Author: ChrisHardmanWriter

Training Programs Invite Diverse Groups of Cooks Into the Kitchen

| ChrisHardmanWriter

MADISON, WISCONSIN-BASED Chef Jonny Hunter has a passion for hand-crafted, local food. The charcuterie produced by his company Underground Meats has won three Good Food Awards. His meat-centered restaurant, Forequarter, was nominated as one of the best new restaurants of 2013by Bon Appétit, and he was nominated for “Best Chef: Midwest” Semifinals of 2017 by the James Beard Foundation.

With all this success, it’s hard to believe that he can’t find enough cooks to staff his kitchen.

“Casual fine-dining places have been opening with much more frequency,” Hunter said. “After the industry started to grow, [our] labor supply dried up pretty quickly.”

Amid historically low unemployment in Wisconsin and around the country, it’s perhaps no surprise that finding kitchen help is a major challenge for restaurants. But widespread employment isn’t evenly distributed—many minority populations still face chronic unemployment. To address that unemployment crisis, and to build a more diverse workforce, Hunter reached out to people who were systematically under-employed. In 2014, he joined with two other like-minded individuals, Matt Feifarek of Slow Food Madison and Chandra Miller Fienen of Starting Block Madison, to form FoodWorks Madison.

At the top of their agenda was to develop First Course, a job-training program tailored to produce cooks ready for a kitchen job in three weeks. Their first cohort graduated in May of 2017. “We really want to make it so that our student [can] apply for a job on a Tuesday and be useful on a busy Friday night shift,” Feifarek said.

A Nationwide Cook Shortage

In addition to Madison, restaurants in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and other cities around the country are also struggling to fill their kitchens with cooks. The low wages and long hours the restaurant industry is known for make recruiting cooks difficult. Although some restaurants have increased wages and benefits, the need for cooks still outnumbers the supply.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the demand for cooks is expected to steadily increase as new restaurants continue to open and people continue eating out. Although the overall demand for cooks in schools, hospitals and cafeterias is expected to grow by 6 percent from 2016 to 2026, the growth for restaurant cooks is expected to grow by 12 percent. That means the U.S. restaurant industry will need a total of 1,377,200 cooks in 2026 compared to 1,231,900 cooks employed in 2016.

To fill this need, leaders in the food industry are taking a more active approach to staffing their kitchens. Instead of waiting for the cooks to come to them, they are recruiting people to complete low-cost or free training programs with a job opportunity as the end result.

Culinary Training Programs Across the U.S.

Programs in Boston, Cincinnati, Maryland, and most recently Chicago are tapping into a long-ignored labor pool to fill the city’s kitchens. Cincinnati COOKS! is a free culinary training program that has graduated more than 1,400 formerly under- and unemployed people, including recovering addicts, veterans, and chronically unemployed adults.

The curriculum, developed by the Freestone Food Bank, includes life skills training such as job interview techniques to help students succeed both in and out of the kitchen. War veteran and recovering addict Adam McKinney joined the program straight from rehab.

“The leadership that is around here, and the way they go about doing things, keeps all of us motivated,” he said.

Within a year of completing the program, 80 percent of the graduates find jobs in the food industry or start a continuing-education program such as Cincinnati State’s Culinary Management program.

The Maryland Food Bank runs FoodWorks, a 12-week culinary training program for low-income individuals in conjunction with the Community College of Baltimore County. Students learn basic culinary techniques, professionalism, and food safety while they prepare meals for their hungry neighbors.

And in October, celebrity chef and restaurateur Rick Bayless announced that he is launching a culinary training program for low-income students at a food-and-beverage incubator called The Hatchery on Chicago’s West Side.

“I believe this program can help surmount two big challenges in the city—lack of cooks to fill our restaurants’ kitchens and a lack of both solid preparation and career opportunities for the youth of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods,” Bayless said in a statement.

At Bayless’ program, high school- and college-age students will pay a minimal fee to learn basic culinary skills from Chicago chefs and then head to internships at Chicago’s best restaurant groups.

In Madison, An Open-Source Journey

The FoodWorks Madison crew completed their first job-training program in 2017. Feifarek describes First Course as “not a cooking school or a culinary school—this is a get-a-job school.” To develop the curriculum, FoodWorks worked with chefs and kitchen managers, community agencies, and an educator from the University of Wisconsin.

Supported in part by a $10,000 grant from the city of Madison, FoodWorks was able to rent a kitchen, hire teachers, buy ingredients, and give $1,000 to each graduate of the program. “It went awesome. We learned a lot in the process,” Hunter said. “We were very pleasantly surprised to find out that our idea worked.”

Feifarek said FoodWorks places heavy emphasis on job placement, inviting business owners and managers to come and talk to students. So far, the approach has proven successful: three of the four First Course students are working full-time at jobs that pay at least $14 an hour. “It’s a nice move for employers because they can use us as references,” Feifarek said. “We hope that one of the ways it will work is lowering hiring risk for a small business.”

In June, FoodWorks raised $56,500 through Kickstarter to develop the program further. The plan is to increase the training to 10 sessions a year with 20 students in each course.

Once their program model is more finely tuned, FoodWorks will open-source First Course so other communities around the country can replicate and build on their success.

That way, restaurants looking for cooks and workers looking for jobs will have more opportunities to find each other. “I love it when you can use one problem to solve another,” said Feifarek.

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman 

All photos courtesy of Matt Feifarek.

These Programs Use Farming to Heal and Empower our Nation’s Veterans

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ALTHOUGH IT HAS largely faded to the background, the U.S. is currently embroiled in the longest war in its history, the 16-year-and-counting operations in Afghanistan. Despite the declared end of combat operations in 2014, at least 11,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in Afghanistan, and the all-volunteer U.S. armed forces include more than 1.4 million active-duty personnel.

In addition, there are 20.9 million military veterans living in the country today, and although there are a number of programs to help them find work after they leave the service, there remain an estimated 453,000 veterans unemployed. These men and women face a number of barriers to finding and maintaining work, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic brain injuries, and difficulty transitioning back to civilian life.

Veterans who return to the family farm have found that farming requires some of the same skills they used in the military: resilience, a do-or-die work ethic, and physical stamina. At the same time, many veteran farmers find that farm life is good therapy.

Around the country, programs such as the Farmer Veteran Coalition, Archi’s Acres, and Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots are helping these former soldiers transition to careers in agriculture. Training veterans to be farmers offers a promising solution to the need to care for veterans and to address the ongoing shortage of farmers due to the rapid aging of the country’s farm population.

In honor of Veteran’s Day, Civil Eats is profiling five programs that use agriculture to heal and empower the nation’s veterans.

1. Heroic Food (New York)

Heroic Food gives veterans a new mission: serving their country by growing food. “Veterans are sitting at home feeling like their duty to serve is over,” said Heroic Food’s communications specialist Jasmin Vazquez. She points out that while veterans need a new mission, America needs farmers.

Veterans participating in Heroic Foods' Microgreens and Urban Farming class. (Photo courtesy of Heroic Foods.)
Heroic Food

Heroic Food—which was started in 2014 by Leora Barish, the daughter of a career army chaplain injured in Korea—offers a year-long immersion program for veterans who are interested in small-scale commercial farming. Local experts from the Cornell Small Farms Program, the Farmer Veteran Coalition, and the Hawthorne Valley Learning Center helped develop a curriculum with veterans in mind. Each is matched with an experienced farmer who provides a paid internship and on-site housing.

For those interested in a shorter time commitment, Heroic Food organizes workshops on the 10 farms they partner with. Topics are diverse and include welding, cheese-making, beekeeping, high-tunnel building, and composting.

Heroic Foods’ “Farm Squads” consist of intensive three-day workshops full of hard work and knowledge-sharing. The farmers receive help from strong, motivated workers and have a chance to give back. “America wants to help, but they don’t know how,” said Vazquez. “We offer these farmers a way to directly influence the life of a veteran.”

Heroic Food staff also attend to participants’ psychological needs. Program manager Ryan O’Sullivan, himself a combat veteran, regularly checks in with program participants to make sure they are meeting their professional and personal goals. “If the [Veterans Administration] doesn’t help these struggling veterans, we are going to,” Vazquez said.

2. Veterans to Farmers Colorado

In Colorado, veterans transform from “protectors into providers” with Veterans to Farmers’ agriculture-based certificate programs in homesteading, aquaponics, in-soil, and greenhouse programs. The training is free and includes a stipend for participants.

Founder and U.S. Marine Corps veteran Buck Adams had already established a successful five-acre greenhouse farm, one of the largest in Colorado, when he decided to specifically train and hire fellow vets in 2011.
Adams found that the greenhouse was a calming place for returning soldiers who were dealing with PTSD; by becoming providers, he felt that veterans could more easily transition back to civilian life. “You start growing food for your community and you automatically become enveloped [by] the community. It’s the next path of service,” he said.“I believe one of the biggest problems the nation faces is the unemployment rate for veterans,” says Adams. “A lot of people are talking about what we can do, but it doesn’t seem like anything is happening.”

VTF’s hydroponic program lasts eight weeks, provides on-the-job training and includes a curriculum developed with the help of Colorado State University. VTF has also partnered with the CSU Extension office to train veterans in business skills with a Building Farmers course.

VTF’s other courses are equally rigorous and rely on partnerships with experts in the community. The 10-week aquaponics program is run in partnership with Colorado Aquaponics and the Mental Health Center of Denver (MHCD). The soil-based program takes place at the Denver Botanic Gardens and focuses on small-scale, organic vegetable farming. The homesteading program (livestock) is run by veteran-owned Farmer Murphy family farm. To date, 100 vets have successfully completed the training programs.

3. Heroes to Hives Michigan

Healing is also at the heart of this Michigan-based program. Adam Ingrao, a former Army Patriot missile fire controller, found that nature—in particular weeding his mother’s flower beds—helped him heal from a training accident that cut short his military career at age 25. He went on to earn a degree in agriculture from California Polytechnic State University and then to pursue a Ph.D. in entomology from Michigan State University.

Army veteran and Heroes to Hives Instructor Adam Ingrao teaching Heroes to Hives students in the Heroes to Hives apiary at Kellogg Biological Station Bird Sanctuary (photo Lacey Ingrao)
Heroes to Hives founder Adam Ingrao

His experience as a beekeeper made a lasting impression. “Beekeeping is kind of a meditative experience,” Ingrao said. In order to keep the bees calm, beekeepers need to be very mindful of what they’re doing and maintain calm themselves.

He realized that other veterans could benefit from working with bees, so he and his wife Lacey started Heroes to Hives in 2015. They took five combat veterans through a nine-month program that trained them in the science and business of beekeeping. Their success attracted funding from the AT&T Foundation and a partnership with the MSU’s Michigan Pollinator Initiative.

In the second year of the program, Heroes to Hives mentored 15 combat veterans, 80 percent of whom have a service-related disability, PTSD, or a traumatic brain injury. The vets work directly with hives, learn the science behind beekeeping, master best business practices and connect with potential employers.

“We also get these individuals out in the public,” Ingrao said. This year, his students put on demonstrations at the Michigan Honey Festival in August. “It’s amazing to see how much more comfortable they feel in these public spaces [after attending the program].”

Heroes to Hives is free for participants and tailors instruction time to the students’ work schedules. Now that it has joined forces with MSU, Ingrao expects the program to grow in services and capacity.

4. Growing Warriors Kentucky

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 1.7 million veterans use food stamps to feed themselves and their families. That statistic doesn’t sit well with Mike Lewis, a veteran of the 3rd U.S. Infantry, The Old Guard. Add the fact that veterans disproportionately come from rural areas, and Lewis, who is a farm advocate in rural Kentucky, takes this statistic personally.

“You come from a community that feeds the country. Then you go to defend the country and [when you come home] the land that you defended can’t even feed you,” he says. Lewis watched his brother Fred struggle after coming home from multiple tours in the Middle East with a traumatic brain injury in 2009, and saw firsthand how therapeutic life on the farm was for him.

Mike Lewis and his son on their industrial hemp farm. (Photo courtesy of Growing Warriors)
Growing Warriors Founder Mike Lewis and son

He founded Growing Warriors, a non-profit that has been teaching veterans how to feed themselves, in 2012. “Initially we started with a small garden with about 10 vet families,” Lewis said. Monthly classes covered farming techniques, healthy cooking, seed saving, and food preservation.

As the participants of Growing Warriors expressed an interest in farming as a profession, Lewis reached out to other organizations to expand his offerings and provide business training.

In 2017 alone, Growing Warriors facilitated more than 50 workshops that covered a wide variety of topics including mushroom-growing, beekeeping, aquaponics, soils science, and organic gardening. The organization also offers a 12-month immersive residential farmer-training program. “[We’re] seeing vets go from wondering what they’re going to do to thinking: ‘My mission hasn’t changed, I’m defending my land through nutrition,” Lewis said.

5. Veteran Farmer Project Pennsylvania

The lush, rolling hills of Westmoreland County in western Pennsylvania are home to more than 1,000 working farms. To take advantage of that deep agricultural heritage, the Westmoreland Conservation District started the Pennsylvania Veteran Farmer Project to connect veterans with farmers and farming resources.

Project director Mimi Brooker describes their services as a “one-stop shop for those who have served and are in ag or wish to be in ag.”

Fertile Valley Farms' Tammy Preble. (Photo courtesy Veteran Farmer Project)
Army veteran Tammy Preble

Specifically, the Troops to Tractors program matches veterans who want to get into farming with successful local farm mentors. The relationships range from casual farm visits to a paid internships. “[The] mentor farmer is getting a really solid employee … someone with a proven set of skills who is dedicated,” Brooker said.

The Project curates a website with information about agricultural job opportunities and ways to secure business funding and educational programs in agriculture. A map of 26 veteran-owned farms and agribusinesses offers another resource for aspiring farmers.

Last weekend, Troops to Tractors held their first Farm Trail tour. Eight veteran-owned farms opened their doors to the public, including  Fertile Valley Farms, which was started by Army veteran Tammy Preble and her husband.

“Veterans considering transitioning into farming need to understand that much like life in the military, life on a farm is non-stop—almost like a constant deployment,” says Preble. In order to succeed, she adds,  “Your family has to be understanding of the time demands and demands of the livestock taking precedence over everything else.”

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman 

Edible Flint Sows Seeds for a Healthy Future

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IT’s A BEAUTIFUL day in Flint, Michigan. The sky is clear, flowers are in bloom and the volunteer gardeners in the edible flint Demonstration Garden are hard at work. Mike Roose is watering pepper plants in the raised-bed gardens. Scott Poinsett is trimming the garden perimeter, and Garden Manager Ginny Farah is harvesting crops for neighborhood residents. By the time they are done, the community garden will look its best in preparation for the evening’s food garden tour.

The Flint Food Garden Tour, which attracted 200 paying participants in late July, is edible flint’s signature annual event. For the past nine years, garden fans have toured the city’s community, church and private gardens in celebration of the vibrant food-gardening culture in the “Vehicle City.”

“Gardening here goes back 100 years or more,” says MSU Extension Community Food Systems Educator Terry McLean. In addition to her role on edible flint’s Leadership Board, she is the liaison between edible flint and MSU Extension.

Edible flint has existed as a network with workgroups since 2009, but it wasn’t until 2014 that it became a true nonprofit with an advisory board. “We support people who want to garden, we engage interested gardeners and we inspire people to garden,” says Garden Starters Training Coordinator Micah Williams, one of edible flint’s three paid employees.

edible flint demonstration garden

The most visible result of edible flint’s work is the demonstration garden located at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Begole Street across from the Hurley Medical Center. Employees from Hurley created the garden and maintained it for a few years but then asked edible flint if they would take it over. Edible flint adopted the garden in 2014.

Volunteers are the fuel that feeds the demonstration garden. Garden managers Ginny Farah and Scott Poinsett work in the garden at least three mornings a week from April to October. “Between the two of us we put in a lot of volunteer hours, but we really enjoy it,” Farah says. In addition to edible flint regulars, volunteer groups from Whole Foods and Michigan State University have lent a hand this year.

Most of the produce grown in the garden goes to people living in the surrounding neighborhoods. Last year, in spite of a prolonged drought, the demonstration garden donated 1,500 pounds of produce to community members. “Community gardens are meant to share,” says McLean. “It’s been an amazing outreach.”

On distribution days, edible flint volunteers fill plastic bags with a variety of the day’s harvest. The produce they grow includes watermelon, tomatoes, okra, squash, collard greens and herbs. Farah says she likes to introduce a new vegetable each season. This year, they are growing long beans, a specialty of Asian gardeners.

People trickle in to take the plastic bags of produce hanging on the garden fence. “We’ve gotten to know quite a few people who live in the neighborhood,” Farah says. She specifically plants okra for one neighbor, and McLean recalls the grandmother who said because of the garden, her entire family was eating healthy food that summer.

The Flint Demonstration Garden donated 1,500 pounds of produce to the community this year.”

In Flint, fresh produce can be difficult to find. In the past few years, several major grocery stores have closed their doors and left the city, and many of the city’s low-income residents don’t have a car to drive to the remaining places that do sell fruits and vegetables.

“I think that gardening empowers people. Growing your own food is an essential skill, especially in a community where there are no chain grocery stores,” Williams says.

To make food gardening affordable, edible flint sells highly subsidized garden starters kits. For $15, a beginning gardener gets 44 live plants, a bag of seed potatoes and 19 types of organic seed. The kit is designed to feed a family of four with a 1,500-square-foot garden. “It allows just about anybody the ability to garden,” McLean says.

The program also offers low-cost soil testing, tilling and compost delivery. According to Williams, in 2017 edible flint sold 330 kits, delivered 377 yards of compost, tilled 27 gardens and distributed 58 water filters.

To ensure success in urban food gardening, edible flint runs an 11-week garden starters class. Drawing on experts in the community, the class covers soil science, pest management, vegetable and fruit production and seed starting, among other topics. The class also includes an introduction to land access and food accessibility in Flint. “Every week has a new class topic and a new teacher,” Williams says.

Key partnerships with the Ruth Mott Foundation, MSU Extension, the Michigan Food and Farming Systems and the Flint Farmers’ Market have contributed to edible flint’s growth. Part of edible flint’s strategic plan is to increase commercial food production and provide support for food entrepreneurs in the city and its surroundings. For a city with 42% of its population living below the poverty level, economic opportunities, food sovereignty and increased access to healthy food are just what the community needs.

Published in edibleWOW Magazine | Photos by Chris Stranad

Refugees in Cleveland Gain Language and Job Skills

| ChrisHardmanWriter

ACROSS THE Cuyahoga River from downtown Cleveland, men and women dressed in brightly colored clothing harvest vegetables from tidy rows of plantings. Multilingual conversations take place in Hindi, Nepali, Somali and English. With the Cleveland skyline as their backdrop, these refugee farmers nurture their connection to the land and to their new home.

In 2010, the Cleveland nonprofit The Refugee Response created The Refugee Empowerment Agricultural Program (REAP) to support resettled refugees in the Cleveland area through farming. During the year-long program, men and women from Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Burundi, Myanmar, and Somalia learn language and job skills as they work the six-acre Ohio City Farm—one of the largest urban farms in the nation.

This year, REAP expects to harvest 22,000 pounds of produce from the farm’s hoop houses and fields. The Refugee Response leases nearly five acres of the Ohio City Farm from the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority.

Since Donald Trump took office in January, the United States has become a less friendly place for people born in other countries. But various community groups across the U.S. have long supported refugees—often through efforts focused on agriculture.

In addition to REAP in Cleveland, projects such as Plant It Forward in Houston, New Roots in San Diego, and the Refugee Urban Agriculture Initiative in Philadelphia have found that refugees and urban farming are a good fit, and despite the hostility at the federal level, they remain committed to their work.

“We did a survey, and 80 percent of people who were coming as refugees have some sort of agricultural background,” said Refugee Response Director of Agricultural Empowerment Margaret Fitzpatrick.

That makes a farm an ideal entry into the American work force. In addition, Fitzpatrick explained, people are coming from all kinds of backgrounds, often with a history of violence and trauma. Refugees find farm work comforting and therapeutic.

REAP graduate Lar Doe has been working for REAP since 2012. Although he was born in Myanmar, Doe grew up in a refugee camp on the border of Myanmar and Thailand.

After spending nearly 15 years there, he was granted permission to move to the U.S. in 2010. His first jobs were in Kentucky and Iowa, but then he accepted an invitation from the Refugee Response to relocate to Cleveland. He was one of REAP’s first refugee employees.

“It is a diverse city. You can find many different people from different countries,” he said. “I feel like the local people here understand about the world.”

Cleveland has a long history of welcoming refugees; since 1983, 17,000 displaced people have settled in the city. To better serve Cleveland’s increasing population of refugees, 16 organizations pooled their resources to form the Refugee Services Collaborative of Greater Cleveland in 2011. Collaborative members come from county refugee-resettlement agencies, area school systems, healthcare providers, and community and faith-based organizations.

REAP’s current cohort includes 10 refugees from Congo, South Sudan, and Myanmar.

As part of the program, trainees spend 28 hours each week on the farm and 12 hours in the classroom learning English as a Second Language. Farm work includes planting, seeding, harvesting, packing and delivery. For their farm and classroom time, they earn $9 an hour.

“The farm provides a step into employment in an area where people are comfortable (farming) with a skill set that people already have (farming),” Fitzpatrick said. Graduates of the program have gone on to work in the food service industry or been hired to work for REAP itself.

REAP also teaches participants about U.S. workplace culture. “The idea of being to work on time, calling a manager if you are sick, time sheet—those are things we take for granted being U.S. citizens, but these are skills that are not necessarily taught before they arrive,” Fitzpatrick said.

Doe talks about the differences in workplace culture: “[At home,] if you work and you get tired, you can rest, and if you feel OK, you can go back to work,” he said. “I always suggest to new refugees that they have to be patient, because the way that they work in their home country might be totally different than here.”

refugee

Located on the west side of the city, next to public housing and across the street from the city’s oldest farmers’ market, the farm is ideally positioned to help integrate refugees into the diverse fabric of American life.

“I’m very fortunate to have this job here, because this is an opportunity that I can get involved to the community and also learn more about the people and culture,” Doe said.

Refugees have the opportunity to practice English with visitors touring the farm, with Americans volunteering on the farm, with REAP staff, with members of REAP’s 60-person CSA, and with customers at the weekly farm stand.

Before coming to Cleveland, Doe worked at a meat packing plant. “The job I used to work before, it was hard to get involved in the country,” he said. “You only go to work and come back. You may never feel like it is your home.”

The community aspect of the program also appeals to Lachuman Nopeney, a 52-year-old refugee from Bhutan who spent 20 years in a refugee camp in Nepal and came to the U.S. in 2009 with no work experience and few English skills.

He worked at a restaurant in Milwaukee, where talking wasn’t encouraged. After going through REAP in 2016, however, he was hired by The Refugee Response to work on the farm.

“I’m happy,” he said with a broad smile. With the help of Refugee Response staff and other refugees, he is learning English. He likes his job of “working, joking, talking.”

“It’s more than a job,” said Refugee Response Executive Director Patrick Kearns. “The people in the program become like family to each other.”

According to Fitzpatrick, Cleveland is a diverse city that celebrates different cultures. As a result, The Refugee Response has formed solid partnerships with area restaurants including Great Lakes Brewing Company, Urban Farmer, and The Flying Fig.

In addition to buying produce, these and other local restaurants hold fundraising events, host dinners on the farm, and even employ REAP graduates. As one of the founders of the Ohio City Farm, the Great Lakes Brewing has a special interest in REAP and currently pays REAP to grow vegetables, herbs, and hops on the restaurant’s one-acre parcel of the Ohio City Farm.

“We’re very fortunate to be surrounded by a lot of local food restaurants here in Cleveland,” Fitzpatrick said.

Lar Doe says he is proud of his job. “I want to do something for the community,” he explains. As a refugee and a relatively newcomer to the country, his options to help build community may be limited. “English is the big issue for me. This [farm] is about the only thing we can do to make the city proud.”

Published on Civil Eats by Chris Hardman | Photos courtesy of The Refugee Response

Lunch Express serves rural kids in Tennessee

| ChrisHardmanWriter

IN AN APARTMENT complex in Greene County, Tennessee, children wait excitedly for the arrival of the Lunch Express bus. The apartment manager sets up picnic tables in the shade, while Christy Lunday brings out a small table for the little kids. Lunday, a mother of four, has used the Lunch Express for three years. She has a job and makes just enough money to exempt her from government food assistance programs, but she still needs help feeding her family. “There is not a lot of money left for food after bills,” she said. “[The Lunch Express bus] really helped me out a lot.”

She explains that for some of the children in the neighborhood, the Lunch Express provides them with the biggest meal of the day. “It does have an impact on some families more than others,” she said. “The need is definitely there. I think it’s awesome.”

With summer break just around the corner, many low-income parents are worried about feeding their children through the summer months. During the school year, free and reduced school breakfasts and lunches help these families tremendously, but once the summer comes, already strapped-for-cash families can see their food bills double. The strain is extra on families in rural areas who do not live close to Boys & Girls Clubs or schools that offer summer lunch programs.

The Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee, which serves some 3,000 square miles across eight counties in the northeastern part of the state, has come up with an innovative way to provide lunch for kids in the country during the summer. The Lunch Express, first developed in 2012, delivers lunch five days a week to children in remote areas of the region using four refurbished school buses.  In rural Northeast Tennessee, one in four children lives at or below the poverty level, which translates to a lot of hungry kids. Compounding the problem, many of the families the local food bank serves live in sparsely populated areas or tucked away on winding mountain roads.

“Without our program a lot of them would be going without meals,” explained Heidi Davis, the summer feeding service coordinator for Second Harvest. “A lot of parents talk about skipping meals during the summer.” The Lunch Express provides the largest meal of the day for many low-income kids.

Throughout the nation, school districts use money from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Summer Food Service Program to fund free breakfast and lunch programs for children in the summer. Other USDA sponsored summer lunch programs are hosted by Boys and Girls Clubs, libraries, churches, YMCAs and social service agencies. But the problem of reaching kids in rural areas, with no access to transportation, remains. The cost of transporting food over long distances to a widely dispersed rural population requires additional funds that many summer food service programs simply don’t have.

“Our program costs a bit more to operate than we actually get reimbursed [by the government for],” Davis said. “The mobile program is expensive, but we are committed to it because we know 80 percent of children that qualify for free and reduced lunch are at home during the summer and not in a summer program like at the YMCA where a traditional summer meals site would be.”

Each Lunch Express bus makes between eight to 10 stops a day and reaches in total about 100 kids. Combined with Second Harvest’s mobile food pantry and summer food service program, Davis estimates that the food bank feeds 1,000 kids a day. “We know we’re only hitting about 11-12 percent of kids in our area,” Davis said. She explains that the food bank is working to expand the Lunch Express’ route and on reaching kids in remote mountain areas.

Because the Lunch Express is primarily funded through the USDA, the program must meet a set of government guidelines. For example, lunch sites must be in a school system where more than 50 percent of students receive free and reduced lunch and participants must be 18 years old or younger and must eat the entire meal as a group at the site. Nutrition guidelines dictate that each meal must contain one cup of milk, ¾ cup of fruits and vegetables, one serving of grain, and one serving of meat or meat alternative.

The Second Harvest Food Bank of Northeast Tennessee also uses private funds, from donations and fundraisers, to send food boxes home for the kids’ weekend lunches.

“We’ve done a ton of advocacy to make the program work better for families in rural communities, and we’ve used private funds to operate demonstration pilots to see if we can feed kids in different ways and still operate within the reimbursement amount,” Davis said.

Christina Meanyhan, a mother of six, lives in the same apartment complex as Christy Lunday. She stocks up on food throughout the school year to help her get through the lean summer months. She relies on $741 a month in food assistance to feed herself and her three children. Once the summer comes, her food bill will nearly double—from $500 to $900 a month—when her three oldest children, who spend the school year at their dad’s house in Florida, return for the summer.

All six of her children are eligible for the Lunch Express. “I can’t even explain to you how much money that saves me,” she said.

She is currently unemployed because her car broke down, and she doesn’t have money to fix it. “I was doing fine,” she said, but no car means no job. In rural Tennessee, there is nowhere to walk to work and no public transportation.

The Lunch Express is an important part the Meanyhan family’s day. “[The bus] parks right outside my window,” she said. “From that first day on, they are looking out the window for that lunch bus.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

How Flint is Using Good Food to Combat Lead Poisoning

| ChrisHardmanWriter

WHEN NEWS OF the Flint water crisis went viral in January, water donations and pledges of support came from around the world, and suddenly a community that was long ignored by the outside world was the subject of national news reports. The story was alarming: hundreds of people had been exposed to lead simply by using the water in their homes.

When the city of Flint began using water from the Flint River in April 2014 and forwent treating it for corrosion, the move resulted in corroded pipes, lead in the public water supply, and a public health crisis. Ingesting lead is dangerous for anyone, but it is especially damaging to children and pregnant women, with long-term effects including behavioral, learning, and hearing problems, delayed fetus growth, and harm to the brain, kidneys, and other essential organs.

Research shows, however, that good nutrition can help mitigate the impact on children with elevated lead levels. Like calcium, lead is stored in the bones, and it can remain there—eventually leaking out into the bloodstream, continuing the exposure internally—for months or years after the external exposure stops. Fortunately, foods low in fat and high in vitamin C and iron combat lead poisoning by decreasing the metal’s absorption by the body. Calcium also decreases lead’s negative impacts by helping prevent it from leaving the bones.

With that in mind, members of Flint’s food community doubled their efforts to get healthy food into the homes of Flint residents.

The hub of Flint’s food community is the year-round Flint farmers’ market, an indoor bazar conveniently located across the street from the MTA bus terminal. While the market has long purveyed high-quality fruits and vegetables and offered cooking demos, exercise classes, and health programs, it took on a new mission earlier this year: getting foods that combat lead poisoning into the homes of Flint residents.

Along with the Hurley Wellness Center and Michigan State University Extension, the market created a series of cooking classes that teach participants to prepare meals with the lead-fighting foods.

It just happens that most of the foods that help with lead exposure are just your basic healthy foods,” says Chef Sean Gartland, market cooking class lead and culinary director of Flint Food Works, an incubator program also at the market.

Gartland rotates teaching duties with Hurley dietitians and MSU educators. All of the classes are free of charge, and each participant goes home with a bag of produce, a nutrition guide, and recipes designed to reduce the effects of lead exposure.

One of Gartland’s recent classes featured a brown rice dish with grilled chicken, kale, and black beans. “We try to drive home why you would add [those ingredients] to a recipe for flavor and also for the effect of mitigating lead in your body,” Gartland says. Since June of this year, 258 people have attended 24 of these special cooking classes in the farmers’ market demonstration kitchen.

Various other community groups have joined the lead-fighting effort as well. Last summer, the market hosted a program sponsored by the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) and the non-profit FlintNOW. On the last day of school, 8,000 Flint public school children received “nutrition backpacks” containing a mini basketball, information about nutrition and lead, and three $5 gift certificates to the Flint farmers’ market. Additional funding from the Detroit Pistons matched each $5 gift certificate with another $5—bringing the total to $30 worth of free food.

It’s clear that families have bought more produce because these incentives. Gartland says $35,000 worth of NBPA gift certificates have been redeemed, which translates to 7,000 individual gift certificates for 2,333 kids. An additional $27,500 worth of Pistons gift certificates have been cashed in as well.

The national non-profit Fair Food Network (FFN), another organization with a track record in Flint, has also stepped up its offerings to help combat lead poisoning through diet.

In 2011, the FFN introduced the Double Up Food Bucks program, which enabled low-income Flint residents receiving SNAP benefits (formerly known as food stamps) to double their healthy food budget. If a shopper spends $20 in SNAP benefits on produce at the grocery store or farmers’ market, for example, they earn another $20 in food bucks to spend on more fruits and vegetables.

“We were already in Flint doing work in farmers’ markets and grocery stores when we started hearing about the exposure that families and kids had to lead,” says FFN’s President and CEO Oran Hesterman. “Medical experts [told] us one of the only ways they know to mitigate the long-term impacts of lead exposure is to make sure that those who have had that exposure have a high nutritional level of iron and calcium.”

To build the program’s capacity to fight lead poisoning, Fair Food expanded to include milk as an eligible item and moved the program beyond the farmers’ market and a few grocery stores to additional retail outlets that sell fresh produce. (Because neither the farmers’ market vendors nor the grocery store partners offer produce grown in the city or affected areas, lead-contaminated produce is not a concern.)

Additionally, FFN hired a company called Epic Technology Solutions to develop the technology needed for shoppers to seamlessly go from venue to venue spending and earning food bucks.

Flint resident Liberty Bell uses Double Up Food Bucks at both the farmers’ market and the grocery store. “Buy one and get double back, how can you beat that?” she asks. “That extra $20 or $40 in your pocket is awesome.” She says the extra money helps to provide a healthier lifestyle for her and her young son.

Because the original Double Up program was underutilized—only 3,000 of 40,000 eligible people took advantage of it in 2015—FFN launched a targeted advertising campaign using billboards, bus signs, radio and TV commercials, and ads on social media. So far, the results have been positive. Since then, FFN reports that 4,000 people have used the program since June 2016, a 76 percent increase in enrollment compared to the same time period last year.

It takes a lot of people to get a buzz going in a community about a program like this,” Hesterman says. “I’m not sure what it’s going to take to make [Double Up] a daily habit, but that is our goal.”

The Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, which works on increasing access to healthy food in 22 Michigan counties, including Genesse County, where Flint is located, has also gotten involved. In partnership with the Michigan Department of Public Health, the food bank operates a mobile food pantry that hauls truckloads of healthy food to Flint families.

Since March, the “Flint Nutrition Mobile Pantry,” which is supported by a $28 million state appropriation, has brought tuna, potatoes, baked beans, cereal, apples, peppers, and tomatoes to religious institutions and neighborhood centers throughout Flint. This past September, the mobile pantry made 24 stops in 20 days.

“I think this is a wonderful example of neighbor helping neighbor to provide healthy food to families to mitigate the impact of lead,” says William Kerr, president of the Food Bank of Eastern Michigan, in a statement.

Kerr promised that the Food Bank will stick with Flint over the next 10 to 15 years to work through the after effects of lead exposure to the city’s children.

Now, as the Flint water crisis fades from the political spotlight and offers of help dwindle, members of Flint’s food community continue helping families get the good food they need—now more than ever.

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

Good Food Takes on the School Fundraiser

| ChrisHardmanWriter

OCTOBER IS NATIONAL Farm to School month. It’s one of those “take the pledge” times of year that catapults school fundraising season into overdrive. And with the designation comes all the familiar annual pressure to load the tables with goodies and buy whatever is on offer.

We’ve all been there. A co-worker or family member blindsides you with catalogues and order forms for candles you don’t need or cookies you don’t want. In a moment of weakness, you find yourself signed up for a giant tub of cheddar jalapeno popcorn chock-full of artificial ingredients..

But school fundraising is no longer the old-time cottage industry many of us remember, bolstered by the bake sale and door-to-door dollar chocolate bar pitch. It’s big, big business. According to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers (AFRDS), schools and other non-profits net $1.7 billion selling cookie dough, candy, popcorn and a variety of other food and non-food products. Schools depend on these fundraisers to purchase sports equipment, technology, and plan field trips.

At the same time, as cultural interest in—and government support of—healthier school lunch programs has grown, parents and educators have begun questioning why schools sanction the sale of high-fat, high-sugar processed food, especially in a nation with a childhood obesity rate of 17 percent and rising.

When Mark Abbott found himself faced with the annual school fundraising campaign, he dutifully supported his son, who sold $400 worth of candy and cookie dough to friends and family. But after Abbott’s son questioned why he was selling processed food his family never ate at home, Abbott was inspired. He thought, why not create a school fundraising program that offers healthy, locally made products including honey, jam, pasta, granola, and seasonal produce?

In 2013, Abbott did just that, and introduced FarmRaiser—an online and mobile market—to schools in Flint, Michigan. With his fundraising model, not only can schools raise money, they can also support local businesses that produce healthy food. “Parents are responding to it in a big way,” Abbott says. “We are disrupting an industry.” Since 2013, FarmRaiser has managed 150 fundraising campaigns, become active in 22 states, and helped raise $270,000.

With a traditional school fundraising program, a school can expect to net 20-50 percent of sales. FarmRaiser, on the other hand, preserves that net percentage for schools (by charging a flat rate of 10 percent of sales, Farmraiser guarantees at least a 45 percent return to the school, though the typical campaign returns, on average, 51 percent to the cause), but also extends the support to local food artisans and farmers. “Our entire value proposition is leaving 85 percent of the money in the community,” Abbott says.

FarmRaiser tailors the products to the school’s location, so most of the vendors are truly “local,” and live within 30 miles of the school. For people who want to support the school but aren’t interested in receiving products, FarmRaiser offers a community basket donation. Half of every cash donation goes to the school while the other half goes to a local food bank or homeless shelter. According to Abbott, 10 percent of sales are community basket donations.

FarmRaiser works with 150 food vendors who offer more than 500 different products. Abbott explains that although the vendors sell their products at 50 percent less than retail, they gain tangible benefits with very little risk. FarmRaiser shares customer information with their vendors, allowing them to reach out to potential customers they know have already tried their product.

“For our suppliers that sell direct to consumers in their community, the cost of acquiring that potential customer is the margin [they] would have made in retail sales,” Abbott says. He estimates that 15,000 people have tried local products with FarmRaiser so far.

Al Dente Pasta Company in Whitmore Lake, Michigan has participated in 16 FarmRaiser campaigns since 2013. It sells its products in a bundle: two bags of pasta and one sauce. “For us it isn’t a financial gain. It was more wanting to support something really interesting that I thought served an important purpose,” says owner Monique Deschaine. “The model is a real win-win. You’re showcasing local ingredients. You’re allowing schools or organizations to fundraise. And you are giving people what they want.”

Like any online fundraising platform, FarmRaiser’s business model depends largely on how well its technology functions. And for users of other similar platforms like Kickstarter or GoFundme, the interface and “campaign” process will feel relatively familiar: a dashboard design that’s friendly to users who sit anywhere on the tech-savvy spectrum, and a mobile app that replaces order forms and processes payment by check, cash or credit card. Around 45 percent of FarmRaiser transactions are electronic, Abbott says, and he expects that number to grow.

For schools that still want to use paper, brochures and order forms can be printed from the FarmRaiser website, and schools can input their own orders into their custom campaign pages. Abbott says 75 percent of the campaign set-up and maintenance is automated, and his team is working on the final 25 percent.

But getting the technology up to speed is really only part of the equation. “Our biggest challenge is finding schools that want to do healthy fundraising,” Abbott says. Approaching schools to give a sales pitch is very expensive and time consuming. So instead, FarmRaiser has developed partnerships with like-minded organizations such as Slow Food USA, Food Corps, and Whole Kids Foundation. Abbott estimates that the FarmRaiser message can reach as many as 1 million people on social media through posts from its partners.

Meanwhile, the billion-dollar school fundraising market provides an endless–and annually renewable– source of growth opportunities. The company currently staffs three full-time and one part-time employee, along with five engineering contract workers. So far, investors have provided the funding for start-up and operating costs. And as FarmRaiser continues to automate campaign management, the profitability of each campaign increases.

FarmRaiser is harnessing the power of good food rather than irrelevant junk, and in turn making more money for schools. Their technology is not that new, and neither — obviously — is the idea of healthy food. What it is doing is extending at scale the intangible benefits of a fundraiser beyond the institution and into the community.

Published on The New Food Economy by Chris Hardman 

Flint MTA Provides Rides to Grocery Stores

| ChrisHardmanWriter

BEFORE FLINT, MICHIGAN became synonymous with poisoned water, residents had another major health concern: limited access to healthy foods. Residents were shocked in the spring of 2015 when two of Flint’s major east side grocery stores, part of the Meijer and Kroger chains, closed their doors. The city had already lost a Kroger several months earlier on the northwest side of town.

“The public was wondering, ‘How will people get their groceries?’ There wasn’t a grocery store within four to five miles,” says Derrek Williams, manager of Fixed Route Transportation Services for Flint’s Mass Transportation Authority (MTA). In a city where42 percent of residents live below the poverty level, many households can’t afford a car to drive to a grocery store across town or outside the city limits.

“Our staff met to talk about what we could do to help people,” says Edgar H. Benning, the Flint MTA’s general manager and CEO, who grew up on the east side of Flint. “We had a real challenge on our hands.”

Last April, Benning and his team introduced a new bus route serving east-side neighborhoods called Rides to Groceries, which takes passengers to the east-side grocery stores, Kroger in the northeast and to Walmart in the southeast. (While the bus also stops near a new grocery store called Fresh Choice Market, few riders patronize the store because of its higher prices.) To make the bus affordable for as many people as possible, the MTA reduced the normal bus rate by half, to just $0.85 each way.

The new bus route took a while to catch on. “The people really didn’t know how to receive it, because no one tailors a bus for a neighborhood,” Williams says. “Our biggest challenge has been getting the people out to ride and understanding that this ride is set up for the grocery store.”

The MTA, which employs a staff of 470 people, launched a publicity campaign by handing out flyers, talking to block clubs, and knocking on doors. Special bus signs with grocery carts dot the route, and recently, the bus was wrapped with a colorful image that includes a shopping cart, fresh produce, and contact information.

In the early days of the new route, an MTA bus driver noticed one rider who was taking the bus almost every day and bringing home only one or two small bags. When the driver told Benning about the woman, he realized she was shopping every day because she couldn’t carry a week’s worth of groceries from the bus stop to her home.

Wondering if other riders had the same problem, Benning sent several of his staff into the neighborhoods to interview passengers. They found that some people had trouble maneuvering from the bus stop to their homes, Benning says.

In response, he decided to develop another option: “We offered another level of service, which would allow people to go from their home to the store,” he said. For $2.25 each way, residents living off the main route can call and schedule pickups and drop-offs at their homes. Similar to the bus route, the call-in service, which relies on a separate vehicle, is available all day, Monday through Saturday.

According to Benning, ridership has grown from 235 people the first month to about 900 per month more recently. “Not only do we have people who use it daily to go shopping, but we also have people who work at those stores and use it,” he says.

Frequent bus rider and Walmart employee Violetta Allen, who used to walk more than two miles both ways to shop and go to work, says she finds the new bus service helpful. “I used to walk from Center Road to work at Walmart,” she says. “The shopper bus brings me all the way out here. Now I don’t have to carry my groceries so far when I get off of work.”

The MTA plans to expand the service to the other side of town and introduce call-in program riders to grocery minibuses. Benning says the MTA has to adapt to the needs of an isolated and aging population. “In some cases, they go to the corner drug stores and are living off what’s on those the shelves,” he says.

The Rides to Groceries bus costs $6,000 per month to operate. Because the fares don’t offset that new cost, Benning has sought funding from the community and from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So far, the Kroger Foundation donated $15,000; Walmart gave $1,000; and United Way of Genesee County gave $5,000.

“If we wait until the money’s there, we will never get it,” Benning says. “Let’s put it out [there], make it work, and figure out how to fund it.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman

 

Detroit Food Academy Prepares Teens for Jobs

| ChrisHardmanWriter

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Hassan Amaleki is on the fast track to a successful career in the food industry. By the time he graduated from high school in 2015, Amaleki had worked for a thriving food business, completed an entrepreneurial training program, and led the launch of a successful new product.

Amaleki gained these experiences through the Detroit Food Academy (DFA), an after-school training program for high school kids ages 13-20 that gives young people hands-on, real world experiences in developing, marketing, and selling artisan food products. Students work with mentor businesses, including Slow Jams, Friends of Detroit Potato Chips, Cynt-Sational Popcorn, and Brooklyn Street Local, to learn culinary and business skills.

After completing the 25-week program, graduates earn a certificate in food entrepreneurship, and have access to a network of potential employers and an opportunity to enter a summer employment program. Best of all, the program is completely free.

The unemployment rate among Detroit youth is alarmingly high at 30 percent compared to the city-wide unemployment rate of 6.5 percent. While the DFA has only just begun to track the activities of their 800 graduates, they do know that of the 44 students who completed the past two summer programs, 90 percent were hired by their mentors or the DFA. That’s 40 young people with new jobs.

“That confidence our students are building is our main focus,” says DFA Executive Director Jen Rusciano. “Food is just the [most fun] way to do that.” Rusciano, along with Noam Kimelman and Amy Berkhoudt, founded the DFA at Detroit’s Cesar Chavez High School in 2011.

During the school year, the DFA runs as an after-school club that meets 1-2 days a week for a few hours. Hassan Amaleki joined when he was in ninth grade. “I found a program where I can make a whole bunch of different kinds of great food,” Amaleki says. “From then on I [thought], ‘wow this is a great program; I got to stick with it.’”

The DFA offers their program at eight high schools around Detroit, and around 200 students have joined the DFA this year. DFA staff use portable equipment to turn classrooms into kitchens for cooking demos and workshops. The meetings themselves are often driven by student interest. For example Amaleki loves preparing pasta dishes. “We always cook and we always eat,” says Rusciano.

At the beginning of the year, the students use a budget to plan field trips. DFA students have visited Detroit’s Eastern Market, one of the largest historic markets in the country; D-Town farm, an eight-acre urban farm run by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network; and small businesses, such as Sister Pie on the city’s East Side.

In the summer, the students work as interns with Detroit food companies, where they can pursue either a culinary or entrepreneurial path. “We try to walk the mentees through every aspect of running a business,” says Shannon Byrne, a DFA board member and the owner of Slow Jams in Detroit, where Amaleki worked. Byrne has been hosting DFA students since the program began. The students work with her on food production, selling at markets, sourcing ingredients, budgeting, inventory, and bookkeeping. Byrne sees the partnership as benefiting her business as well as the students.

“Teenagers come into an experience with a different perspective,” she says. “Some of the questions mentees have asked over the years really help you reflect on your own business and your values in your business.”

Students commit to one day a week with their food mentors. Amaleki learned to keep moving while at Slow Jams. “They taught me to get work done right away,” he says.

“We make it pretty clear that the students are there to both learn and help,” Rusciano says. “We only reach out to food businesses that have a triple bottom line vision, folks who see themselves contributing to the foundation of a broader community in addition to having a great business.”

In 2015, DFA launched Small Batch Detroit to give students more real world experience and to generate revenue outside of the grants that fund the program. Amaleki was part of a group of students that developed the DFA debut product called Mitten Bites, no-bake granola snacks with dark chocolate, peanut butter, and dried fruit. “We did a lot of research on it before we made it,” Amaleki says. “It’s something almost everybody has had before. Somebody’s mom or grandma made an energy bite that was also a snack.”

Mitten Bites have taken off. They are for sale at 30 locations, including the Eastern Market and Whole Foods. Once a week, Small Batch Director Jacob Schoenknecht, Amaleki, VISTA service member Margo Dalal and DFA students produce Mitten Bites in a rented commercial kitchen. The team recently doubled their production level from two batches of 600 bites each to four.

In addition to working in food, DFA graduates have gone on to pursue careers in fields such as education and nursing. And their experience with the DFA has given them an important head start. “It’s transformative,” Byrne says. “We can see the impact on all of the students that come through.”

Published on CivilEats by Chris Hardman