Because of you, more children will start the school day ready to learn, without the pang of hunger as a distraction. Our Back-to-School campaign reminds us that along with pencils and paper, children need a daily supply of food to take on new concepts, run on playgrounds, and socialize more successfully.
Our Community Health and Agriculture Education teams have collaborated to develop the new Food Shuttle Academy, an online learning platform with free, self-paced lessons on health, nutrition, agriculture, and more!
Our Spring Match challenge, made possible by generous funders, including SOLV Energy and the Mead Family Foundation, exceeded the $105,000 goal, raising an additional $70,000 to erase hunger!
Love, Tito’s has a heart for community gardens and increasing access to fresh, healthy foods. Their philanthropic Love, Tito’s Block to Block program, reconnects neighborhoods and creates community gardens and farms throughout the United States. Our hearts are in full bloom knowing that our Camden Street Garden will be the next beneficiary of Block to Block, allowing neighbors with mobility challenges to access our many activities more easily.
by Sarah Paxson An article came out in the National Geographic about how much Americans pay for fruit and vegetables. The article included an interesting chart showing the differences in costs between produce commonly found in our grocery stores. It's worth taking a look!
by Sarah Paxson ...by reaching the kids!
A new article suggests that teaching children about food and helping to expand their food preferences is the highest priority in turning our food systems around. The article says that "kids’ food preferences and knowledge about what and how they eat is heavily influenced by parents, teachers, childcare professionals and other adults around them" and that it is for this reason that the explosion in recent years of healthy food programs for kids may be the single most promising means for transforming our food system as a whole.
Programs like Cooking Matters teaches the youth of America a new way to look at food than the way they see in commercials, on the shelves of our grocery stores, or even in the lunch line at school. "Whenever kids are able to take ownership over something like cooking the food themselves, it creates a stronger connection," says Sarah Elliott, farm-to-school program manager at REAP Food Group in Madison, WI.
Read the full article and see how our Cooking Matters courses read the kids.
