By Tara McDaniel, FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member ’21

Glow light bracelets flicker in the dark. There is a dull, blue illumination glowing in the school hallway from the makeshift lanterns constructed of standing flashlights. Above these sit empty plastic jars — the five-gallon jars once held dill pickles. Some of our students wear head lamps to track their way to the bathroom.

This is not a school sleepover event or a party day. We are completely out of power within the school building. Last night a huge storm came through the entire region around the rural community of Cedarville, Arkansas. A tornado briefly touched down about 20 miles away from the school. Fences, trees, and power lines are down throughout the area. Every school surrounding us is closed due to power loss. Although our main building is without electricity, our cafeteria has power. Within the cafeteria the lights are on and the kitchen is cooking. So our school doors are open today.

In fact, all of our doors leading outside are open because there is otherwise little light to safely travel down the halls. Some of our teachers have opted to use the cafeteria as their classroom, but we could hardly hold them all even if we didn’t have COVID guidelines to follow. Fourth grade English Language Arts is sitting outside under the awning listening to their teacher read. Many teachers grade papers next to the windows as their students use the same sunlight to practice their handwriting or work math problems. Our campus security guard moves around the small school with his eyes peeled. Inside our eyes adjust to the dark.

The decision to be open today despite the lack of electricity throughout the main building was heavily influenced by what our school provides its students. Of course, our main objective at the school is to teach students academically. That said, they are offered so much more on the school grounds. We have an on-site counselor to help with their emotional struggles. Thanks to our elementary school principal, the onsite Wellness Clinic offers healthcare to our students. It provides medical, dental, and eye care treatment. And then there are the very basic needs we provide for these kids. Our school offers 100% free breakfast, lunch, and dinner that meet National Breakfast and Lunch Program requirements. Simply put, if we were not open today some of these kids wouldn’t eat.

Cedarville is a town within rural Arkansas near the border of Oklahoma. It is a tight-knit community. The people within know their community’s strengths: charity, faith, and selfless service. Those same strengths help identify others within the community that may be experiencing hardships. Accessing nutritious foods is one of those hardships. For those students living in food insecure households, our cafeteria offers the mealtime table for each meal.

This town is impacted by profound barriers to healthy food access. We have a dollar store, a grocery store, and two gas stations leading out of town. Families that struggle with poverty often also struggle to maintain reliable transportation in order to get to the grocery store back to their homes. We do not have any sidewalks running adjacent to the highway that runs through the town. This makes travel by foot on the winding road at the foothill of the Boston Mountains a hike worthy of a backpacking trip. Parents rely on the free food services at the school as it solves these problems.

So we are open, without power, feeding children. It’s reminiscent of when we had staff preparing bagged meals that were delivered by school bus all spring after our state shut down schools. Our Nutrition Director — a firm woman who’s good with numbers and has a big momma bear heart — would put food in anyone’s empty hands. The students would go to their bus stops to pick up the bagged food, chat with the staff, and get any homework ready. Our school is a free summer lunch program site, so our buses continued to run breakfast and lunch all summer.

If there’s one silver lining to COVID closings, it’s that it gave school lunches a platform. It demonstrated to those who can eat at home that not everyone has the same resources. Like many other communities, Cedarville answered with a range of grassroots efforts to feed those who faced an empty dinner plate. The school became a hub through which food could be distributed by different means. Local churches handed out boxes of perishable food through car windows. The school offered pre-posted SNAP applications. Through social media, the school spread the word about emergency SNAP benefits offered by the state to the parents of school-age children in order to help offset the costs of putting food on the table.

Our school garden was open to one family at a time. Families were free to pick as much produce as they could eat. The garden always made available a first aid kit — including COVID PPE — gardening tools, and child and family activities. The space was left available as a connection to the school which so many students had otherwise lost. On the fence a sign was put up made out of plastic Solo cups that read “Keep Growing, Cedarville.”

I am the school’s FoodCorps AmeriCorps service member. I give hands-on lessons, support healthy school meals, and help create a schoolwide culture of health. I get to do the fun stuff like garden lessons, school taste tests, and send school-garden grown produce home with the students. My work is flexible. This morning I scrapped my garden maintenance plans to pass out glow sticks. Next, I will be with a fourth grade science class utilizing our garden as a classroom for a lesson about worms and the active role that earthworms play in our food systems. This wasn’t my original schedule for the day. Using the garden classroom is not something that I am unprepared to do, yet I know that teaching in the dark is not something in the lesson plans. Today, teaching outside is where I can help serve the school.

Our students are enjoying their glow light bracelets. They are trading colors or connecting them together to make necklaces. Marks streak the floor from desks that have been dragged closer to the windows for light. 

The usual murmurs of the copy machine and the computers have been replaced by soft voices humming and pencils moving. There are plenty of extra recesses all over the campus to keep the day active; there is only so much learning to be done without the technology to print worksheets or sign into virtual classrooms. The teachers and staff are stressed. They do not realize how wonderful they have made this day for the students. We are all just glad to know that their minds continue to learn in this space that we can provide and that their bellies are full.

FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member Tara McDaniel was selected as the winner of the 2021 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $5,000 prize for her service site, Cedarville Elementary School in Cedarville, AR. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

Read more from the 2021 Victory Growers essay contest: 

• Finding Abundance by Ann Dang
• Community in the Wake of Wildfires by Alicia Loebl

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Over the last year, business and school closures have led to families worrying about their children having access to nourishing meals. As two professionals who work to keep kids healthy and fed, we see a clear, bipartisan opportunity to support children as they return to school in the fall: the Food and Nutrition Education in Schools Act.

Despite the hardships of the past year, it’s been inspiring to see the crucial role that the Arkansas school nutrition community has played in ensuring access to healthy food for our kids. Schools have served brown-bag lunches and delivered meals since the start of the pandemic. In some cases, schools served three meals a day to students and their families.

If you ask a school nutrition leader how they did it, you might hear them talk about their amazing staff, community, and dedication to kids. They may also mention the support of their school’s food educators, such as FoodCorps service members, who teach kids about healthy food in hands-on lessons in classrooms and school gardens. These educators jumped in to help by distributing meals, harvesting school gardens to include fresh produce to give to families–and ensuring students had access to safe, outdoor education.

Food and nutrition education has a direct influence on the lives and well-being of students. An independent Columbia Teachers College study found that kids who receive more hands-on food education were eating up to three times as many fruits and veggies as kids who received less. Through food education, students learn to enjoy vegetables, setting them up for good health for a lifetime. Yet, these subjects are not considered to be a high priority in critical child health policy conversations in Little Rock or Washington.

In Arkansas, where one in five children face hunger, we are lucky to have a legislative champion in Sen. John Boozman, who is an advocate for programs to address this pervasive issue and has seen food education in action during local school visits.

The Food and Nutrition Education in Schools Act prioritizes schools with high rates of free or reduced-priced meals, a clear indicator of community need. Inspired by the FoodCorps model, this bipartisan bill would provide these schools with funding to hire food educators.

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By Tove Danovich for Civil Eats

When the schools closed in Cedarville, Arkansas in March, Tara McDaniel (pictured above) was told it would only be for two weeks. So this service member with FoodCorps—an Americorps grantee that works with schools in resource-limited areas—set to work planting crops her students could come back to.

It’s clear now that schools around the country will be closed until at least next fall, but McDaniel hasn’t stopped gardening. “I want people passing by on their daily walks to see that [the garden] is still growing and that our community still grows and continues,” she says.

The closures came at a rough time for school gardens—which had either just planted their spring crops or were planning to plant them. Though anything related to food production is generally considered “essential” and allowed to operate during the COVID-19 outbreak, the decision to keep a school garden open depends on the school and staff running the program.

“As soon I heard schools were closing, I emailed the principals of every school we work with and said, ‘We want to keep gardening’,” says Michelle Welton, executive director of Grow Portland. The organization works with 13 low-income schools in Oregon, and its staff is still maintaining the gardens in 10 of those schools.

Instead of planting the gardens with the intention of using them as learning gardens—each one seeded with a few carrots here, some beans there, and a hodgepodge of other produce for variety—Grow Portland’s staff is pivoting to use the beds for production. In lieu of each school growing a bit of everything, Welton says, the gardens are now working more like urban farms, with entire beds of carrots or leafy greens.

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By Megan Wilson for KNWA

Martin Luther King Jr. Day is designated as a day of service.

Some people volunteered to improve Linda Childers Knapp Elementary School.

Thanks to a grant from Engage Arkansas, they replaced nine raised beds in the school’s garden, making them more wheelchair accessible.

Sarah Bryan, a service member with FoodCorps, said the new beds will help with the school’s cooking and gardening classes.

“We’re trying to reach those kids in different ways to show them that gardening and eating healthy is a possibility for them even though they might not always have the means or the resources to acquire them,” she said.

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“No matter what people are consuming, my goal is for them to care about the impact it has on our environment and planet from beginning to end,” Emily Olsen said of her vision for Cloud City Conservation Center (C4). Olsen replaced Kendra Kurihara, who led C4 for three years, as the nonprofit’s director earlier this month.

Originally from Vermont, Olsen grew up alongside her mother’s garden, roadside farmstands and orchards. When Olsen began studying at New York University, she noticed the different challenges to food access in an urban area.

“Living in New York made me understand that not everyone understands where their food comes from,” Olsen explained.

A few years after graduating, Olsen moved to rural Arkansas to run a school garden program with FoodCorps. And though Olsen was introducing young students to leafy greens and root vegetables, it was evident that students’ families often couldn’t afford the produce they were growing in school.

So when Olsen moved to Denver a few years later, she took a position with a bike-powered food rescue operation focused on dismantling barriers to food access. Olsen ran Denver Food Rescue’s operations for three years, until the lure of mountain living became too much.

“I was tired of looking at the mountains every day,” Olsen said. “I wanted to be in them.”

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A central Arkansas school district is working to instill healthy habits in their students.

This project is part of the Conway School District’s Farm to School initiative. It’s the district’s way of addressing diet-related health issues here in Arkansas. 

Today kids from Carolyn Lewis Elementary were part of a taste test. Staff turned Arkansas-grown sweet potatoes into “Scooby Snacks” for the Halloween-themed event.

The school has several of these throughout the school year to show kids that healthy food can be fun and delicious.

“It really connects them with healthy eating and food. With us dressing up as Scooby Doo, it makes it fun, it makes them want to try and maybe more likely to eat sweet potatoes, as well as bring that home and share it with their family,” says Meagan Brown, the food service coordinator.

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By Shannon Newerth, FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member: Van Buren, Arkansas

“Miss Shannon! Miss Shannon!” I hear as I walk around the cafeteria during lunch. Students are calling for me from their seats, anxiously waiting to show me what they brought in their lunch boxes or picked up off the line.

Carrots. Applesauce. Yogurt. Grapes. I look at them with beaming eyes and say, “I am so proud of you for making these choices today — now let’s see you eat it!”

For some students, it may be challenging to finish all the food they have brought or placed on their trays. For others, it is not so difficult.

I see raised hands. I walk over to a student to help open her string cheese. I see another hand. This student needs a napkin. I hand him one of the few I keep in my back pocket during lunch. As our remaining minutes in the cafeteria dwindle, I congratulate students on making a “happy tray,” a tray with food completely finished paired with an empty milk carton.

These students look up at me with big eyes and wide grins. These faces are the faces of food insecurity. For many — if not all — of the students with a “happy tray” lunch in the cafeteria, this may be the most balanced meal they receive that day. In some cases, it may be the only meal they receive that day. 

I can be found in the cafeteria at two elementary schools in Van Buren, Arkansas. One of the schools I serve at is located in an urban area just a few blocks away from downtown Van Buren. The other school is rural and is located on the outskirts of the city. These two schools serve culturally different student populations with one major commonality: 73% to 88% of the students are free and reduced lunch recipients. Many of those students are among the most vulnerable of the 560,000 Arkansas residents who struggle with food insecurity.

Food insecurity can be defined as the lack of access to healthy or nutritious foods. At the surface, food insecurity is seen as a result of unemployment, low wages, and poverty; beneath, many of these factors are deeply rooted in racial and socioeconomic discrimination. It is a tragedy that the students I serve, along with millions of others across the country, must pack the weight of this social injustice in their backpacks daily to school. 

As a FoodCorps service member, I am given the unique opportunity to meet students in the classroom to unpack and address food insecurity and hunger in a way that empowers them to make positive food choices with the food they have access to. One of my favorite lessons created by FoodCorps is “Get to the Source.” In this lesson, students play a game to identify foods and match them to their sources. They then learn the definition of minimally versus highly processed foods and, in groups, apply that understanding to sort various food products that share an original, whole food source. Learning these skills is particularly important to students with limited access to whole foods. “Get to the Source” equips students with the ability to choose minimally processed foods in order to make more positive choices.

Another FoodCorps lesson I enjoy teaching is “Go, Grow, Glow.” In this lesson, students play go, grow, and glow charades, learning about the different foods that help their bodies have energy (go), grow strong (grow), and stay healthy (glow). They then draw themselves in action and at their best, connecting these feelings to the foods that enable them to enjoy those activities.

In conjunction with this lesson, I have taught students how to make a few “Go, Grow, Glow” snacks, or what I like to call — in a jazzy voice — Triple-G snacks. A whole wheat cracker topped with low-fat cheese and a grape. A bit of vanilla Greek yogurt with fruit sprinkled with granola. Banana and sunflower seed butter wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla. Building relatively low-cost, three-part, delicious snacks exposes them to positive food possibilities easily within their reach. “Go, Grow, Glow” shows up in the cafeteria as a Triple-G lunch packed from home or a Triple-G tray of school-provided options chosen with care. 

FoodCorps’ presence at the two elementary schools I serve is slowly but surely creating the organization’s sought-after schoolwide culture of health — one student at a time, one lesson at a time. To counter the weight of food insecurity, we are equipping students with the tools they can pack to make positive food choices at home and at school. These choices will positively impact their health in their lives and the health of future generations of their families. 

FoodCorps AmeriCorps Service Member Shannon Newerth was selected as a runner-up for the 2019 FoodCorps Victory Growers Award “for a compelling account of hunger and food insecurity,” winning a $1,000 prize for her service site, Van Buren Public Schools in Van Buren, AR. The award, sponsored by C&S Wholesale Grocers, highlights that many children struggle with hunger and food insecurity, and that the food they receive at school is the most important meal they will get all day.

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When Delaney Farris first joined FoodCorps, she had no idea how deeply invested she would become in the program and its participants. Evidence of the hard work she has poured into the Van Buren School District can be seen across campus gardens, in classrooms, and on cafeteria salad bars. She has helped expand existing agriculture efforts and led the charge to connect schools to the community through gardening and nutrition education.

The Crawford County native stepped into her role as VBSD FoodCorps team member in 2017. Implemented by AmeriCorps, the national initiative partners with local schools and organizations to engage children and help give them knowledge about, and access to, nutritious foods. At the time Farris was assigned, the program had been in place at Van Buren for only one year, but was already experiencing great success.

“When Delaney came to Van Buren, we were still in the learning process, but were receiving positive feedback about FoodCorps and the impact it was having on students,” said VBSD Activities Administrator Drew Cone. “She took what we already had started and built upon that, leading to the creation of gardens at Central and Rena Elementary Schools. She has also been instrumental in adding outdoor classroom features at Parkview, as well as a chicken coop and a greenhouse.”

Farris is passionate about teaching students the value of growing their own food. She visits classrooms and takes learning outside, where students plant and harvest items. She also partners with educators to integrate her work into their curriculum and to hold special activities such as farmer’s markets and family nights. Farris oversees the Sprout Scouts program, which gives interested students even more opportunities to work outdoors. She also holds routine taste tests to expose students to healthy produce direct from the school garden. Such engagement helps open students’ minds to the possibility of trying new foods and venturing outside their comfort zones.

“I have a student who isn’t fond of trying new things,” said Farris. “We have a deal that he can just smell whatever we are tasting. We were in our herb garden checking on our basil and mint and trying the leaves. He picked a basil leaf, gave it a smell, and we moved on. A few minutes, later I hear him yelling, ‘This basil is DIVINE, Miss Delaney. I really think I need to take some home to my family!’”

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Serving as a FoodCorps AmeriCorps service member can help you discover new, meaningful career paths. Hear from three alumni about how their experiences with FoodCorps led them to exciting and meaningful career opportunities post-service.

Apply now

Apply to serve by March 13.

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Countless seeds have been planted and produce harvested since Mary Grace Stoneking arrived in Van Buren two years ago.

Assigned as the first-ever FoodCorps representative to the Van Buren School District, Stoneking’s arrival signaled a shift in the way VBSD approached nutrition education and ushered in a new way of thinking about food and its origins for Van Buren students.

Stoneking came to VBSD in the summer of 2016 after King and Tate Elementary schools were selected for FoodCorps, a national initiative designed to connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy. Implemented by AmeriCorps, the program partners with local schools and organizations to engage children and help give them knowledge about, and access to, nutritious foods.

“When we applied and received a FoodCorps service member, we didn’t fully know what to expect,” said VBSD Activities Administrator Drew Cone. “We were hoping for some gardens and extra support educating students about nutrition and the reasons why it is important.”

Cone said the district quickly realized that Stoneking had an even greater vision for the program. Her passion for nutrition and access to healthy foods led her to become a part of FoodCorps and have served as the driving factors in her work.

The North Carolina native took part in an urban gardening program while in college and worked on farms during her summers. Upon graduating with a degree in philosophy, she decided to do something that would enable her to promote healthy living and impact social change.

“Food was a way to tie in all those issues for me,” she said.

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