Our Approach
Our school programs make a difference for kids every day.
Our Work in Schools
Since 2011, FoodCorps has grounded our work where kids spend most of their days (and eat most of their meals): schools. We place trained corps members directly in schools, where they teach students about growing, cooking, and trying new foods; support nutrition staff in putting local, nutritious, and kid-approved meals on the lunch line; and make nourishing food part of the whole school experience. We work in rural, urban, and Indigenous communities, and we set goals driven by what a district hopes to achieve through our partnership.
3x
increase in fruit and vegetable consumption
Every child could benefit from this. Every child should have that experience: to dig in the dirt, to plant something and see it grow.
Barb Schmitz, Guidance Counselor
The FoodCorps difference
FoodCorps members bring nourishing food to life in all kinds of school communities. FoodCorps programming can include:
Hands-on cooking lessons, including skills like knife safety and kitchen clean-up
Taste tests where kids vote on the best-tasting preparation of a fruit or veggie
Starting and maintaining a school garden and harvesting the produce together
Field trips to local farms to learn more about where our food comes from
Developing lunch menus that move away from ultraprocessed foods toward more local, scratch-cooked options
Adapting cafeteria offerings to include recipes from students’ cultural backgrounds
Incorporating food into other subject areas, like math, science, and reading
Socioemotional learning activities about the importance of food in our families and histories
Family engagement events that connect lessons from the classroom to the kitchen table
