of the populations we work with. Our students are armed with an education necessary to make informed choices about food. They no longer listen blindly to advertisements and their experiences with us have taken them beyond the walls of a subpar grocery store.

All over the state of Connecticut, FoodCorps has been empowering youth. They know what to look for on labels, they know how to cook, they know which questions to ask, they know how to grow their own food, and they know to demand more from the world. Food is no longer a mystery to our students. Food is now a tool they can use to shape their lives and their world in whatever way they see fit. And that’s justice.

The post Defining Justice appeared first on FoodCorps.

graders about FoodCorps and were excited they got to have lessons this year. Well…almost everyone was excited.

There he was, head down on his desk, a fake snore coming from his nose. “That’s Ryan*,” the others told me, “he always does that.”  I tried to keep my cool, but my mind immediately went to our FoodCorps Connecticut Orientation  when a second year service member told us newbies some of her tricks for dealing with “disruptive” children. All I could think was, “For real? On the first day?” But, she had told us that every disruptive child has a reason. So, as the snores got louder I decided that I would move on with the lesson, add him to a group, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. We were doing a “5 Sense Detective” lesson, where we explored and described the mystery veggie I had put in a paper bag. Spoiler: it was a green bean. By the end of that class I noticed that Ryan was more involved, and, despite the fact that he was one of the students who said, “I don’t like green beans,” I caught him sneaking a third helping.

That day, I didn’t know that Ryan wasn’t being rude, but, that he has a sleep disorder. If I had judged him based on first impression I would have never gotten to know him as one of the most enthusiastic students that I have had this year.

A few weeks ago, and about twenty lessons later, Ryan came up to me in the middle of my lesson on photosynthesis. While he was giving me a hug he looked up and announced matter-of-factly, “I don’t like vegetables.” I laughed and responded, “you liked the green beans I brought in… and the squash… and the spinach and beet salad we tasted in the cafeteria… and you ate all of your six plant part salad we made.” He just said, “hmm…” thoughtfully, then shrugged and walked away. I consider that a FoodCorps win!

Just like I did not know Ryan, or the impact I might have on him at the beginning of the year, I didn’t feel like I would ever find a place in a school community that was so different than the one I came from. But now, nine months later, I don’t have to psych myself up in my car before classes. I now choose to use the students’ bathroom because I run into kids who give me taste test ideas, not because I’m too afraid to ask for a key for the staff bathroom. Now, almost every single person (staff, teacher, student, etc.)  in the school knows my name, or at least knows that I am the “garden lady.” Kids hug me in the halls, beg me to sit with them at lunch, and actually stop running when I tell them to walk.  

They flock around the garden fence while I work at recess, tentatively sniffing the oregano leaves crushed between my fingers, curiously feeling zucchini seeds, guarding the bean sprouts from careless feet, and, most importantly, asking me when they will get to help! Finally, what I really didn’t know at the beginning of the year, is how hard it would be to say goodbye to this amazing community: I hope they know that they have taught me so much more than I could ever teach them.

_{*Names of students have been changed to protect their identities.} 

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