Curt Ellis Tells Blue Sky Funders Forum about Power of Food in Environmental Literacy

By Curt Ellis, FoodCorps CEO & Co-Founder

October is National Farm to School Month, a six-year-old celebration of programs around the country working to connect kids to healthy food through cooking, gardening, and lunch trays filled with food from local farms. The organization I’m proud to lead, FoodCorps, plays a role in these efforts, providing the AmeriCorps people power that fuels farm-to-school efforts in hundreds of schools each year.

If you were to ask many of our philanthropic supporters why FoodCorps is needed and what we achieve, they’d tell you we were founded to combat our nation’s runaway epidemics of obesity and diet-related disease, and that our secret sauce (other than homemade ranch dressing, of course) is that we’re good at getting kids––in our case, low-income children who are disproportionately held back from academic achievement and social mobility by inadequate nutrition––to eat their veggies.

But that’s only half true. Not because it’s disingenuous (it’s not), but because it’s incomplete.