September 2023 Positive Change Recipient: Coalition for Healthy School Food
Contributed by: Amie Hamlin, Executive Director
The Coalition for Healthy School Food (CHSF) is a 501c3 non-profit that has been active in Ithaca since 2008. GreenStar and CHSF have partnered in a number of ways over the years, and as Executive Director and co-founder of CHSF, I am thrilled to have this opportunity to address the GreenStar community, which we have been a part of since the beginning!
CHSF was founded after successfully introducing and passing (unanimously) a New York State legislative resolution in 2004 that requested vegan options in school meals. We work with schools across the country with a focus on New York City and Ithaca which also serve as learning laboratories to help us help other schools.
A private version of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program (FFVSP) was an idea we proposed in a meeting at GreenStar which was a precursor group to GreenStar Community Projects, and GreenStar was a partner and supportive throughout. CHSF ran the FFVSP at BJM Elementary. Each day students had plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables in the classroom as a healthy snack. The principal at the time, Denise Gomber, said that it changed the culture of the school in several positive ways. I will always remember students excitedly eating thinly sliced raw beets as if they were potato chips and forgoing junk food snacks after a few bites during a party and instead choosing the vegetables. We ran the program from 2008 – 2010 before turning the program over to another non-profit.
Our next project in 2011 was to work with the cafeteria to introduce plant-based (vegan) main dishes. We worked together with the school district, Moosewood Restaurant, Cayuga Pure Organics, and students to create a recipe and enter it into a USDA contest. The resulting recipe, Fiesta Mexican Lasagna, was chosen to be featured in a USDA cookbook which was sent to schools across the country. Following this, we continued to create plant-based recipes in partnership with Moosewood that were used in the Ithaca City School District and shared with schools across the country, including all schools in New York State and California. The recipes are inspired by flavors from around the world. One way we promote the recipes is by conducting food tastings in the cafeteria which significantly increased the number of students choosing them.
Another way we promote the recipes is through a recipe-specific curriculum, called “Cool School Food in the Classroom”, and we have taught it in all of the elementary schools at one time or another. It features a slide show of different aspects of the culture the recipe is inspired from: people, architecture, transportation, nature, landscapes, animals, farmer’s markets, food, and more. Then students have a sensory experience where they see, touch, and smell the individual ingredients. This is followed by a taste testing of the recipe provided by the cafeteria, and finally, an inquiry-based discussion about the power of plants.
We also promote the recipes by teaching how to make them in after-school cooking classes, which we have taught in most of the elementary schools.
An activity that we did during the pandemic which was a huge and very satisfying effort was to remotely teach about 190 students in the sixth grade Family and Consumer Science classes at Boynton. We did this over two semesters, with 100 students one semester and 90 the other. Each semester it was 3 separate classes, and each class had 9 or 10 sessions, so we taught 57 individual classes. They included cooking demos for hummus, oat milk, banana ice cream, crispy tofu bites, and more; classes on diet and disease; three classes on food equity; and the impact of our food choices on climate change. In the evaluations, students expressed surprise, for example, upon learning that type 2 diabetes could be reversed in about three months with a whole food plant-based diet.
We look forward to continuing our programs in the Ithaca area, and we’d love to have your support! We seek volunteers, board members, donations, and most of all, right now, we are seeking a part-time manager to work between 20 – 27 hours per week for our Ithaca programs. Please contact me if you are interested in any of these!
A Note from GreenStar: Coalition for Healthy School Foods is one of 10 local nonprofit organizations voted among GreenStar’s membership to be a 2023 Partner for Change. They are also GreenStar’s September 2023 featured Positive Change recipient. Read more about our Partners for Change program here.