FoodCorps: Addressing Childhood Obesity through School Food and National Service

Could you describe FoodCorps and the impetus behind the program?

Cecily Upton: FoodCorps really formed around this idea of using public service as a way to meet the need for support within the school system and the community to improve school food. There were a lot of young people interested in being involved in the food system who did not feel as if they could get a toehold in anywhere, and wanted to have an opportunity to spend a year getting their hands dirty. FoodCorps brings these two sides together while addressing childhood obesity and food insecurity in a holistic, fun, and engaging way, and also allowing for service members to get some professional development in the process.

After a year in FoodCorps, service members become public health leaders, teachers, farmers, and all-around innovators in the food system, helping to create a healthy, fair, affordable food system that is available to all people in the United States.

Curt Ellis: There is an opportunity to take the schools, where 32 million kids eat every day and learn about food every day, and turn them into a place where healthy food is celebrated and served. The flip side, of course, is to leave them as a place where we reinforce the fast-food nation that kids see all around them outside of school.

We truly have an opportunity and an obligation to turn schools into engines for health and wellness for this generation of kids.

Debra Eschmeyer: A point I would like to highlight as to how we ensure we end childhood obesity and hunger through policy change and practice is: If healthy food is served to children, but not eaten, the nutritional value is zero. That is why FoodCorps is so important. We place the essential human capital into the school food system to get kids excited to eat fruits and vegetables and whole grains when they are served to them.

FoodCorps cites three pillars or a “three-ingredient recipe” for healthy kids as a core mission. Could you describe what this consists of and how you came to focus on these three items?

Debra Eschmeyer: Through the schools, FoodCorps responds to America's epidemic of obesity and opens new markets for sustainable food and farming. Taking a wraparound approach, we rebuild the role of food in classrooms, schoolyards, and cafeterias across the 250 schools we now serve.

FoodCorps service members are emerging professionals in the fields of education, sustainability, and health, united by a common passion for food. Our annual recruiting process draws more than 1000 applicants, from which we select only the standout candidates to serve. We fielded a first class of 50, currently support a second team of 80, and expect to grow to 130 service members in our upcoming third year.

FoodCorps leaders dedicate a year of their lives to public service in limited-resource, high-obesity communities. Under the direction of our grassroots partners, service members transform the school food environment by implementing the following three-ingredient recipe for healthy kids:

1. Knowledge: Food and Nutrition Education. FoodCorps teaches kids about healthy food and where it comes from. The typical elementary student receives an average of 3.4 hours of nutrition education in a year, yet they watch more television than that every day. Our service members work with teachers to increase the quantity of nutrition education children receive, while dramatically improving its quality as well, through an emphasis on hands-on learning.

When these three ingredients are implemented together, there is a change in children's attitudes toward consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables. If you offer these foods on lunch trays, but don't give children a chance to taste test, or grow them with their own hands, the food may well end up in the trash. If you engage children in growing these foods in the garden but don't present daily opportunities for them to eat the foods in the lunchroom, the garden lesson is less effective. If you talk about healthy food and where it comes from, but don't offer hands-on experiences and chances to eat it every day, the lesson doesn't land. These ingredients are interdependent.

How do you prepare service members for their year of service?

Curt Ellis: Step one is we choose amazing service people. As Deb described, we had 50 service members in our 2011 class and we have 80 service members in our 2012 class. In both cases, we had well over 1000 people apply for those spots. We are starting with people who have previous experience studying nutrition or who went to culinary school or have experience working on a farm, among other skills.

Once we identify those people, we bring them all together for a week of in-person training. We teach them the fundamentals of classroom management and nutrition education, the fundamentals of building and tending school gardens, and the fundamentals of how our cafeteria procurement systems work in this country.

We work with them on volunteer recruitment and community organizing—basic skills of how you thoughtfully engage the public. Rather than dropping them in as some person who knows all the answers, we work on how you bring a community together and ask the right questions.

Once service members are in a community, what types of activities are they engaged in?

Cecily Upton: Most of our service members are focused on the school day and school environment. That is where they spend the majority of their time—building school gardens or rehabilitating gardens that have been left to decay and then working with teachers in classrooms and after school to engage students. Some of the work they do involves adding a garden-based science curriculum, learning math through square-foot gardening, and learning about history and culture by planting “three sister” crops or through a pioneer garden or a salsa garden.

A lot of our students are at multicultural schools and our service members are taking advantage of that by having them bring in examples of recipes that their families may have cooked at home and sharing those with the other students. Most of their time is spent in the school environment, but naturally there are connections that come out from that to families and to communities.

Could you give us an example of one service member's experience in FoodCorps?

Cecily Upton: We have so many amazing service members, but I will give you an example of two who serve together in Michigan: Kirsten Gerbatsch and Daniel Marbury.

They are an amazing duo. Daniel has really taken the Access pillar—the development and expansion of healthy food options for students in the cafeteria—and run with it. For the first couple of months of his service, he got up early, went to the school, and put on a hair net and a beard net and did whatever was needed as an extra set of hands in the kitchen to understand how the whole system worked and to make friends.

From there, he was able to introduce some new ideas, such as, “What if we made a soup for lunch instead of microwaving frozen food?” So he worked with farmers to bring in local produce and worked with the food service director to ensure that they could afford it and that they had the time and the opportunity to do this and that he could help.

He worked with the food service staff and helped them relearn how to cook on a massive scale. They started creating these healthy lunch options and they did it very slowly at first. One day they would have a local soup. Then the next week they would try something else. Kirsten helped more on the student side by doing taste tests in classrooms of the vegetables that they were going to be served in the lunchroom and by doing science lessons and biology lessons around the same foods that they were later going to see on their cafeteria trays.

The food service staff was a bit skeptical that the students were going to eat it, but the students did—and they loved it. It was proof to the food service that not only was this economically possible but that the students would embrace it.

One of the really wonderful side benefits is, as Daniel told me, that the food service director gained a tremendous amount of pride in the work of their team and in the fact that they had created this delicious meal for their students. It was, all in all, a positive experience for everyone, and it is continuing.

FoodCorps service members work in limited-resource communities. How do you select the communities?

Debra Eschmeyer: FoodCorps chooses the communities we serve in response to the ways our obesity epidemic discriminates. Our leaders currently serve in 12 states, in communities that range from rural to urban. We are planting gardens in the concrete landscapes of Flint, Michigan, and we are sourcing local produce in northeast Iowa, where rich farmland surrounds food-desert towns. We are teaching about traditional foodways on the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, a place where 60% of children are overweight or obese, and we are getting local sweet potatoes on the school lunch menu in Jackson, Mississippi, where the legacies of racism and poverty play out in disparities of health. FoodCorps service members are placed in communities across the country where simply adding an extra apple to a lunch tray is not enough.

With many communities around the country that could benefit from the program, what drew you to the 12 states you are currently in?

Debra Eschmeyer: Selection is basically based on a balance of need and capacity. We only work in the high-need public schools with high rates of child obesity and food insecurity, and in partnership with local organizations that have the capacity to host a service member in their community. This is the beauty of the extended planning process that we went through—we had thousands of stakeholders involved in the planning process—and so we already knew which schools had been doing revolutionary work, who had the support of principals, who had the support of teachers. So we had this beautiful combination of those that had the capacity to take this amazing human energy and put it into a high-needs school.

When FoodCorps first launched, 108 organizations from 40 states applied to host the program; 10 standout partners were selected. In subsequent years, we have used a more streamlined process to identify additional state-level partners to help us grow. As of the end of 2012, we are in 12 states and we are hoping to be in 15 in 2013. We are working. We are chipping away. We are getting there.

A lot of your program focuses on a measurably healthier school food environment. How are you tracking your successes and challenges and how are you making this information available to the public as well as researchers?

Debra Eschmeyer: Honing our program design based on good research is critical to our long-term success. FoodCorps service members measure and report on their impact on a weekly basis, using a customized online reporting system. Some of the metrics we track are: The number of children our service members teach; the number and duration of lessons our service members deliver; the number of gardens our service members build and tend; the number of local volunteers recruited for programmatic sustainability; the amount of garden produce our service members donate to food insecure families; the percentage of our service corps continuing in related professional fields; and the value of local, sustainable produce purchased from local farms for school meals.

In addition to tracking these output measures, we have established an evaluation partnership with the University of North Carolina Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention to assess something less visible—the shift in children's attitudes toward fruit and vegetable consumption catalyzed by our service members. We are conducting this outcome evaluation using a sample population of children, via pre- and postassessments of students who have received at least 10 hours of hands-on engagement with healthy food via FoodCorps educators. Survey results from a sample of 1005 youth participants indicate that student attitudes toward trying new fruits and vegetables improved by 6.1% on average with FoodCorps' interventions. Certain subgroups saw even greater gains; for example, 1^st graders' average score improved 18.2% over the year. More results are expected later in 2013.

What is the long-term plan for FoodCorps?

Curt Ellis: There are 100,000 public schools in America, and every child in this country deserves to have the knowledge of what healthy food is, a chance to grow and cook and taste some of it themselves, and access every single day to healthy, high-quality food at school. We believe FoodCorps needs to grow. Our goal for the next 10 years is to hit the gas as hard as we can and help bring FoodCorps to scale.

What exactly that looks like, and how big it makes sense for a program like ours to get before you take what we have learned and leverage that knowledge base toward making change in policy or just change in practice, is an open question. But it is something we are really excited to pursue. We have so many high-need communities that are really eager for FoodCorps service members to come help them do the great work they are already doing at scale. Right now, we just want to keep rolling up our sleeves and finding more talented new leaders for the food field and putting them out where they can do their work.

Cecily Upton: We see a high demand from communities—there is always a desire for more service members. And not only that, we also see the demand for people who want to serve as well. There is a true need and desire from young people to be engaged in this work in a hands-on way. They all see what change is possible with the investment of human resources and they want to be a part of that.

Debra Eschmeyer: Thinking about the vision for the long-term efficacy of FoodCorps starts with understanding that there are 55 million kids that go to school 5 days a week, 180 days a year. As the Institute of Medicine recommended in the consensus report, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation, ¹ we need to “strengthen schools as the heart of health.” Schools, in particular, should be a “national focal point” for obesity prevention, because children spend up to half their waking hours and consume as many as half their daily calories there. Our educational system is supposed to be a pathway to enabling a healthy society, and FoodCorps is part of that path.

The success of our program will be determined by whether a thriving environment for kids to have access to, and education about, healthy food takes root. The vision is that in 10, 20, or 30 years the United States is going to be looked upon by other countries, and they will look at a FoodCorps school and say, “That is how you raise a healthy nation. That is how you invest in public education and public health. That is how you raise a citizen to believe in civic engagement and community awareness and healthy eating.” That's the ideal for FoodCorps. That's the ideal for our nation.

—Jamie Devereaux, Features Editor