Frequently Asked Questions
Your mission is to improve the health and well-being of the community’s school-aged children by improving access to healthy and nutritious foods at school. Why does Growing Healthy Kids focus on school food?
Growing Healthy Kids focuses on school food because children consume an estimated 35-50% of their calories at school. Schools have the unique opportunity to become leaders in helping our community's children develop healthy eating habits for life.
Also, many schools in Nashville are located in "food deserts" — areas with an abundance of fast food restaurants and corner stores but a lack of full-service supermarkets. Schools can serve as the leverage point for these areas, and provide students with fresh, healthy, and nutritious meals that may be hard to access in their neighborhoods.
What has Growing Healthy Kids done to improve Nashville’s school food environment?
Growing Healthy Kids has done many things to improve Nashville’s school food environment, including:
School Garden/ Food Justice Curricula
Growing Healthy Kids, in conjunction with the Vanderbilt Dietetic Internship Program, developed a “School Garden Nutrition Curriculum” for elementary school students and a “Food Justice Curriculum” for middle/ high school students. The curricula are TN standards-based and include innovative lesson plans, take-home recipes, interactive worksheets, and helpful nutrition books and websites.
Connecting the Dots
Growing Healthy Kids connects parents and teachers throughout Nashville to healthy school food resources in the community, including: garden supplies, community volunteers, healthy school food project grants, nutrition resources for classrooms, farm field-trips, healthy snack program volunteers, and much more.
Healthy School Food Leadership Institute
Growing Healthy Kids has brought together Nashville parents, teachers and students for a 4-session institute aimed at building leadership around healthy school food reform. The institute introduces participants to civic engagement, school food assessments, communications skills, school food recording methods, and much more.
Workshop Series
Growing Healthy Kids has hosted several community-wide workshops, including: The School Garden Workshop Series, which trained over 60 parents, teachers, and community members in "Planning a Garden and Connecting it to your Curriculum" and "Building a Garden from the Ground Up"; "School Food Systems 101", which taught parents and teachers the basics of the school food system; and the "Healthy School Food Forum", which celebrated the many healthy school food successes in Nashville.
What is the need for Growing Healthy Kids? What are the statistics regarding the health of Tennessee's youth?
• Approximately one in three youth in Tennessee are obese. (America’s Second Harvest, 2007)
• In Tennessee, 41% of all students are “at risk” for obesity or overweight. (2006 Tennessee Coordinated School Health Annual Report)
• In 2007, only 18.3 percent of Tennessee high school students ate recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. (Coordinated School Health, Childhood Obesity Fact Sheet)
• 72% of children enrolled in MNPS qualify for free or reduced price school lunch due to their families economic status.
For more information on how you can participate, please contact:
Shavaun Evans at 615-322-5638
or
Growing Healthy Kids is an initiative of the Food Security Partners of Middle Tennessee that aims to improve the health and well-being of our community's school-aged children by improving their access to healthy and nutritious foods at school.