This January and February, the Food Bank held volunteer trainings for CookShop, our series of nutrition and health education programs for adults as well as elementary and high school students. We were able to successfully train more than 200 volunteers in three trainings – and that’s almost four times the number of volunteers we had last year!
After being trained, these volunteers will be placed in one of two programs, CookShop Classroom or CookShop For Adults.
Some of the things the volunteers learned in the training were proper knife skills, how to engage 5-7 year olds in nutrition education, how certain plants grow, how to purchase nutritious food on a sustainable income and even a surprisingly delicious recipe involving celery, carrots, orange juice and mustard!
By mid-February, our new CookShop volunteers will be helping teach low-income adults and children about nutrition and healthy living across all five boroughs.
By doing so, these volunteers are helping the Food Bank achieve a key element of ending food poverty – increasing the health of our city. New York City's low-income neighborhoods suffer from a high incidence of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension – and CookShop is on the frontline of the Food Bank’s efforts to change this reality.
Part of the Food Bank’s suite of nutrition and health education programs, CookShop for Adults now aims to serve parents and guardians of the children who participate in CookShop Classroom. The new-and-improved course helps prepare adults with the information and resources they need to take the lessons their children learn at school and continue them right at their own kitchen tables.
The program works like this: participants meet for in-school workshops that complement the kids’ lessons on nutrition, food production and cooking. During the workshops, the adults learn healthy recipes, as well as nutrition-related topics including portion control, added sugars, food storage, reading food labels and making food substitutions.
In this way, we train participants to become nutrition educators for their loved ones, and provide them with the information and materials they need to conduct in-home workshops for their families.
When adults and kids are both excited about nutritious food and its benefits, the whole family will make a stronger commitment to healthy choices.
The Food Bank plans to feature CookShop for Adults participants here on Bank on It to give you a first-hand take of the effect of our new model…so stay tuned!
As I mentioned in my last letter here (A Year in Recession, Jan 15), 2009 was a hard year for the Food Bank For New York City and the New Yorkers we serve. While we anticipate that economic hardship will continue in 2010, as we look back at this past fall and early winter — our busiest time of year — all of us at the Food Bank are deeply inspired by how our supporters came together in these difficult times.
Our inspiration comes from the outpouring of support for the Food Bank’s 2009 NYC Goes Orange campaign, with more than 300 partners raising food, funds and public awareness for New Yorkers who struggle to get by. The season also saw the launch of the Adopt a Food Program initiative — a partnership between the Food Bank and Mayor Bloomberg’s NYC Service that will dramatically increase volunteer support across our food assistance network.
Also, we launched the 2009–2010 CookShop school year. These unique Food Bank programs bring nutrition education to elementary and high school students as well as adults, inspiring enthusiasm for healthy, affordable foods. [PLUS: Witness our health and nutrition education efforts first-hand in our CookShop video.] And the Food Bank’s 18th Annual Agency Conference brought together hundreds from the hunger relief community, along with elected officials to strategize and build strength for the coming year.
With 3.3 million New Yorkers currently experiencing difficulty affording the food they need, it is essential that we continue this momentum together. President Barack Obama has set a goal to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. We’re now five years from that target, and I invite you to invest in our future by helping us end food poverty.
As the Food Bank launched the CookShop Program’s 16th year this past fall, I was struck by how much the program has grown since a small team of dedicated staff at the Community Food Resource Center (CFRC), myself included, held the program’s first launch.
CFRC – which changed its name to FoodChange a few years before merging with the Food Bank – began a pilot program in 1994 under a United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) competitive grants program that was looking for innovative ways to improve the nutritional intake of low-income populations. Initially called the Central Harlem Collaborative Nutrition Education Program, CookShop was one of only a handful of programs in the country that was funded through these grants.
The goal of the initial program was to increase schoolchildren’s consumption of nutritious food and to reach parents and others in the Central Harlem community through cooking workshops held at community organizations and housing projects. CFRC developed elementary-school curricula and teacher-training materials that focused on hands-on, food and nutrition activities for the classroom. After just one year in a few Central Harlem schools, it was clear to CFRC that the program had incredible potential to promote healthy eating in New York City’s low-income neighborhoods – areas that often suffer from a high incidence of diet-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity and hypertension.
As readers of this blog know, our elementary-school and adult programs are now known respectively as CookShop Classroom and CookShop for Adults. Additionally, CookShop has now expanded to include EATWISE, our CookShop Program for Teens.
And the biggest accomplishment? Altogether, the Food Bank’s CookShop Programs are expected to reach more than 14,000 children, teens and adults throughout the five boroughs this school year.
Longtime child nutrition advocate Agnes Molnar was Director of the Child Nutrition Unit at Community Food Resource Center (CFRC; later FoodChange) from 1981 to 2003, where her advocacy was instrumental in convincing the city to implement the first pilot Universal School Lunch program (using USDA’s Provision 2), to provide free school breakfasts to all public school students, and to expand the Summer Food Service Program to include city parks, swimming pools and public housing developments. Agnes designed and received USDA funding to implement the model nutrition education program for food stamp-eligible populations that evolved into CookShop. As co-founder of Community Food Advocates, Agnes is now working on a campaign to make school meals free to all New York City public school students.
While catching up on my podcasts last weekend, I learned about a teacher at New York City’s Hunter College High School, named Heather Hanemann, who developed a curriculum to teach economics using excerpts from Planet Money — National Public Radio’s radio program and blog that aims to explain labyrinthine economic issues to the layman. The program’s hosts were pleased and impressed to see their efforts extended to educate teenagers about issues that many adults find difficult to grasp.
Being an employee of the Food Bank For New York City, whose CookShop Program educates elementary and high school students, as well as adults, about nutrition and healthy diets, I felt encouraged learning about others’ efforts to educate youth about issues that have a huge potential to help them later in life — whether they are confronted with an overabundance of low-cost, unhealthy food options or the difficult task of navigating their financial future.
Helping to spread the benefits of her efforts, Heather Hanemann graciously allowed Planet Money to post her curriculum materials to their blog, to be downloaded and used by other teachers. Happy learning!
This year, almost two hundred volunteers will be doing their best to spur volunteering throughout New York City, and I am happy to count myself as one of them. The project that has brought us all together is the NYC Civic Corps, founded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Our goal is to harness the power of New York’s population and focus it toward improving the city.
Myself and the close to 200 members of the Corps’s inaugural class have been assigned in small teams to about sixty public agencies and non-profit organizations throughout the five boroughs. For the next year, our jobs are designed to “pay it forward” while helping to create new, or develop existing, volunteer programs. Through doing this, the Civic Corps aims to strengthen our city’s network of volunteer programs and engage more New Yorkers in meaningful service, creating lasting changes in New York City
The Civic Corps is affiliated with Americorps VISTA, a national poverty reduction program; however it is unique and groundbreaking in its scale and focus. The corps is the first Americorps program with the mission to improve civic engagement throughout an entire city. At the same time, it is also the first program to foces on several local needs — including health, education and emergency preparedness. The ultimate goal for the Civic Corps is to create a model volunteer program to be adopted in cities across the nation.
Having been assigned to the Food Bank For New York City, myself and two other Civic Corps members have been given an incredible opportunity to help work towards the Food Bank’s goals. Be it childhood nutrition, tax assistance or improving community kitchens around the city, we have an opportunity to add our own small contribution to the greater good of New York City, the Food Bank and the Civic Corps.
Stay tuned for more on my role as a Civic Corps member at the Food Bank next month!
Here are a few things that we’ve been reading around the office recently. Are there any stories you’d like to share? Leave a link in the comments!
The USDA projects free and reduced price lunches to reach a 41-year high for the 2009–10 school year, McClatchy reports.
Daily Dish, the LA Times food blog, writes about Food Bank partner Whole Foods and the “Renegade Lunch Lady” teaming up to help improve the quality of school lunches.
In the New York Times Magazine, David Leonhart discusses the policy implications of approaching obesity as a serious health risk like smoking. While we certainly don’t condone any form of employment discrimination — one rather extreme example — the article provides an outline for how to reshape the fight against obesity.
In an NPR story about migrant children’s health in China, they explore healthy eating in schools as a tool to better not only physical health, but also school performance.
With the beginning of the school year quickly approaching, the Food Bank For New York City has begun a pilot program to solicit and accept donations of school supplies. The school supplies will be distributed to elementary-school age children through the food programs in our citywide network.
Recently, Target stepped up and donated a $1,000 gift card for the purchase of school supplies. So, the other week, I made the trip out to the Target in College Point, Queens. After locating our most requested item, I loaded my first red shopping cart with 225 twelve-packs of crisp, new #2 pencils.
While filling my second and third shopping carts with 450 composition notebooks, 225 packs of crayons, and handfuls of erasers and rulers, shoppers began to notice what must have seemed to them the absurdly large quantity of school supplies I was removing from the bins and shelves. With curious looks, a few shoppers asked me why I was taking so many supplies. I explained Target’s generous donation and the Food Bank’s plan to distribute the supplies to families visiting our network programs.
The shoppers’ responses were very supportive and appreciative, as many acknowledged that children need these supplies to succeed in school. Two shoppers I spoke with happened to be school teachers — who confirmed the need for the supplies I was loading into the carts. A testament to this need, these teachers were actually there to pick up miscellaneous supplies to keep in their desks for students who might not have any — most likely making the purchases out of their own pockets.
Special thanks to Target manager Hamid Tabibzada and his friendly staff — especially Melissa, who helped me navigate the four shopping carts of supplies through the store. Thanks to Target’s donation we were able to distribute supplies to 225 young students! What a great way to begin the school year.
It’s true, but unfortunately not every day. Over the last few weeks the CookShop team has been testing out new recipes for our CookShop Classroom program for elementary school. Because so many participating schools have been with us for many years, we try to update our recipes every year in order to keep students (and their teachers) excited about cooking. The pancakes were made by CookShop Classroom Manager Jennifer Byrd, though all of the CookShop staff helped out with recipe development.
Of course, these were not regular, Saturday morning pancakes, but whole wheat pancakes with spiced apples. The office was filled with the sweet smell of caramelized apples, enough so that employees from every department wandered in for a taste. The excitement that flowed through the office was very similar to the energy in elementary classrooms when our students try something new. Everyone gave their feedback so the CookShop staff could react and improve the recipes.
Though the last two weeks have focused on apples and wheat, we are also testing new collard green, lettuce, cauliflower, bean and carrot recipes. In all of our CookShop programs, we find that many people don’t like vegetables because they had them cooked poorly in the past. Developing easy, healthy, appealing recipes is the quickest way to encourage our participants to give these foods another try and bring them into their own kitchens.
Do you have any simple, healthy recipes based on our CookShop foods? Please share!
In July, the Food Bank launched the “Change One Thing” ad campaign, aimed at encouraging healthy eating among our city’s teens. While cheap, fast junk food seems to be everywhere, there is a common perception that eating healthy requires a wholesale lifestyle change.
Our ads promote the idea that you can lead a healthier life by Changing One Thing. Craving soda? Try water today. Skip those mini doughnuts this time and grab that orange! The Food Bank is also asking all New Yorkers to take our Change One Thing pledge — and help us move toward a healthier New York.
Our summer students from EATWISE, the Food Bank's CookShop program for high school students, are taking the lead! Read what they are pledging to change in their diets below. Great ideas!
Farhat Ludi
“One thing I can change is to avoid fast food and eat healthy food every day. Also I can do more exercise to be healthy in myself.
Hajera Ahmed
“One thing that I could change is to stop getting fatty foods out. Now I am trying to eat health food. I think I’m changing.”
Solveig Nolasco
“I should eat more vegetables and less meat a day.”
Jean Tony
“One thing I changed was to stop eating McDonald’s.”
Asuka Li
“Change: eat more vegetables, less rice and meat.
Change: run for at least 20 min every day.”
Tyree W.
“One healthy change I’ve made recently is drinking about 80 oz of water every day.”
Leroy Walker
“I could stop eating junk food every day and eat fruit every day.”
Kiaralee
“One thing I can change about my diet is consuming more water instead of juice and soda. One change I have already made is changing my portion size.”
Don Snyder
“Shop at the green markets.”
Romona
“Stop drinking soda. Stop eating candy. Eat more breakfast.”
Celin Concepcion
“One thing that I could change in my diet is that whenever I go to the kitchen and get a snack I should get a fruit or vegetable, instead of donuts or chips and soda.
Kate Hindin, This Is Your Life
Kate Hindin said: Thank you Daniel for this wonderful homage! I will always cherish my time at the Food Bank. I got to...
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A Taste of Tennis
San Antonio Tennis Lessons said: Wow great food and a a great sport, what more could you ask for?
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Part of the Food Bank’s suite of 
absurdly large quantity of school supplies I was removing from the bins and shelves. With curious looks, a few shoppers asked me why I was taking so many supplies. I explained Target’s generous donation and the Food Bank’s plan to distribute the supplies to families visiting our network programs.
