FoodCorps

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Model & Strategy

FoodCorps is a national service organization that provides a scalable response to America’s painful and costly epidemic of childhood obesity. Working under the direction of high-impact local partners, FoodCorps Service Members invest a year of full-time public service delivering nutrition education, cultivating school gardens and sourcing farm-fresh school meals for K-12 students in communities of need across the country.

FoodCorps offers a means for training a new generation of leaders in the fields of food, education and health, and a mechanism for building connections and capacity among the diverse organizations that advocate for a more just, healthful and sustainable food system. 1 in 5 FoodCorps alumni are hired by their school or service site for a long-term position.

 

At a Glance
Founded: 2010
By: Curt Ellis
Food & Agriculture
Location of work: Domestic, Northeast, West Coast, Midwest, Southwest, Southeast
https://foodcorps.org/
FoodCorps
1201 Broadway
Suite 411
New York, NY 10001
Connecting kids to real food. Helping them grow up healthy.
Meet Curt Ellis

Curt Ellis began working with the five other founders of FoodCorps in 2009. With colleagues Debra Eschmeyer, Cecily Upton, Crissie McMullan, Jerusha Klemperer and Ian Cheney, Curt led an 18-month planning process that engaged more than 10,000 stakeholders in developing the FoodCorps model. Rather than being designed from the top down, their school food solution emerged from the grassroots up: a national organization that local voices shaped according to their needs.

Curt’s passion for food and agriculture is rooted in his childhood in Oregon. He developed his interest at The Mountain School and Yale and then moved to Iowa to investigate the role of subsidized commodities in the American obesity epidemic. The film he co-created there, King Corn, won a George Foster Peabody Award, helped bring national press attention to the Farm Bill, and reached an audience of millions in theatres and on PBS. Curt also produced The Greening of Southie (Sundance Channel, 2008) and used his Food and Community Fellowship to launch the mobile school garden project, Truck Farm, and direct the sequel to King Corn, Big River (Discovery, 2010).

IMPACT

In the last school year, FoodCorps’ 225 corps members reached 158,578 children, led 42,951 hands-on lessons and 3,386 taste tests (more than double the previous year), supported 471 school gardens, and activated 6,685 community volunteers in improving school food environments.

External evaluation by Columbia University showed that students who get more of FoodCorps’ hands-on learning eat triple the fruits and vegetables compared with peers in low-implementation schools.

9 in 10 FoodCorps’ alumni are in careers of impact—such as education, school food services, and policy and advocacy—that advance FoodCorps’ goal of nurturing a nation of healthy children; 100% of FoodCorps alumni say service gave them confidence as leaders; one in five alumni are hired by their school or site after service, often in jobs created for them.

In an external evaluation by Spark Policy Institute, 98% of school leaders described FoodCorps as “highly valued.”

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