1. Our (225!) Thoughtful AmeriCorps Service Members

Earlier this month, an important discussion took place on the FoodCorps service member listserv. Thanksgiving can be a challenging holiday to teach: How do we provide culturally responsive lessons that honor the contributions of First Nations people in a way that children can appreciate and understand? Our service members engaged in thoughtful dialogue, sharing a variety of ideas and resources for how to use our country’s biggest food holiday as an entry point into discussing America’s many histories and food traditions.

2. Our (605!) Amazing Alumni

An awe-inspiring 89% of our 2016 service members are now working in fields like education, school food leadership, and policy and advocacy—careers that advance our goal of nurturing a nation of healthy children. These include Marlie Wilson (’13), who organizes local-food procurement trainings for schools through Wisconsin Department of Agriculture; Alyssa Charney (’13), who leads the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s work on farm bill conservation policy; and Charles Greenlea (’15), Program Director at FoodCorps partner organization Habesha Inc. in his hometown of Atlanta.

3.  Our Dedicated Community Partners

Community partnerships are what make our impact possible and lasting.  From school principals like Renee Risley at King Elementary in Van Buren, Arkansas, to community-based organizations like New Britain ROOTS in New Britain, Connecticut, to the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in Somerset, Maine, our extended FoodCorps family helps build a better FoodCorps.

4. Our Passionate Staff

The FoodCorps team is full of talented, enthusiastic folks that make me excited to come to work every day. Policy Director Kumar Chandran, formerly the Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, brings his deep knowledge of the nutrition policies to our newly launched D.C. office. Lucy Flores, FoodCorps’ first employee, is now leading a project to reimagine school cafeterias as places where every child is not just nourished, but welcomed and included. Our California Program Director Jackie Hemann, who joined us this summer after 18 years at Playworks, is helping us build and deliver a powerhouse program in Oakland. Former Recruitment Director Tiffany McClain is ensuring we integrate a diversity and inclusion lens in all that we do in her newly formed role as Director of Organizational Equity and Inclusion.

5. Everyone Who Stepped Up to Protect AmeriCorps & National Service

Thank you for using your voice to stand up for national service! It is because of your action that the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a fiscal year 2018 budget that protects funding for AmeriCorps, the national service program that fuels FoodCorps’ efforts to connect kids to healthy food in schools across the country.

6. YOU!

As part of our nationwide network of champions for child health, you are helping FoodCorps create a better future for our nation’s kids. Whether you are a sustaining donor, a volunteer, an aspiring service member—or one of the other wonderful people on this list—I see you, and I appreciate you.

7.  #GivingTuesday Generosity

On November 28, every dollar FoodCorps receives—up to $60,000!—will be matched thanks to a generous gift from FoodCorps board chair Jenny Shilling Stein and her husband Josh Stein. That means your gift will go twice as far in making a critical difference in the lives of the students FoodCorps serves. Help us meet our goal to unlock a total of $120,000, which will equip eight schools to become beacons of health, where children get the nourishment that will enable them to reach their full potential.

The post 7 years of FoodCorps, 7 things I’m grateful for appeared first on FoodCorps.

Most academic programs and fellowships are designed with an emphasis on the experience and learning that participants will gain during their active enrollment. Yet this limited scope ignores an important reality: It’s after students leave campus that an education does its work.

The same is true in the social sector. As leadership accelerators like Echoing Green and national service programs like AmeriCorps proliferate, nonprofits focused on developing human capital need to recognize that if we approach alumni strategy as an afterthought, we will leave some of our greatest potential for impact unfulfilled.

Based on our experience at FoodCorps, the national service organization that brought us together as a funder (Davidson) and social entrepreneur (Ellis), here’s a look at the five common weaknesses built into many alumni programs and what the organizations running them can do better.

Read

The post Stanford Social Innovation Review: Rethinking Alumni Programs for Greater Impact appeared first on FoodCorps.

October is National Farm to School Month, a six-year-old celebration of programs around the country working to connect kids to healthy food through cooking, gardening, and lunch trays filled with food from local farms. The organization I’m proud to lead, FoodCorps, plays a role in these efforts, providing the AmeriCorps people power that fuels farm-to-school efforts in hundreds of schools each year.

If you were to ask many of our philanthropic supporters why FoodCorps is needed and what we achieve, they’d tell you we were founded to combat our nation’s runaway epidemics of obesity and diet-related disease, and that our secret sauce (other than homemade ranch dressing, of course) is that we’re good at getting kids––in our case, low-income children who are disproportionately held back from academic achievement and social mobility by inadequate nutrition––to eat their veggies.

But that’s only half true. Not because it’s disingenuous (it’s not), but because it’s incomplete.

Read more

The post Curt Ellis Tells Blue Sky Funders Forum about Power of Food in Environmental Literacy appeared first on FoodCorps.

Curt Ellis helped start FoodCorps, a nonprofit whose AmeriCorps program teaches kids about healthy food and nutrition through hands-on activities like gardening and cooking.

Measuring Impact: “But FoodCorps measures its success not by its alumni’s achievements but by its results in schools. The charity assesses children’s attitudes toward fruits and vegetables before and after they encounter the program. According to its surveys, seven of 10 students at FoodCorps schools reported trying new foods and display a more positive attitude toward produce. The organization also tracks whether schools are measurably healthier at the end of the school year by looking at factors such as whether they planted school gardens, developed healthier lunch recipes, and redesigned lunchrooms to more effectively promote produce.”

Growing in the Future: “Looking ahead, Mr. Ellis sees lots of room for growth. Currently concentrated in urban areas, FoodCorps is working to get better at serving rural and tribal communities and is placing more emphasis on identifying standout local leaders to nurture. More than 80 percent of members are serving in the state where they lived prior to beginning service.”

Read the full piece at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The post Chronicle of Philanthropy Profiles FoodCorps’ Hunger for Results appeared first on FoodCorps.

Prominent philanthropy journal Inside Philanthropy talks to FoodCorps donors Kat Taylor and New Profit’s Eliza Greenberg to find out why a program like FoodCorps can be a smart investment in healthy children and healthy schools.

The post Inside Philanthropy: FoodCorps Gaining Steam with Philanthropists as Systems Change Solution appeared first on FoodCorps.

Watch FoodCorps Co-Founder and CEO Curt Ellis and Service Member Meghan McDermott discuss how FoodCorps is changing communities for the better.

Over the last few weeks NationSwell has been introducing you to a number of groundbreaking innovators who are making big bets to tackle even bigger national problems. The topics have ranged from education and national service to our recent installment featuring FoodCorps, an organization dedicated to teaching kids across 15 states how to grow and eat healthy food.

On June 24, NationSwell hosted its first ever live Google+ hangout to discuss these initiatives. NationSwell’s Special Projects Editor Cat Cheney, FoodCorps founder Curt Ellis, and FoodCorps service member Meghan McDermott elaborated on how specifically the organization is changing their communities for the better.

As Curt Ellis puts it, “There are 100,000 public schools in America. As we’ve learned in the first few years, changing a lunch line from serving french fries to fresh greens takes a great deal of work.” Not only that, but changing a child’s attitude toward food is not exactly a simple task either. To try to teach her students to have an open mind to foods they instinctively dismiss without trying, food service member Meghan McDermott’s motto in her classroom is ‘Don’t yuck my yum.’ “We try to teach kids to be respectful of other people’s eating habits and their likes and dislikes. We teach them that everyone’s tastebuds are different. They might like something now that they don’t like later, or they might not like something now that they might like prepared a different way.”

Read more and watch the video on Nationswell.com

The post Watch: NationSwell’s Q&A with FoodCorps, the Nutrition Movement Changing How American Kids Eat appeared first on FoodCorps.