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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Growing up, easy access to fresh, healthy food was a consistent part of Linnea Mack’s life. It wasn’t until she got a little bit older that she realized that wasn’t the case for everybody.

“I was raised in a home were we ate mostly organic,” said Mack, 21, a recent graduate of UCLA. “When I was in high school, I realized that was a privilege in many ways, and that not everyone ate or knew about the importance of good food. It helped me realize how lucky I was.”

That realization remained at the back of Mack’s mind as she studied geography—with an emphasis on environmental issues—in college. A course focused on cities and food further enforced Mack’s understanding that food access is a matter of social justice, and after graduating this past spring she spent the summer working with Food Forward, an organization that collects leftover produce from Los Angeles-area farmers’ markets and distributes it to organizations dedicated to poverty and hunger relief.

Mack said seeing firsthand the positive impacts of fresh food for those who received it encouraged her to continue on that path. She applied and was accepted to FoodCorps, an AmeriCorps program dedicated to educating schoolchildren about and connecting them to healthy food and eating habits. She recently began working toward those goals with the Chico Unified School District. She’ll spend one year in Chico with the program and, while she grew up in San Jose, she’s no stranger to the area, as her grandparents are longtime Butte County residents.

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Gavin Witt, 8, loves vegetables. He likes spinach and radishes, but kale is his favorite.

He knows how to grow the leafy green vegetable, how to cook it in meals and prepare it for a salad.

“I just love it,”the Citrus School third-grader said.

Witt has learned all about growing and eating vegetables while working in the school garden with Jen Swanstrom, a service member of FoodCorps, a nonprofit that aims to connect kids with healthy food in school. Swanstrom works in the Chico Unified School District and with the Center for Healthy Communities.

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1. Seeds & seedlings

The first signs of spring awakening are seed coming of packets and getting into the soil. Lindsay Hall’s students in Traverse City, Michigan might not be able to pronounce “embryo” and “cotyledon” yet, but they’re excited by how cool seeds are.

2. First sprouts

Jordyn Kessler’s elementary schoolers in Chicopee, MA aren’t daydreaming when the look out their classroom window, they’re peeking at their sprouts! Windows covered by sprout houses and sills covered by seed cups are sure signs of a healthy school food environment.

3. Garden builds and work days

You can’t just jump right into the school garden when the weather starts to warm up. First things first: garden beds need to be built, signs need to be put up, and weeds need to be pulled. Thankfully, volunteers from the school community can help get the job done fast. In just one garden workday, Mariah Marten-Ray in Paso Robles, CA and volunteers prepped 38 garden beds and covered the space in between with wood chips.

4. Dirty hands

It’s not just volunteers getting their hands dirty. The Garfield Elementary chapter of Sprout Scouts, the trademark FoodCorps after school club, recently took advantage of their first sunny day outdoors to prep the soil and plant spinach seeds. “Despite some hesitation, Scouts were pretty excited to show off their dirty hands,” shares Service Member Nathan Spalding.

5. Square feet

Gardens are a fun tool for young mathematicians. Dasia Harmon’s Atlanta students discussed what a square foot is, how to measure one, and how many seeds belong in each square foot of a garden bed. For all of their hard work crunching numbers, the elementary schoolers will soon be rewarded with carrots, beets, and spinach!

6. First harvests

Even in places with mild winters like Oakland, CA, spring can give plants an extra energizing and productive push. FoodCorps Member Lydia Yamaguchi sums it up nicely: “ITS SPRING AND EVERYTHING IS BUDDING AND FLOWERING AND GROWING IN THE GARDEN AND I LOVE IT.” 

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Sprout Scouts is a skills-based program developed by FoodCorps and Life Lab that provides FoodCorps service members the resources and activities they need to teach their students about cooking, gardening and nutrition education in a hands-on, fun and engaging way. Similar to Boy and Girl Scouts, Sprout Scouts is built on a series of adventures that develop new and complementary skills.  Through fun, hands-on activities that link to academic standards, Sprout Scouts clubs teach kids how to grow, prepare, and eat healthy food!  My service site, One Cool Earth, was supportive and eager to see Sprout Scouts implemented in the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD).

During my first week of service, I met with the two after school program directors of PRJUSD to introduce Sprout Scouts.  What I thought would be a hard pitch was actually an enthusiastic nod of approval.  After school program leaders are always looking for new activities and lessons to keep children engaged, and many had expressed interest in using the garden. We agreed that we wanted the club to reach every child enrolled in the afterschool programs at the three elementary schools I serve.  The solution: we set up a rotating system with staff training built in!  I co-teach one lesson per week with an afterschool program leader at a school, for instance Max.  Max then teaches the same weekly lesson to rotating groups of students throughout the week. This way, all 150 children enrolled get to experience Sprout Scouts while equipping staff with outdoor garden education skills to sustain the program.

One of the first Adventures we embarked on was called “Dead Heading” and was a lesson about seed saving.  As we cut down tall sunflower stalks and began picking out the seeds, the kids were curious to eat them.  “These taste different than the ones we get from the grocery store,” one kid said in a voice that insinuated “hey garden lady, I’m not sure if you know what you’re doing here.”  We talked about how sunflower seeds in the store are roasted and these are raw.  “Can we roast all the sunflower seeds next time?” asked one girl.  As my mind was racing to come up with a way to accommodate 30 children in the school kitchen, another child said, “Last year in my 2nd grade class we made our own solar ovens out of pizza boxes!  We could make those again but with you to roast the sunflower seeds!”  Is this not the most ingenious idea?  One of my favorite parts about teaching in the garden is there are so many sparks of wonder that I can empower children to explore.  The next week we did just that, applying engineering practices, math, and cooking into a lesson that resulted in warmed (not quite toasted) sunflower seeds that were still a hit.

A couple of months later the Sprout Scouts were going on a bug hunt in their garden, rolling logs over to see what insects and decomposers they could find and drawing their external structures in their Sprout Scouts journals.  We then planted a beneficial insect garden to create habitat for their favorite insects.  In Winter, we had a tea party with mint from our garden.  We learned about the medicinal properties of mint.  Did you know it helps calm your digestive system if you have a lot of gas?  Kids love that fact.  Students collected sticks and leaves to make centerpieces at their desks and made leaf print cards for their families while enjoying their tea.

The garden grew more beautiful, and I was able to adapt Sprout Scouts lessons to a lunch time recess garden club.  As children were released from lunch, I would watch a herd of 60 kids speed walking across the lawn to the garden.  I also started to get a lot of positive feedback. One girl told the principal, “Mrs. Crawford, Wednesday is my favorite day to come to school because it’s garden club.”

“My daughter is on the autism spectrum and never eats anything out of our home garden.  She came home from garden club yesterday and said ‘Papa, I ate an orange tomato today! I guess I like the orange ones in the school garden with my friends.’”

—Parent and Teacher at Virginia Peterson Elementary School

As support grew, the principal became the biggest advocate for the garden.  She wrote it into the time cards to have paraeducators help supervise garden club; she encouraged every classroom to adopt a garden bed and set up classroom experiments; and she advocated for the district to provide funding to pilot an integrated garden program by One Cool Earth at Virginia Peterson next year.

Just last week was open house night, and at one point there were over 150 kids and parents in the garden releasing ladybugs and exploring.  It was a surreal moment listening to children talk to their parents about edible flowers, six plant part tacos, and composting experiments.  Some even introduced me saying “This is Ms. Mariah.  She helped us start Sprout Scouts!”  I realized that Sprout Scouts was the entry point that led to a flourishing gardening program that every child has access to.

The Sprout Scouts program is made possible through the generous support of Presenting Sponsor Target and Founding Partner the Whole Kids Foundation. 

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I returned for my second year with a renewed passion to encourage students and their families to eat healthier. When an opportunity to host family cooking nights with The Kids Cook Monday was announced, I leapt at the chance.

I serve in Chico, CA, where I teach garden-enhanced nutrition education at Citrus Avenue Elementary School. The school has a free and reduced meal rate of nearly 90%, so it is not insignificant to host an event for families who may or may not have access to healthy and fresh food at home. Moreover, a tale that plays out across the US is familiar here too: Chico is in the heart of California’s North Valley, skirted on all sides by plentiful agriculture, yet despite this richness, students do not know where their food comes from or how their food is grown.

The Kids Cook Monday (KCM) project is based on research which shows that healthy habits are more likely to stick on a Monday. A survey showed 77% of people (out of 2,000 participants) agreed that starting off the week eating healthily helped them continue the habit for the rest of the week. Another study in partnership with The Kids Cook Monday, a part of the Mondays Campaigns, showed that Google searches of health-related information, like stopping smoking and searches for a doctor, peak on a Monday. Diana Rice, RD, from KCM, states that this “tells us that Monday is the day that people have health on the brain and our goal is to hit people with the health information and resources they need on the day they’re thinking about it.”

Additionally, children in families who regularly eat dinner together are far less likely to be obese, are more likely to have better grades, lower stress, and decreased rates of high-risk behaviors. The Kids Cook Monday website provides family-friendly recipes which are inexpensive, easy to cook on a weeknight, mostly meat free, and encourage families to cook a healthy meal together each week.

In preparation for our first cooking night, the garden class picked the last of the summer squash from our garden, and made flower arrangements for the tables, thanks to the kind donation of flowers from a local nursery. We used the multipurpose room and set up the tables with prep cooking stations, including cutting boards, knives, ingredients, and recipes.

Five families attended, and together we cooked a recipe from KCM, the Cheesy Zucchini Black Bean Skillet. As a group, families followed the steps, chopped the vegetables, mixed in the beans, rice, cheese, and seasonings, and put the dish in the oven to bake. While it was baking, we used some of the family-friendly KCM dinner conversation starters such as, “if you had a superpower, what would it be?” Feedback from families was that they really enjoyed the conversation starters and loved the idea of cooking together on a Monday!

One of the greatest triumphs was the immense support and wonderful community partnerships that made the night a huge success. I had volunteers and donations from 10 local agencies that provided support in the form of food, gift cards, cooking equipment, and most of all, time and energy!

I also secured enough food through donations that together with the budget, we sent each family home with a bag of groceries and a copy of the recipe to make it easy for them to replicate the meal at home. Groceries and resources were generously provided by the Community Action Agency of Butte County, and gift cards were donated from Safeway. A local farm, Grub CSA, donated the bell peppers which we gleaned directly from the farm.

We could not have done it without support from volunteers from Chico State and a local non-profit, Grub Ed, who helped with all set-up and clean-up. The whole night was made possible by support from Chico Area Recreation and Park District and Chico Unified School District’s (CUSD) Nutrition Services. The Nutrition Specialist, Crystal O’Rear, made tons of awesome things happen, all on a voluntary basis, such as opening the school kitchen, organizing the pre-cooking of the rice at the central kitchen, and donating the use of CUSD dishes and silverware, which made it more homey feeling than eating on paper plates with plastic forks. It was awesome to have so much community support; I was really bowled over by it!

The best part: the event really got families to cook together. Several weeks later, I was Christmas shopping on a weekend and happened to bump into a student’s mother. She asked if we were going to do another event and said that their family had cooked the recipe together a few times at home since that night!

For further information on how you and your school can get involved and host your own event, check out the The Kids Cook Monday website. Additionally, here are a couple tips and lessons learned to take into consideration if you’re interested in running a similar event:

• Give yourself plenty of time to plan the event
• Partner, partner, partner! Reach out to the community: e.g. non-profits, college students, the PTA, Rotary clubs, etc.
• Give reminders to the parents a day before; I used fliers as a reminder but a quick call or text message might be more successful
• Let the night janitor know about the event ahead of time so it’s not a complete surprise to him or her on the night!

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