September 1, 2022

This Week in Farm to School 

Farm to school connects local agriculture, schools, and partners to benefit students, educators, farmers, families, and communities.

Get Schools Cooking Informational Webinar

September 7, 2022 // 11 am ET

Join the Chef Ann Foundation for a 45-minute informational session about Get Schools Cooking, an assessment and strategic planning program currently accepting applications. Discussion will include the current application, as well as a brief overview of what participating in the Get Schools Program would look like. Included in the discussion, a previous cohort participant will discuss their experience being a part of the Get Schools Cooking program and what it was like working with the Chef Ann Foundation.

Register here.

Change For Good 2022: Addressing the Student Mental Health Crisis

September 14, 2022 // 12 pm - 1 pm ET

The Healthy Schools Campaign is hosting their annual Change for Good forum, a virtual event highlighting important efforts to address the national crisis in student mental health. This timely event will provide a forum for national leaders from the US Surgeon General’s office and the US Department of Education to hear first-hand about successful state and local efforts and for them to respond and share what their agencies are doing to address student mental health. 

Register here.

Growing School Gardens Summit Webinar Series: Grow & Preserve Food using NGSS/STEAM

September 21, 2022 // 2 pm ET

Join Hope Sickmeier of Southern Boone County Elementary in Ashland, MO to learn how schools teach STEAM & NGSS and preserve food in the 21st century. Hope will share ideas on how to use STEAM in the garden to enhance student learning (square foot gardening & garden design, creating a pollinator, designing and demonstrating methods of seed dispersal). You will also learn how to use garden produce to create fundraising ideas and incorporate economic lessons. This webinar will offer easy recipes for food preservation of produce. Recipes include refrigerator pickles, herbal salts, dehydrated apple chips, sun-dried tomatoes, and apple cider vinegar.

Register here.

Farm to Fork Charlotte

September 25, 2022 // 4 pm - 7 pm ET

The Farm to Fork Picnic in the Garden is back in Charlotte! The Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) and partners will be returning to the Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden with a stellar lineup of over 30 chef and farmer pairings, plus many of the finest Carolina distillers, vintners, and brewers. Chefs will be teamed up with a farmer or an artisan to create small bites at action stations throughout the beautiful grounds of the garden. Sip and nibble while enjoying the band or while strolling through the garden.

Purchase tickets here.

Student Engagement Workbook, The Edible Schoolyard Project

Student engagement is the degree of attention, interest, curiosity, and positive emotional connections students experience while learning. It is what educators build from to understand instruction. Acknowledging the ways that your students engage in your classrooms and focusing on how to access student attention, interest, and curiosity sets you up with a strong base to build out your instructional practices. This workbook, created by The Edible Schoolyard Project, offers a collection of texts and activities to deepen your understanding of student engagement, as well as tools you can bring into your classroom. You will reflect on your own experiences, interact with texts on student engagement, practice recognizing student engagement, and develop a personalized plan to increase student engagement. 

Find the workbook here.

Nutrition Education Can Be a Game-Changer For Our Youth

Providing access to healthier food options coupled with integrating nutrition education in our school curriculum starting from an early age can equip our youth with knowledge to make better food choices, setting them up to live healthier lives.

Read here.

Compost Your Way

Composting food waste not only helps support the nutrient cycle by producing a valuable amendment for garden soil, it is also important for efforts to decrease materials going to landfills. In this lesson, crafted by KidsGardening, students will explore different ways to compost food scraps by researching and/or experimenting with different types of compost systems.

Read more here.

The American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture and Grow with Google Foundation Fellowship

Deadline: September 8, 2022

The fellowship is an 8-month opportunity for select educators to help create place-based lessons that incorporate agriculture, technology, and key digital skills into an Applied Digital Skills lesson. Fellows will also serve as program ambassadors and provide training for other educators and external stakeholders in their communities. Lessons created by the Grow with Google Applied Digital Skills Fellows will be featured and promoted on the Applied Digital Skills and American Farm Bureau Foundation for Agriculture websites. Fellows will also receive a $25,000 stipend, Chromebooks for their classroom and 1:1 engagement with teams at Google. 

Learn more and apply here.

USDA Equitable Access in Child Nutrition Programs

Deadline: September 12, 2022

USDA Food and Nutrition Service is seeking an academic or research institution to administer a grant program that will provide funds for research projects related to equity in Child Nutrition (i.e., school lunch, school breakfast, summer meals, Child and Adult Care Food Program). $2,000,000 of funds are available, which will cover both the administration costs and the grants themselves. 

Learn more and here.

2023 CHS Foundation and National Agriculture in the Classroom Grant Application

Deadline: September 15, 2022

The CHS Foundation provides $500 grants each year to pre-kindergarten-12th grade teachers who have classroom projects that use agricultural concepts to teach reading, writing, math, science, social studies and more. Eligible projects include classroom and schoolyard gardens, embryology projects, aquaculture projects and agricultural literacy reading programs to name a few. Teachers have until June 1 the following year to complete the project and submit a final report. Only state-certified classroom teachers employed by a school district or private school teachers are eligible to apply.

Learn more and apply here.

Indigenous Youth Nutrition Security Grants from Newman's Own Foundation

Deadline: September 15 (Application)

Newman's Own Foundation launches its first-ever request for proposals (RFP) for Nutrition Security for Indigenous Youth. This RFP has been developed in collaboration with their partners at Tahoma Peak Solutions, a Native woman-owned firm focused on empowering and building up communities in Indian Country. Through this RFP, Newman’s Own Foundation will support organizations that build on the strengths of Native communities to enhance nutrition security for Native youth. To accomplish this, they are seeking organizations that are focused on improving nutrition security for indigenous youth.

Learn more here.

Catch up on…School Meals

For the past 2 years, all students have received school meals at no cost thanks to federal USDA waivers during the COVID-19 pandemic. But those waivers expired on June 30. What does this mean for school meals in North Carolina? The North Carolina Alliance for Health has created a great guide to explain the impacts on North Carolina families. 

Learn more here.

School Meals: Who’s at the table?

The National Farm to School Network has been exploring a movement toward values-aligned universal meals focused on equity for the most impacted stakeholders across the food system. Universal meals embedded with the core values of farm to school have the potential to radically transform our food system for the better. Six key values, put into action, get us closer to a just, equitable food system that promotes the health of all school children and benefits producers, workers, educators, and their communities.

Learn more here.

North Carolina Youth Food Initiative Brings Young People into Social Transformation

Duke’s Sanford World Policy Center explored one way that young people in North Carolina are working to improve their local food system. The Food Youth Initiative is a program based in the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, which is housed at North Carolina State University. They interviewed the Program Coordinator, Bevelyn Ukah, and the Program Partner, Ree Ree Wei, of Transplanting Traditions Community Farm.

Listen here.

Food Solutions New England Racial Equity Challenge Resources

Food Solutions New England has compiled numerous racial equity resources from their 21-day challenges over the years. Topics range from implicit bias, structural racism, conversations with youth, and more!

Learn more here.

To Help Fight Racial Inequality Among Our Children, Look At Nutrition in School

Research shows that access to school meals can actually lead to better grades in math and reading and that hungry stomachs are a distraction from learning. 

Read the opinion here.

NC Crunch Countdown!

Schools provide a great opportunity to serve and highlight local food. One way communities celebrate local food through #NCCrunch. NC Crunch events offer youth and adults an opportunity to taste and learn about locally-grown NC produce as well as honor all those who contributed to feeding our youth and communities.