The Dirt

By Molly Costigan
AmeriCorps VISTA - Community Health Organizer

Sustainable Food Center partners with Marathon Kids to engage with parents, staff, and community members at partner elementary schools and facilitate the formation of wellness teams that participate in health and wellness activities. Wellness teams reach out to SFC for resources and programs, such as healthy cooking classes or school garden trainings. Leaders on the wellness team organize regular meetings and activities, and engage the school community in health and wellness issues.

Norman Elementary parent leader Philimena Dickson, has been involved with Cultivating Healthy Communities for almost three years. Through the wellness team, she has attended SFC’s The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre® cooking class, Basic Organic Gardening class, and School Garden Leadership Training, and she and her family have helped with the installation and maintenance of a community garden at nearby St. James Episcopal church. She also participates in SFC’s Spread the Harvest program for her own family’s garden.

Why did you get involved with Sustainable Food Center and Marathon Kids?
It was definitely the gardening. We had a garden at our home, and I like gardening and knowing that you get fresh food from the garden and can feed your family well.

It is a struggle because sometimes you have sweets and the sweets are not good for you. Or you want to have something quick so you do not have to cook. But once you decide to train yourself you can see what you need to have energy all day.

What are some of your favorite things to grow?
Kale and tomatoes. I have tomatoes right now, at least three of them, that are ready to go into the ground. I will have to try again with carrots. If I have the right type of lettuce, like romaine, then I grow it too. We have cabbage now, and that is a favorite, and onions are pretty good. I would like to grow red onions.

What are some things that you have done here at the school or the church garden?
I am on the wellness team and get information out to the community and the parents. I am talking to more parents about what we do on the wellness team and what we are here to do for the community.

What are some of the things that you have learned as a wellness team leader?
I have learned more about how to communicate with people. If I learn here, I learn in my personal life, like how to keep the information that I have going and then pass it on or keep it on paper—and also trying to put it into the computer. I am starting to use the computer to keep up with names of wellness team members. It is a learning process and I am learning how to be an organizer. When I started I did not know how; I was shaking in my boots!

Why is this important to you?
Because I see how it helps my family, and we all have a healthier diet now.

The AstraZeneca HealthCare Foundation’s Connections for Cardiovascular Health^SM program today announced a grant of $197,772 to Sustainable Food Center in support of the CultivatingHealthy Communities program. This is the third consecutive year in which Sustainable Food Center has received a grant from the Foundation, totaling $550,337.

The Cultivating Healthy Communities program promotes cardiovascular health, sustainable foods, healthy nutrition and the prevention of obesity in children and families living in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. These residents lack access to affordable, healthy foods and nutrition literacy. So how does this program work on a grassroots, personal level?

Sustainable Food Center engages with parents, staff and community members at partner elementary schools to facilitate the formation of wellness teams that participate in health and wellness activities. Wellness teams reach out to SFC resources and programs such as healthy cooking classes or school garden trainings. Leaders on the wellness team organize regular meetings and activities and engage the school community in health and wellness issues. Humberto Jaimes, a parent at Overton Elementary and wellness team leader, shares his story:

"I got involved in Sustainable Food Center programs because my wife decided to go to the SFC School Garden Leadership Training last Spring at Overton Elementary, and she couldn’t come on one of the days, so she told me, 'You have to go.' That’s how I got here. That’s how I got involved in all of this. I have really participated by inviting people and involving others. I like to work with people and know what it is that people want so that I can help them and see if there are ways to change things.

I wanted to get involved in the wellness team because, well, the name says it all. It’s for the wellness of people. Aside from the fact that I am learning something new, I’m learning how to help people and how to let them know what we can do to be well. It’s an interesting topic. Working with people has helped me to learn more about people in general, and this is what motivated me to get involved. Although I can’t fully find a way to express it, I want to continue working on this so that I can feel like I did something.

Last fall, the wellness team helped organize The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre® 6-week series class. Before knowing about The Happy Kitchen, I had attended a nutrition training, so I had an idea about nutrition, more or less, but The Happy Kitchen is something different; the cookbook, all of it, really gave me an idea of how to cook healthier. It taught me how to use less sugar and fat in the food I prepare at home for my family. For me, this was a good experience. What really helped was learning to look at the amount of sugar in soda. I decided not to drink soda anymore.

I have made some personal changes for my heart health as well. For one, I decided to exercise more. Before I joined the wellness team, I went to the doctor and he told me I had high cholesterol and that I needed to exercise, so then I realized that I’m not the only one who might have a problem; there are a lot of people who need motivation to exercise, and not exercising can affect your cholesterol.

In my own family, my daughter was a little overweight and now she’s lost weight because of the changes we made at home; we don’t drink sodas, sugary juice, or a lot of bread – and if it is bread, it has to be whole wheat. Every time we go to the supermarket, we try to read the nutrition label and check the amount of sugar each product has, so there have been a lot of family changes, as well as personal ones. It’s helped me to be more responsible than I was before.

Being involved with SFC has helped me to communicate with people that I don’t know. This is all new, and I feel like I still haven’t learned all that I would like to learn, but I know that I just need to keep learning more."

In preparation for the move to our new home in May, SFC had a chance to work with UT Social Work Masters students on a recent community engagement project. This is a great example of how educational institutions and non-profit organizations can collaborate! 

By Rebekah Brown, Kristi Click, Jenny Horton, Katherine Keegan, Katelyn Walbridge

Our project began with an initial meeting with Joy Casnovsky (Program Director of The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre® Program and Sari Albornoz (Co-Director of the Grow Local Program), who were our Project Leaders from Sustainable Food Center. In our first meeting, they introduced us to the programs that SFC runs, the new Center that will open up in 2013, and a brief explanation of what they expected from us. The Project objective was to create ties between organizations within a 3 mile radius of the new SFC home so that SFC could engage with the surrounding community in anticipation of the big move in May 2013. In order to further familiarize ourselves with SFC’s programs and services, we toured the new SFC site as well as participated in the “Germinators” meetings. (The “Germinators” is the group of community members that has been working to develop the St. David’s Foundation Community Garden at SFC’s new home.)

Our first step was to develop a list of non-profit, religious and education-related organizations within a 3-mile radius of the new SFC Center. Sari and Joy then prioritized each organization so we knew the order in which to contact them. Also, as was anticipated, Sari and Joy identified organizations with which they already had a strong relationship, so did not need our help at this point in time in the engagement process. We then developed a brief survey to gauge interest in specific SFC programs among the prioritized organizations.

Sari met with us to discuss the actual engagement interaction. She provided us with talking points and role-played with us to ensure a successful interaction. We divided up the final list of organizations and began making contact. Our general strategy was to either call or email the appropriate people at each agency to provide more information over email or set up an in-person meeting. Using the responses from this correspondence we created a final list of interested organizations, as well as the specific SFC programs that were of most interest to organizations. This data will help grow the awareness of SFC among neighbor organizations and help form partnerships between them and SFC!

                                                                                                            Masters Students Presenting their poster!

Did you know that SFC’s Grow Local program has provided assistance to more than 130 school gardens in the Austin area? These gardens can be found at public schools and private schools, from preschools to high schools and every level in between. Some school gardens are incorporated into classroom lessons or afterschool clubs, others are used to produce food for the cafeteria, farmers’ markets, or food pantries, and still others serve as places for parents and community members to grow healthy food for their families. What these school gardens all have in common is that they serve as places for children (and adults!) to learn about where food comes from, how it is grown, and how delicious and fun eating fresh fruits and vegetables can be!

The assistance that SFC provides to school gardens includes our free School Garden Leadership trainings, Spread the Harvest resources, in-class and afterschool lessons & activities, School Garden Volunteer matching, consultation, grant assistance, and more. SFC’s recent School Garden Leadership training at Mendez Middle School successfully inspired and empowered dozens of leaders to start and expand garden projects at their schools, and we look forward to providing continuing support to these endeavors. Check SFC’s Events page for our next School Garden Leadership training in early 2013. You can find more information about how SFC promotes school gardening success in Austin here: http://www.sustainablefoodcenter.org/grow-local/school-gardens

If you know of any school garden projects that aren’t yet connected with SFC, we’d love to hear from them! Please contact Jess Guffey, Grow Local Co-Director, at jess (at) sustainablefoodcenter (dot) org, to find out how we can offer assistance.

October is a busy time for local food systems advocates and programs – not only does Food Day fall on the 24th, but the whole month is dedicated to Farm to School activities. With events and activities occurring all over the country, National Farm to School Month provides Austin-area schools participating in SFC’s Sprouting Health Kids program an opportunity to shine a nationwide spotlight on efforts to connect students with healthy, local food.

As part of Sustainable Food Center’s farm to school and food systems education programming, and in collaboration with Marathon Kids, schools wellness teams are planning “Meet the Farmer” days and Veggie Sampling events in their cafeterias, helping to coordinate Basic Organic Gardening classes for teachers and parents, and even hosting School Garden Leadership Trainings, presented by SFC’s Grow Local program. Some schools are planning garden work-days, farmers’ market tours, or healthy local foods classroom lessons, and, all schools are posting colorful posters and other “point of sale” materials in their cafeterias to promote the availability of local foods.

While many events are occurring as part of Farm to School Month in October, we know that interest and activity remains strong throughout the year. Look for photos from the month in upcoming newsletter articles. And, visit http://www.farmtoschoolmonth.org for more info (you may even spot a familiar face in one of their pics!).

SFC is probably used to volunteers coming and going, but I am sure that I was one new face this summer that never seemed to leave! As part of another exciting collaboration with the UT School of Public Health (UTSPH), an opportunity “cropped up” for me to “cook up” an evaluation for The Happy Kitchen’s cooking and nutrition classes, as part of an internship for my Masters program. The idea that Joy (The Happy Kitchen Director) envisioned was to measure different aspects of participants’ life that may have changed since completing the program, such as use of healthy cooking oils, use of the nutrition facts label, or intake of leafy greens. After a lot of work was done on the questionnaire, it consisted of questions to measure participants’ recall of two timepoints (e.g., before The Happy Kitchen classes and in the week before the interview); later when the data is analyzed, we will be able to tell if there is a significant difference in certain areas between these two timepoints, which could mean that something was learned and maintained from the classes. When the data analysis is complete, we will hopefully be able to determine which factors, in particular, help individuals to be healthier in their eating and what else SFC can do to improve barriers to healthy eating. Hopefully we will see that a large portion of the participants using farmers markets and other SFC programs, which in itself is definitely a (tasty) step to healthy, sustainable living

Overall, this setup worked great for both me and SFC, given that I needed experience doing public health work, and they needed someone who knew about running a study and would work for free. Given the breadth and amount of work that SFC does, the organization is still relatively small, and running a study like this requires funding and a large time commitment that SFC has had to allocate to other projects in the past. With future expansion set to occur at the new SFC building early next year, this really was a key time for SFC to test see if The Happy Kitchen is meeting its objectives. It is always daunting to start a job somewhere new, and never before had I been the authority on a project that had such responsibility wrapped up in it. I will tell you, though, I thought I was a pretty “green” person before I came to SFC, but never have I had to think about composting my lunch scraps at work. There was one incident where I threw away a banana peel (because it can’t be recycled)- I swear that I thought I would be shunned for eternity, but I came to love the staff at SFC!

Rachel Picking Apples in her home state of Iowa

All joking aside, it was real work pulling this off with just a little bit of book knowledge. Though I have made it through undergrad and (almost) graduate school and pulled a couple all-nighters along the way, never before has my schedule been as crazy as this summer has been with classes, my part-time job, and this internship with SFC! Looking back, it has definitely been worth it- How many people get to say that they volunteered at a great organization with great people for degree credit, plus- oh yeah- you are running this big study in which you are basically your own boss, have creative control, and have someone to compost your banana peels and tea bags? Alright, so I was not completely running wild, and I did have to answer to Joy, who collaborated with me on the study design and questionnaire topics. And- okay- I totally had help from my advisers and friends at UTSPH, who gave me a lot of great comments and advice. I could have not completed the study without the bilingual Community Health Organizer VISTAs, who dedicated their time and helped me carry out the actual phone interviews (Sadly, my own Spanish is muy trieste). Doing the phone interviews was a time-consuming job for all of us, not to mention the time it takes to enter everything into a database to be later analyzed and the initial time spent on translating everything. At the end of our efforts, we completed 90 interviews with some   great people all over the Austin metro!

I must admit: I hate talking on the phone. I blame it on my work history, in which my phone experience lay primarily in dealing with angry/impatient customers and patients. My poor family is a victim of this weird quirk, as well, and is forced to put up with mainly texts and emails from someone they only see a few times a year and who lives 1,000 miles away! Despite this fact, I loved these phone calls once everyone started sharing. I never thought I would meet such characters and genuine people over the phone, and I found it difficult not to just crumple up the questionnaire and begin chatting about life. So if you were one of the ones that made the phone calls such an enjoyable experience for me, thanks for helping me face my fear!

I also want to give some credit to the facilitators for The Happy Kitchen classes- Many of the positive comments we received in the phone interviews were about your attitude toward and knowledge about nutrition and cooking, coupled with fun personalities and a supportive atmosphere- I went to sit in on one of the classes and would be willing to contribute my own positive comments from that singular experience! The enthusiastic comments that had nothing but praise for The Happy Kitchen, overall, also poured in with overwhelming sincerity and mass. Based on my background in the social sciences, I knew this phenomenon was not normal for study recruitment. Though the actual statistical results will not be completed until I complete my thesis this fall, I am confident that The Happy Kitchen must be doing something right!

I may have helped SFC and The Happy Kitchen by evaluating their program, but I was helped myself. The last day of the study, I brought in gluten-free chocolate espresso cupcakes (decorated with fondant “seedlings” and made with pureed black beans!), which I was more open to trying than I would have ever been before SFC. Also, I can no longer go without feeling guilty when I do not compost my food scraps. I would thank SFC, but because of their influence, now I’ll just have to take one of the City of Austin composting classes offered at the SFC Farmers’ Markets just so I can receive the free composting pail that I can no longer seem to live without…. Stop bettering my life, SFC! I can’t take anymore!

By Rachel Pauley

Grow Local recently wrapped up a successful round of spring classes, including four Basic Organic Gardening series, five Citizen Gardener trainings, and two School Garden Leadership trainings. Grow Local’s Basic Organic Gardening & Citizen Gardener classes are taught by some amazing community members who love gardening and are inspired to share this knowledge with others. Classes took place at a variety of locations, including several under-served elementary schools, faith-based centers, and an eldercare center. Hundreds of participants gained new knowledge and skills about how to grow their own healthy, local food, and were inspired to start gardening.

The next Grow Local class will be a Community Garden Leadership training on Saturday, June 16, which explains how to start and sustain a successful community garden project – look for more details and registration information coming soon on SFC’s Events page. The next round of Basic Organic Gardening, Citizen Gardener, and School Garden Leadership trainings will start up in the fall, so check our Events page this summer for details about those.

On April 17, over 100 kindergarten students, parents, and staff from Jordan Elementary took a fieldtrip to the SFC Farmers’ Market East, located just a mile and a half from the school. The group was greeted by an energetic farmers’ market crew and started out the day by participating in an interactive educational activity tracing products such as jam and pickles to their original ingredients – strawberries and cucumbers. Then, they watched a cooking demonstration for a “Green Goddess Dressing” from the SFC cookbook and eagerly dipped radishes and cucumbers into the final product. Kid-approved! Afterward, they toured the market and talked to farmers, learning about fruits, vegetables, pecans, honey, and other local products. Students asked questions such as, “Does that carrot taste good?” to “Do the bees like their own honey?” They especially liked sampling sweet, ripe strawberries from Naeglin Farms. The group ended the fieldtrip with a picnic lunch and playtime on the nearby playground. One teacher followed up in an email saying, “The kids had a great time at the farmers’ market. Some even said they enjoyed it more than the rodeo, and that’s a big compliment!”