Donors and changemakers alike have a growing interest in food issues. The Chronicle of Philanthropy takes a look at FoodCorps and friends.
By Eden Stiffman
During a Food and Society conference six years ago hosted by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, documentary filmmaker Curt Ellis was taking a break in his hotel room, watching TV coverage of President Obama signing a law expanding AmeriCorps, when a light bulb went off in his head.
Mr. Ellis quickly gathered a few dozen people from the conference to discuss creating a “good-food” effort that would meet the new law’s directive to create AmeriCorps programs addressing childhood obesity.
“I realized this is the moment where we can put those young people out in the field in national-service positions connecting kids to healthy food in school,” he says. Two years earlier, visiting college campuses to promote his film King Corn, a takedown of industrialized agriculture, students had impressed him with their passion about food as a social-justice issue.
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