Cooking Homemade Solutions with FoodCorps

Featuring Curt Ellis, Co-founder and CEO, FoodCorps and Dr. Robert S. Harvey President, FoodCorps.

Curt: [00:00:04] The most important thing is to figure out how can you really come to understand the system from its multiple perspectives? So how can you spend time with the stakeholders who sit in different places in that system and see it the way they see it? If you spend enough time actually with those people understanding their experience of the system, I think you can build a pretty accurate map of what the purpose of that system is today. And you can then ask the question of what should the purpose of that system be in the future. [00:00:38][34.4]

Tulaine: [00:00:47] You're listening to System Catalysts. Each week you will hear personal stories of change makers who are bringing more inclusive connective system level solutions to our most persistent challenges. I'm Tulane Montgomery. In this episode, Jeff Walker spoke with our guests Kurt Ellis and Dr. Robert Harvey. People who care about doing good in the world often come with the best intentions. But when you're born with economic privilege, it might be difficult to truly understand the perspective of people you're trying to help. As someone who has worked in the social sector for decades, I have witnessed this time and time again. The most impactful solutions come when leaders arise from the communities and issues they serve. Kurt Ellis, CEO of Food Corps, learned this the hard way. He co-founded the organization with a seemingly simple mission to connect kids to healthy food in school. [00:02:02][75.2]

Curt: [00:02:03] When we started Food Core, there were six of us who co-founded the organization. We were all white people. The first set of food core classes was overwhelmingly white liberal arts college grads who then joined AmeriCorps to do a year of domestic national service and ended up in a community they knew very little about. You know, folks from Middlebury showing up in the Mississippi Delta trying to be useful, but realizing pretty quickly how little they knew about that community and how unsuccessful they could be working outside of their context and without enough depth of cultural understanding and networks and relationships and credibility. [00:02:41][37.9]

Tulaine: [00:02:43] This was almost 15 years ago. Today, the organization recruits a majority of people within the communities they serve. Last year, they also welcomed educator and racial justice advocate Dr. Robert S Harvey as their first president. Together, they are navigating the waters of the food, education and political systems with an ambitious goal to provide every child in the U.S. with access to food, education and nourishing food by 2030. [00:03:14][31.6]

Curt: [00:03:16] When I started this work, I was really interested in food on a personal level, really interested in food as a critically important part of the equation for environmental sustainability. That was what drew me in to this work, was I was an environmentalist on my college campus and I was trying to think through how do we grow food and produce food and shift to a way of eating in this country that might be sustainable for a species on the planet long term? And then as I dug more deeply into the multitude of issues that intersect in food, I started to get interested in food beyond just an environmental tool. But how is it playing out in terms of American culture, in terms of public health, and then in terms of social and racial justice? [00:04:01][44.9]

Tulaine: [00:04:05] This curiosity led Kurt to co-create the documentary King Corn in 2007. The film follows Kurt and his friend Ian Cheney, then college students in their yearlong journey to grow an acre of corn. [00:04:19][13.8]

Curt: [00:04:21] For the first time in American history. Our generation was at risk of having a shorter life span than our parents. And it was because of what we ate. [00:04:31][10.6]

Tulaine: [00:04:36] They examined the industrialization of corn production, as well as the proliferation of high fructose corn sirup in the country. The discussions following the film made a parent the need to build more school gardens and farm to school programs. Three years later, Ellis and five of his colleagues co-founded Food Court. They used AmeriCorps as their anchor, the initiative that recruits young leaders for a year of full time public service. Food Corps would be a way for AmeriCorps members to foster healthy school food environments in low income communities. [00:05:09][33.0]

Curt: [00:05:10] It was unexpected because I thought I had a lot of the answers when we started. And particularly being a white man with a whole lot of privilege, uncovering the dimensions of how racism plays out within me and how racism in our society and our systems plays out in our work. I had just had a whole lot of unlearning to do and still do and a whole lot of assumptions that I needed to question. And over time, I've been so fortunate to have part of my journey at Food Court be a journey of uncovering the ways in which this is justice work, this is anti-racism work. And if we are going to be successful at building a future for food in school where every child, especially the kids who have been most harmed by the way injustice and inequity have played out in our country, we have to make our organization a more just organization. And so Food Corps has been an intense and challenging and important journey towards anti-racism within the organization. I've been on that journey as an individual, and so much of that has been about excavating the ways in which our mission is a justice mission. And for us to be successful at that, we really have to show up in communities with real intentionality about who we are, who we know and who we work with, how we understand the systems that we are working in, and what kind of future we're trying to create. [00:06:38][88.2]

Tulaine: [00:06:43] Through this journey. Kurt has learned to prioritize proximity leadership. Being approximate leader is about much more than being exposed to or studying a group of people. It's about actually being a part of that group or being meaningfully guided by it. Today, 70% of Food Corps service members are serving in their local communities and 35% identify as bipoc, black, indigenous, multiracial or person of color. [00:07:11][27.9]

Curt: [00:07:12] We've got a couple hundred Corps members out a year who are building school gardens, teaching hands on lessons about food, or doing cooking classes with kids at the school level, and growing set of core members who are working at the district level to do student driven menu development, culturally responsive menu development, local sourcing from smaller scale farmers and supply chains within the community. That community level work is also at the same time an investment in the leadership trajectories of those AmeriCorps members. The overwhelming majority of Food Corps alums go into fields that sit at the intersection of education and equity and health, and they move into leadership roles in those fields, whether it is within the education sector or specifically within the school meals sector or in the policy arena. [00:08:05][52.6]

Tulaine: [00:08:07] Food Corps aims to address the fact that today in the United States, one in five children struggle with hunger and one in three are overweight or obese. But providing food, education and nutritious meals isn't just about physical health. [00:08:23][15.9]

Curt: [00:08:24] If kids grow up not having access to nourishing meals and not building a healthy relationship to food, we see in the research that kids attain less education are out sick, more work, progress, less in their careers, and are forced out of the workforce earlier and die younger with fewer dreams fulfilled. The impacts are real and long term. At the same time, if you think about how efficient a lever this school meal program could be for making a positive difference on those charges, that's pretty tremendous. Right now, the annual economic toll of the way we eat in this country due to health challenges is $1.4 trillion a year. And if we can make a dent in that $1.4 trillion annual cost through the lever of the school meal program, which is a $17 billion annual cost. The return on investment is pretty huge. So our sense is that this is a really underutilized tool in the pencil box. And there's been interesting studies out of California recently that looked at schools and districts that changed from a lower quality, less healthy school meal provider to greater investment in a higher quality school meal provider. The academic performance gains that happened in those schools and districts was meaningful and happened at a much lower price point than a comparable tutoring intervention that would have gotten you the same academic gains. So we missed the fact that school meals aren't just a lever for student health. They really are a lever for student success and student academic performance. [00:10:07][103.0]

Tulaine: [00:10:08] As important as the community level work is. Food Core alone doesn't have the resources to reach every single school in need. That is why the organization also has their hand in policy change. But Curt knows that this advocacy must be informed by their work at the local level. [00:10:25][16.6]

Curt: [00:10:26] And so we've got our kind of footprint of the places that we serve is strategically chosen so that we show up in the backyards of key members of the Senate AG Committee in particular, or in key states where state level policy feels really ripe for progress. And then we mobilize the voices of our community, stakeholders and our alums to show up in policy conversations and have a pretty significant investment at this point in state and federal policy work, because that's where the rules of the game are written. But our sense is you have to connect that direct work to the systemic work, or we don't have credibility in the systemic conversation. We can't show up in a policy conversation and sit down with the senator and have no daily experience in schools and yet say schools need to change the way they're approaching food. [00:11:12][46.3]

Tulaine: [00:11:13] And attempting to create systemic change. It is essential to unite all stakeholders toward a common mission, and that takes time. [00:11:20][7.3]

Curt: [00:11:22] It is relational work first and foremost. It's not work that moves super fast. And every time we've seen somebody try to change school meal programs by coming in and wagging a finger and saying what's happening is bad and everything needs to look different, it has failed. What really works is being in true partnership, and it begins with orienting around a set of common goals and making sure that all the stakeholders who have reason to care about this work and that is a broad set of stakeholders, from kids to families to principals to superintendents, to food service leadership, to folks on the lunch line, bring folks together to identify a set of common goals. And what we find that's interesting is across political lines, across geographic lines, across cultural lines. Folks generally want the same things out of their kids experience of food in school. And so for us, what has been important is to recognize there are system catalysts at every level of the system. There are folks at the school level who can be a catalyst that incredibly passionate parent volunteer who helped start a school garden. There can be folks at the district level who can be a catalyst, school meal leaders. And then there are catalysts at the state and federal level policy innovators who are saying this is work that really matters. But those system catalysts can't act alone. It has to be an ecosystem. It has to be a community of people who come together. It has to be a set of common goals or else that individual kind of entrepreneurial spirit is never going to break through. It's never going to be work that is sustained. We have to figure out how to make this a team project where we're oriented around a shared mission for what the future of food in school can be. Within the level we're operating in the system. [00:13:08][106.6]

Tulaine: [00:13:11] Looking to improve the ways in which Food Corps works within the education system. Kirk reached out to Dr. Harvey, who joined the organization in 2022 as its first president. [00:13:21][10.1]

Dr. Harvey: [00:13:23] Clue Core has taken a really beautiful turn toward thinking about what are the best practices, being informed through a lens of teaching and learning and how we implemented those in our work. Secondly, we're really thinking about the question of culture from two angles one from the angle of inclusion and belonging, which is really the question of how are we ensuring that every lived identity with an emphasis on identities that have lived under systems of oppression, feel points of entry into our organization, but also feel a deep and measurable sense of belonging. So not diversity, equity, inclusion for the sake of doing it, but diversity, equity, inclusion, because we know that it is humane and it will enhance our organizational impact in the world. And then secondly, there's been a major culture shift that's starting to happen at full core as we lean deeper into the question of human accountability. How do we utilize some of the best practices out of the education system to ensure higher fidelity and efficacy for our service members? That, as you might imagine, was met with an interesting amount of both embrace by a handful, but deep skepticism intention by others because it was an explicitly education and teaching and learning move which was novel to us as a food organization where it required more time, it required more capacity, it required more intrigue from folks. And we had to wade through the waters of change management to get our team on board with building robust trainings for our service members. That really mirrored the trainings that any first year teacher would experience at any school. One of the newest conversations we're having as an organization there's been a big pivot for us is needing clear systems in measuring our work and in measuring the way that now an org that has over 100 FTE and additional almost 200 service members. So 300 folks being deployed across our organization to live out our mission. How are we holding each other accountable, both internally, interpersonally, interpersonally, across teams to our strategic plan and to our 2030 goal? And then what's the backwards professional development and professional learning that needs to occur for all of us to experience growth in the name of accountability. [00:15:42][138.8]

Tulaine: [00:15:43] For Dr. Harvey? Accountability is in the service of achieving the end goal. [00:15:48][4.4]

Dr. Harvey: [00:15:49] What I have found that happens in organizations, particularly organizations that are scaling, is that people can get lost in the monotony of their day to day work, that they stop making connections between why they're doing what they're doing to the system mission that the org is in pursuit of. And so the acts become isolated, acts distinct from the pursuit. I mean, when you have a 2030 goal, like 50 million young people experiencing free, nourishing meals and food education, and you have 300 people, 200 of whom are service members where there is some turnover every year, then yeah, there has to be a clear roadmap for me as an individual to see the ways in which I connect to achieving that. And when you have isolated acts and there is no clear narrative that everyone can tell to how they're contributing to that work, then we're doing a disservice to our mission, a disservice to those individuals. But again, as an indicator, we're ultimately doing a disservice to our largest stakeholder, which for us as children, the young people that rely on our mission to live. [00:16:53][63.6]

Tulaine: [00:16:55] These changes, although not easily implemented, seem to have paid off. [00:16:59][4.4]

Dr. Harvey: [00:17:00] A few months ago I had the privilege of doing some site visits and I was honored to spend time in Springfield, Massachusetts, which is one of our anchoring partners for our work. During my time in Springfield, one of the conversations that popped up was this conversation of how are we training and developing our service members to be more impactful in their teaching and learning with young people. This principal, who, when we got to the conversation of service members, was thrilled and talked about how excited he was by the way service members were showing up this year and he kept saying that come with more teacher skills and all they have, they have ways of building the classroom and getting student attention. And then lesson plans are sharper and the ways they know how to manage that class when it's time to transition is better than it's ever been. And it was a such an aha moment, a real glory moment for us to say that while there was tension and while we had to wade through the really complex waters of change with the team who in their right name, we don't have the capacity, we don't have the expertise to make. This kind of pivot. Our partners were giving us feedback on the other end saying, But it's working. It's what we need it. It's what our students need. It's making our relationship tighter. And we were able to then take that moment, take that Springfield story until that Springfield story to an elected official who's then able to experience why food, education, why our work is so critical. And it's those kinds of stories that ultimately give us the seeds that we need to see systems change. [00:18:44][103.0]

Curt: [00:18:45] Now, it's a great story and. [00:18:46][1.1]

Dr. Harvey: [00:18:46] It's really does sound. [00:18:47][0.8]

Curt: [00:18:48] Like, you know, system. [00:18:49][1.5]

Dr. Harvey: [00:18:49] Change requires people to lower walls, to. [00:18:51][1.8]

Curt: [00:18:52] Build trust, and that if you're producing. [00:18:54][2.3]

Dr. Harvey: [00:18:55] Individuals who. [00:18:56][0.7]

Curt: [00:18:56] Can come to them and be true partners and add. [00:18:58][1.7]

Dr. Harvey: [00:18:58] Value and come a perspective as a teacher, as you say. [00:19:01][3.2]

Curt: [00:19:02] Then they can relate better, right? [00:19:03][1.0]

Dr. Harvey: [00:19:03] Rather than somebody. [00:19:03][0.4]

Curt: [00:19:04] Coming in who's got different kind of training. [00:19:06][1.8]

Dr. Harvey: [00:19:06] And in trying to bring some ideas in. [00:19:08][1.9]

Curt: [00:19:09] In an in a system that. [00:19:10][1.0]

Dr. Harvey: [00:19:10] Doesn't really fit what they're used. [00:19:12][1.9]

Curt: [00:19:12] To. You know, how do you do that? And I think that's important to any kind of system. And you're trying to change. [00:19:16][4.2]

Dr. Harvey: [00:19:17] Rather than just being the hostile outside party. Let me come in and work with you using the tools that you've used before. Yeah. I mean, and you just see the dry I mean, our work is food work, but the food work that we do is inside of a school system container. And so it is our responsibility in the name of leadership and learning one of our values as an organization to be able to posture ourselves as learners of the system that we're working with. And so if a school has a set of practices that they use for ensuring that their young people are well, it's our responsibility to take our learning, our curriculum, our approach, and to pivot it in response to what that school takes seriously. Because that's the system that we're working with that talk about social justice and are you. [00:20:01][43.7]

Curt: [00:20:01] Spending a lot of time on that over the years and how you're bringing it. [00:20:04][3.3]

Dr. Harvey: [00:20:04] To bear? You know, equality and people who look like. [00:20:08][3.8]

Curt: [00:20:08] The other person they're dealing with and have had those experiences. [00:20:10][2.2]

Dr. Harvey: [00:20:11] And and how do you kind of. [00:20:12][1.0]

Curt: [00:20:12] Change that orientation that we're all trying to figure out models. [00:20:15][2.8]

Dr. Harvey: [00:20:16] To do that? And how are you looking to. [00:20:17][1.7]

Curt: [00:20:18] Develop your own model? [00:20:18][0.6]

Dr. Harvey: [00:20:19] It's a great question. And one of the things that we know to be true in almost any systemic context is that when the service provider looks like and or shares lived experiences with the one who was receiving the service, that the outcomes are just higher. That data's proven that education's proven in the medical field. Then we see that to be true in our own work, that when a person has either experienced free and reduced lunch or a person comes from the community in which they're being placed, that they're there a capacity to both connect with those young people, but to understand the lived story of that community and that community, food reality is increased exponentially. I think about this when I first joined Food Corps, one of the first site visits I was able to take was in Greenville, Mississippi, where our service members were born and raised in Greenville, had attended the same school they were now serving in, and they knew that land. They knew their communities temperament for change. They knew the changes and the complexities of the cafeteria workers and where the barriers to entry were in ways that somebody who would have parachuted in from a suburb in another state would have spent their entire first year of service just trying to understand the landscape. And so for us, we take seriously the idea that if we're going to have sustainable impacting community, then that impact must be had by identifying folks within proximate space who are willing and excited to be homebound and their level of systems not the same. [00:22:00][100.9]

Tulaine: [00:22:03] By placing proximate leaders in the education system, Food Corps hopes to infiltrate decision making spaces. [00:22:10][6.5]

Dr. Harvey: [00:22:12] We also know that achieving that vision, that 2030 vision of 50 million kids being impacted is going to require some significant disruption of who's in leadership when it comes to school nutrition. When you think about who sits in the seats of power for school nutrition all across the country, often the folks who are filling those seats don't look like and or share the lived experience of the young people whom are being served by that district. And so we have an opportunity in front of us, we believe, to disrupt that pipeline by training and developing a thousand new black indigenous folks of color to be put in a school nutrition leadership pipeline in order to really strengthen who's making decisions around what young people are experiencing on that breakfast lunch plate every day. [00:22:57][45.0]

Tulaine: [00:22:58] And honoring d-ii and proximate leadership. Food Corps has undergone deep changes in the way the organization is structured internally. [00:23:06][7.3]

Curt: [00:23:07] It's a very different food Corps now than it was just a few years ago. [00:23:11][4.4]

Tulaine: [00:23:12] That's Curt again. [00:23:12][0.6]

Curt: [00:23:13] Our board is now 60% people of color. Our leadership team is majority people of color. Our staff is majority people of color. We have significant progress still to go to build a service force that is reflective of the fact that 82% of the kids food core serves are students of color. But we already have the overwhelming majority of our Corps members serving locally in a place where they have great context. On the cultural dimension that's in play in their places. But it's it's a thrilling moment for us as an organization to have much more education expertise in the organization now than we did. That was the system where we realized we didn't have the skills to be a strong partner. I came into this from a food system standpoint. Systems are all nested within other systems. And part of what I've loved about the journey of working with Dr. Harvey over this last year has been the chance to take what I knew about the food system and combine that with the depth of expertise and knowledge she brings about the education system. You can't really be reductionist about this work and be successful about it. I think you have to recognize that it's complex. But if you all get oriented around a shared sense of purpose, a shared destination you're trying to reach, which for us is a future. By the end of this decade where every kid has food, education and great free meals in school every day. Then you can start to see how those systems nest together in a way that actually works together rather than feels too daunting and complex to make a difference on. [00:24:45][91.8]

Tulaine: [00:24:46] Ultimately, Kurt believes that food can be a tool for human connection and for the type of society we want to build. [00:24:53][6.5]

Curt: [00:24:54] We have a chance to take the real opportunity that food presents to us, which is we as a species have never found a better tool for building community and connection with each other. Food is the currency of human connection. It is what brings us together around a table to connect across lines of difference, to break bread and find common ground, and the chance to actually have that be a part of a child's daily experience in school. I think it's tremendously exciting. And so I think about work. Food Core has supported and played a role in and in Portland, Maine, where you'll have in a regular rotation food that is familiar to and celebratory of the kids from the African diaspora. And it just fundamentally changes the way kids experience food. To have local white kids who are seventh generation Mainers sitting down with kids who are recent immigrants to their families or recent immigrants sharing a meal that is reflective of each other's cultures and then being able to talk about that. That's what we want out of our education system, is for it to be a chance for America to reimagine the kind of community we can build as a country. And I think that work begins in our school system and on a lunch tray on a Tuesday. It's really that simple. [00:26:12][78.2]

Tulaine: [00:26:16] And now our Rapidfire segment. [00:26:18][2.2]

Curt: [00:26:22] What's one word to describe your journey as a system catalyst? Unexpected. [00:26:26][4.2]

Dr. Harvey: [00:26:27] What's been one. [00:26:28][0.5]

Curt: [00:26:28] Of the most gratifying moments along this journey? Meeting our first class of 50 food court service members who signed up for something that didn't exist yet. What about your organization keeps you up at night? Questions around our long term financial sustainability in a field that doesn't have a particularly organized set of philanthropic partners. For people who are listening to this, who aspire to be system catalysts, where and how do you think they should start? You know, I think the most important thing is to figure out how can you really come to understand the system from its multiple perspectives. So how can you spend time with the stakeholders who sit in different places in that system and see it the way they see it? How can you see the school meal program from the standpoint of a child? And from the standpoint of someone who works on the lunch line and from the standpoint of a school principal or a superintendent. How can you then see it from the standpoint of a state level policymaker who makes decisions about how that program is implemented and a federal level policymaker who's dealing with the complexities of how you organize the rules of that system? If you spend enough time actually with those people understanding their experience of the system, I think you can build a pretty accurate map of what the purpose of that system is today. And you can then ask the question of what should the purpose of that system be in the future? And once you get crystallized around what the purpose of the things should be and what the purpose of the thing currently is, then I think you can start to do the hard work of figuring out, all right, what might it look like to redesign this thing in a way that actually works for all those stakeholders or for enough of them that it's going to be viable and produces the results that we actually care about? [00:28:29][121.4]

If you want to learn more about Food Corps, head on over to foodcorps.org