New Leaf Kitchen
10235 Normandy Close
Cincinnati, OH 45241
Root-UP Cooking and Food Education
This grant will provide a hands-on cooking and food education program to 300 students and their families at Corryville Catholic, St. Francis Seraph, Holy Family, and St. Boniface schools, part of the Catholic Inner-City Schools Education (CISE) network. CISE is comprised of 10 inner-city schools in Cincinnati’s poorest neighborhoods. These schools were chosen based on socioeconomic factors as well as direct interest from administrators and families.The schools' goal in partnering with New Leaf Kitchen is to offer a nutritious and impactful enrichment program for their students and to keep families connected to their school community and their health throughout the year with lifelong skills, passions, and benefits that transcend every class. This grant program will bring weekly cooking programs, including family events, from November 2022 until June 2023 to 4 CISE Schools.
Program Goals:
We will educate children on how to grow, source, prepare, cook, and consume foods in ways that will positively impact their behavior, health, environment, economy, and community.
We will design and implement lesson plans reaching all learning domains - physical, social/emotional, language/arts, cognitive.
We will make healthy eating fun with cooking and hands-on food exploration using child safe, yet functional, tools.
We will measure the success of our lesson plans through school administration surveys and impact statements directly from the students.
We will reach the entire family through laminated take-home recipe cards.that spark conversations about what the student made that day and learned. This could spark a cooking/ healthy eating movement in the household.
We will create interactive ways to demonstrate how well our programs are impacting students. We hope this will organically indicate a student's typical dietary behaviors, food knowledge, and nutritional awareness, before and after our program.
Our original grant request was for 35,650 for 1500 participants (at $23.77 per child).
We were rewarded $30,000, and were able to have 1300 participants (at $23.08 per child).
Program Results:
We educated children on how to grow, source, prepare, cook, and consume foods in ways that will positively impact their behavior, health, environment, economy, and community. Our passionate and knowledgeable teachers brought a new healthy recipe each week for the students to make. We showed the children the most raw form of each ingredient (basil plant with roots, whole garlic bulbs with the greens and sprouting), and explained how to find correct ingredients at the store, even how to substitute when needed. We taught them not to be fooled by fancy marketing and hidden ingredients, and how to source food most sustainably. The students were incredibly receptive to this information, and excited to start advocating for their own healthy food intake.
We designed and implemented lesson plans reaching all learning domains - physical, social/emotional, language/arts, and cognitive. We were able to focus on cognitive skills through measuring, social skills with cooperative clean-up, physical skills with chopping, and language skills through recipe reading
We made healthy eating fun with cooking and hands-on food exploration using child safe, yet functional, tools. Our tools are fun and engaging, however we train our teachers to demonstrate other ways in which the students can get the task done if they do not have the specific tool at home. This allows for each recipe to be more easily replicated at home.
We measured the success of our lesson plans through school administration surveys and impact statements directly from the students. Attached to this report are their actual impact papers. It is truly a joy to read each student's thoughts, and incredibly helpful and encouraging. (Please see follow up email to Beth Broomall for Impact Statements)
We were able to reach the entire family through laminated take-home recipe cards.that sparked a conversation about what the student made that day and learned. Many impact statements demonstrated how our mission reached home.
We created an interactive way to demonstrate how well our programs are influencing students through student written impact statements. We hope this will organically indicate a student's typical dietary behaviors, food knowledge, and nutritional awareness, before and after our program. I am so impressed with the outcome of information that we were able to find through the impact statements. This organic way of measuring showed us a raw look into the change we are making. In the future we will combine this with more robust quantitative measurements as well.
Website:
http://www.newleafkitchen.org Amount: $30,000
Date: December 2022
