This Week in Farm to School from NC: October 13, 2022

October 13, 2022

This Week in Farm to School

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

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Celebrate! Governor Cooper Proclaims October 2022 as Farm to School Month

Governor Cooper has proclaimed October 2022 as Farm to School and Early Care and Education Month in North Carolina. The Governor encourages kids and adults to taste and learn about North Carolina grown produce for the NC Crunch and to recognize and thank all those who contribute to feeding our kids and communities – from farmers, farm workers, and food hub distributors, to school and early care nutrition professionals, educators, garden coordinators, bus drivers, and transportation professionals.

Everyone can crunch into an NC-grown fruit or vegetable on October 19th or anytime during the month for the #NCCrunch.

NC Crunch Countdown!

Growing School Gardens Summit Webinar Series: Lightning Talks

October 19, 2022 // 2 pm ET

Join the School Garden Support Organization Network for a well facilitated hour-long session consisting of 5-minute Lighting Talks from a variety of school garden professionals! After each talk, there will be time to digest the valuable information shared and ask questions.

Finding Your Future in Food Systems

October 19, 2022 // 6 pm ET

This ongoing webinar series, hosted by the North American Food Systems Network, provides participants with connections and insights to help them identify next steps for their careers. The series features speakers from job-creating organizations, agencies, and businesses, some working locally in their communities, others with national and international scope. Produced by college students for college students and other emerging professionals.

Centering Equity in the Garden

October 29, 2022 // 9 am - 4 pm ET

This in-person workshop, hosted by the NC School Garden Network, is about the intersection between abolitionist teaching and garden-based learning. All levels of experience (in education, in gardening) are encouraged to register, as we will be going over the basics of abolitionist teaching and garden-based learning. Both CEU credit and EE credit are available.

Learn more and register here.

Recorded Webinar: Grow and Preserve Food Using NGSS/STEAM

Hope Sickmeier of Southern Boone County Elementary in Ashland, MO demonstrated how schools teach STEAM & NGSS and preserve food in the 21st century. Hope shared 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). Participants learned how to use garden produce to create fundraising ideas and incorporate economic lessons. This webinar offered easy recipes for food preservation of produce. Recipes include refrigerator pickles, herbal salts, dehydrated apple chips, sun-dried tomatoes, and apple cider vinegar.

Watch here.

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NC Crunch 2022 Resources

The #NCCrunch, co-hosted by the Farm to School Coalition of North Carolina and NC Farm to Preschool Network, is designed to celebrate agriculture, nutrition, and farm to school. New resources that have been created to help with nutrition education and promotional outreach are now available on the F2SCNC website. The resources include a Twitter header, Facebook cover, 14 graphics on seasonal produce grown in our state, and more!

View the resources here.

NC State Board of Education NC Crunch Celebration

During their October meeting, the NC State Board of Education crunched into North Carolina-grown apples from Flavor Full Farms, a NC Farm to School Program grower, to show their support for farm to school and school meals for the NC Crunch and Farm to School and Early Care and Education Month.

NC Superintendent Truitt Celebrates National School Lunch Week and Farm to School and Early Care and Education Month

State Superintendent Catherine Truitt recorded a message to highlight the benefits of farm to school and school meals and encourage everyone to celebrate National School Lunch Week and Farm to School and Early Care and Education Month and help us reach all 100 counties with this year's NC Crunch.

NC State Board of Education (NCSBE) Chair Eric Davis Celebrates National School Lunch Week

NCSBE Chair Eric Davis recorded a video message encouraging everyone to support farm to school meals, celebrate National School Lunch Week, participate in the NC Crunch and recognize our essential front-line professionals involved in feeding and educating our students.

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Budding Botanist Grant

Tomorrow! Deadline: October 14, 2022

The Klorane Botanical Foundation is committed to supporting programs that teach respect for the environment and protect nature through the preservation of plant species and biodiversity. Designed to further their mission, the Budding Botanist Grant will help students learn about plants, explore their world and inspire them to take care of the life they discover in their local ecosystems. In late 2022, twenty high-need schools across the United States will be awarded $1,000 in grant funding to support their youth garden programs.

Learn more and apply here.

Whole Kids Foundation Bee Grant

Deadline: October 15, 2022

The Whole Kids Foundation is offering two grants to support establishing or growing bee programs. The Traditional Bee Grant allows for K-12 schools or non-profit organizations that serve any grades K-12 to start a new or enhance an existing bee program hosting live bees on their campus. The traditional track is for new applicants only. The Renewal Bee Grant allows for K-12 schools or non-profit organizations that have previously received a Bee Grant to receive support to grow their programs. The renewal is for previous Bee Grant recipients only.

Learn more here.

From Learning to Leading: Cultivating the Next Generation of Diverse Food and Agriculture Professionals

Deadline: November 15, 2022

The primary goal of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) From Learning to Leading: Cultivating the Next Generation of Diverse Food and Agriculture Professionals Program (NEXTGEN) is to enable 1890 institutions, 1994 institutions, Alaska Native-serving institutions and Native Hawaiian-serving institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions (specifically, the certified Hispanic-serving agricultural colleges and universities (HSACUs)), and insular area institutions of higher education located in the U.S. territories to build and sustain the next generation of the food, agriculture, natural resources, and human sciences (FANH) workforce primarily through student scholarship support, paid internships, fellowships, and job opportunity matching, and facilitating pathways to employment in the federal sector.

Learn more here.

USDA Farm to School Grant

Deadline: January 6, 2022

The United States Department of Agriculture will award up to $12 million in competitive grants to eligible entities through the Farm to School Grant Program in FY 2023. Each grant helps implement farm to school programs that increase access to local food in eligible schools, connect children with agriculture for better health, and inspire youth to consider careers in agriculture. The RFA includes three tracks - Implementation, State Agency, and Turnkey - to support a variety of projects and implementation stages.

Learn more here.

National School Lunch Program

This week’s For What It’s Worth blogpost by the North Carolina Alliance for Health explores the National School Lunch Program for National School Lunch Week.

Learn more here.

Farm to School Incentive Toolkit

Authored by Cassandra Bull, a recent graduate and research fellow at Tufts University, this report describes and characterizes the variation in 15 statewide Farm to School incentives with respect to their (a) design, (b) context, and (c) alignment to policy goals often attributed to Farm to School. Farm to School incentive policies strive to increase institutional local food purchasing by offsetting the cost of local ingredients through a monetary reimbursement. States have tremendous flexibility in designing these policies, but little guidance on the range of models in which they can use to develop an incentive program. The aggregated collection of experiences and classification schemes presented in this report will give advocates who wish to adopt similar incentive policies a way to identify program elements that are aligned with their specific vision, capacity, and regional context.

Learn more here.

How to Talk to Kids About Microaggressions

Microaggressions are the “everyday slights, indignities and insults committed against marginalized groups because of their membership in those groups”. EmbraceRace has created a resource to help adults learn how to address microaggressions among the youth.