Curt Ellis and Rob Harvey, Co-CEOs of FoodCorps, an AmeriCorps program that partners with schools and policymakers to build access to healthy school meals and food education, joined me discuss why good food is in fact central to the work of schools, how food education and meal choice build agency in students, and the debate on universal school meal assistance programs. As always, subscribers can listen to to the conversation, watch it below, or read the transcript.
Time Topic
2:28 Curt’s journey to founding FoodCorps
4:43 Rob’s path to the work
9:07 Why food is central to the work of schools
15:13 How food can build agency in students
18:43 How FoodCorps works
22:34 The current state of food in schools
Michael Horn:
Delighted you're joining us on the show that is dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can fulfill their human potential, live a life of purpose, dig into their passions, and to help us think about that today, I'm incredibly excited to have two folks who run an organization called FoodCorps, which they're going to tell us more about. But one of them is one of my college friends, Curt Ellis, and the other is his co-CEO, Rob Harvey. So, first, without further ado, both of you welcome. It is great to see you.
Rob Harvey:
Thanks for having us, Michael.
Michael Horn:
So, Curt knows this, but those tuning in, this is incredibly exciting for me because obviously, I've been on my own journey and information gathering around the importance of nutrition as a key equation into wellness—not just health, but actually wellness and self actualization— but also in education because I think it's a critical ingredient. But I want you all to make that case for it. And let's just start at the very surface level so people can sort of ground themselves. What is FoodCorps and what are you doing with schools?
Curt Ellis:
Yeah. FoodCorps is a justice organization, a national nonprofit that works through a range of strategies to help schools become places where kids experience food as a daily source of health and power and joy. And we do that work through direct programming. We have a nationwide team of a couple hundred AmeriCorps members who are either working at the school level building school gardens, teaching hands on lessons about food with kids, or at the district level, where they're helping shift what's on school lunch trays to make that food more scratch-cooked, more locally sourced, more culturally affirming for the kids in that community. Then we do a lot of leadership development and power building work with our key constituents so that we can make a national movement that shifts policy at both the state and federal level. Because our dream is that by 2030, every child in this country should have access to food education, and to free, nourishing meals in school every day.
Michael Horn:
Anything you'd add, Rob? That's a pretty good sum there.
Rob Harvey:
Curt, great summary.
Michael Horn:
Terrific. Well, let's, let's dive into both your pathways there. And, Curt, I'll start with you just because you're the founder and I know that you left college and immediately jumped on this set of questions around our food sources more generally. Why don't you tell the audience about that and then how it led to you to founding FoodCorps?
Curt Ellis:
Sure. I got really interested in food as a prism where you peer into this thing and you see our nation's greatest challenges refracted. You see challenges of public health. You see racial and social injustice. You see environmental sustainability. Food really is at the center of so many of the things that matter. And I got excited about figuring out how I could contribute to what was, in the early two thousands, a kind of emergent debate around how we farm and how we feed ourselves in this country. So, with my best friend and a cousin of mine who was a filmmaker, I moved out to Iowa for a couple of years and made a film there called King Corn that told the story of a lot of what is broken in America's relationship to food. And as I was traveling around the country showing this film to folks, I visited 100 college campuses, and everywhere I went there were more and more young people showing up who were really passionate about food and saw it as the same kind of nexus of issues that matter in our time. And those young people wanted to get into careers making a difference, shifting our food system to be more just and more healthful and more sustainable. But there was no real pathway into careers in that field. And so, it was Earth Day, 2009, I was at a food justice conference in California, and I saw President Obama on a TV screen in my hotel room when I was having my morning coffee. He was signing some legislation into law that directed new resources to AmeriCorps and challenged Americorps to address some particular issues, and child well-being was one of those. And I thought, here's the chance to go start an AmeriCorps for food. And that's what we've done. Our work since then has really become rooted in justice and work that is about not just direct impact, but systems change.
Michael Horn:
Very good. And, Rob, tell us about your own journey there. You're obviously recently announced as the co-CEO. Tell us a little bit about your background and how you came into this organization and how this became an important issue from your perspective as well.
Rob Harvey:
Sure, yeah, so I enter into this work from the vantage point of an educator. I started my career teaching young folks primarily in independent day schools across New England. So schools that benefit from scratch-cooked locally sourced meals on a daily basis by chefs who are very responsive to the needs of kids, and then took a pivot in my career to serve historically black colleges in Louisville, Kentucky, before making a transition into the public charter school world, where I served in both Memphis and in East Harlem, and the throughline that entered into my life that ultimately landed me at FoodCorps was a question around the conditions of well-being. And having to ask, from the moment I arrived in Louisville serving 99% 1st generation black students who all qualify for Pell Grant, which mean they all came from lower socioeconomic context, was a question of what are the conditions of well-being that institutions and communities of learning must take seriously in order to produce young folks in the world who are global citizens, democratically advancing, justice oriented, but also just well - well in their bodies, well in their minds, well in their states of navigating deep intersectional traumas and poverties. And a part of my own personal research as I developed that question, in my mind, was going really deep with the Black Panther party and really wrapping my head around their early iterations of making sense of the food question for children through breakfast before school every day, as a lover of justice, but as a lover of well-being. And that then led me to research Dr. King's ladder work, where he was deeply committed to that intersection of classism and racism. And there was one quote in particular that he offered at a speech at the Atlanta club, where he said that he had the audacity to believe that everybody can have three meals a day for their education. And it was an anchoring moment for me that I have the audacity to believe the same thing. And then leading a network of schools through COVID, that question got crystallized in terms of its importance. And I will never forget when we shut down all of our buildings, March 12th 2020, my one year anniversary of leading that network, the first question we paused to have to wrestle with was feeding children and feeding children every single day, including children who were in the household that did not go to our schools, including family members who were in the household, who were adults, who we know were going to have economic lapses in their capacity to provide for their families. And all of that, as I was reflecting on what my next moment of impact needed to be in the world, led me to FoodCorps and led me to making sense of the fact that schools and communities of learning have a responsibility as one of the most centralized places of well-being and daily life for kids to answer that question to the best of their capacity.
Michael Horn:
So, Rob, just stay there for a moment, because I'm curious how you and Curt connected. Was FoodCorps in the charter schools? Did you go seek it out because you had this puzzle that you had to figure out, what's the right organization to make that impact at scale? How did you all find each other?
Rob Harvey:
So, the answer to those questions are no. And no, that FoodCorps was not a part of my ecosystem to be fully transparent. I had never heard of it before stumbling upon it. And I truly stumbled upon it through a friend of mine who knew the question I was holding around what I wanted to do in terms of impact. And, literally, through a LinkedIn search of my friend who said, “Yo, I see this organization is looking for a president, and you're raising some of these questions. They seem to be trying to navigate some of these same questions and give it a shot.” And literally, and Curt knows this, of all the things I was pursuing and questioning in the world, it was the only non-executive-search-led thing I decided to pursue. And here we are.
The Why Behind FoodCorps
Michael Horn:
Let's shift into the why behind what you all do. And I want to come at it from this vantage point, which—and, Rob, you probably hear this all the time because I suspect we know a lot of charter leaders in common in New York City, and I hear it from them a lot of times—is sort of, the schools ought to stick to their knitting, stay in their lane. Yes, there's a lot of basic needs in the world, but schools try to do too much as it is. So why, in both of your views, is food a critical part of the school equation? Let's put it that way.
Rob Harvey:
Yeah, I'm happy to start. So, I have heard sentiments like that many times from colleagues and even dear friends of mine. And my response has always been, we made a decision at the beginning of the creation of a public education infrastructure. For every indicator that impacts a life to be a part of our knitting. You cannot build a public based infrastructure that sits inside of community that holds lives in its care, often in more hours than the persons who gave birth or who made decisions to raise children, and then say, there are elements of those lives that are not our responsibility. And so I am a deep believer that anytime an institution, a community, sits inside of a place-based context, it is making an intentional decision to take seriously the issues of that place. So, we take seriously the issues of health, we take seriously the issues of housing, we take seriously the issues of food, because we are, in fact, choosing to care for life, at minimum, eight and a half hours a day, at maximum, sometimes 12 hours a day, more waking hours, again, than the people who either birthed and or made decisions to care for those children. And so I see it as built into the fabric of taking seriously the word public. It is a core belief of mine, which begins, you'll probably start hearing my kind of, like, black panther sentiment, that to take seriously the word public means to take seriously every element of the individual human experience that can show up in public context. And so, when we see a child who is hungry, when we see a child who lacks high quality, nourishing meals in their home, we don't have the option, nor do we have the right, the R-I-G-H-T to say that that is not within the fabric of our concern. To then produce a child who is academically and cognitively well in the world. In fact, the opposite is true. That in order to take seriously our knitting quote, unquote, we have to then say, a child will never be able to perform to their highest ability, never be able to internalize content, never be able to do critical analysis, never be able to make sense of math, never be able to do cross content connections, if, in fact, what I'm thinking about from the moment I walked in school is, oh, I will love a meal. And so we have an opportunity to say, in order to do what we actually do well, there are certain conditions that need to be like criteria, pre criteria met for that child. Have I eaten? Did I rest in a place last night that was safe enough for me to have lower anxiety levels? And do I feel like I have enough understanding of my bodily reality to be able to navigate what's put in front of me?
Michael Horn:
So, Curt, Rob just made basically the case that I think I often make when I have this conversation, at the end, which is if we have these other expectations for the performance and learning of children, you have to make sure that the base case is taken care of at minimum. But I think it's deeper than that. I'd love you just to expound a little bit about how food and nutrition tie into these broader areas of student health, academic performance, sense of belonging within school communities and the like.
Curt Ellis:
Sure, the research is clear what a child eats and whether they have enough food, and whether that food is high quality enough and supports their health and well-being, that trajectory shapes a person for their lifetime. We have a $1.4 trillion economic problem in our country caused by the way we eat. And $400 billion of that is the kind of obvious stuff we point to in the world of medical care for folks who are not supported in being well. But a trillion dollars a year is lost economic productivity. It's lost potential, it's lost opportunity for kids and grownups who are out sick more at school and at work to attain less education and advance less in their careers, and who are going to be forced out of the workforce younger, with fewer of their dreams fulfilled. And that is not an individual failing by people. That is a societal failing in the systems we put around kids. And the reality is, the school system is the single greatest lever we have to make change on those issues. There are seven times more school cafeterias in America than there are McDonald's. Children spend half their waking hours and often eat half their daily calories in school. In every single community, the most important place where food and health happen is a school building. And so, we have a tremendous opportunity to start seeing food not as some kind of cost center that education stakeholders should minimize. Let's cut to the minimum amount of time for lunch. Let's cut to the minimum amount of spend on the meals, but actually see it as a value center, see it as an impact center. If we invest in food, it becomes a tool for joy and power and health and agency and belonging for kids. That is tremendously powerful. And it's a pretty extraordinary teaching tool, too. There's no better way to teach a kid than to give them that tactile, experiential chance to grapple with something they're learning in science class or math class, in a garden or cooking class, where they're actually living with it, with their variance.
Food Builds Student Agency
Michael Horn:
I want to circle back to that in a moment, but I want to stay on something you just said and direct this to Rob, because you mentioned agency. And so now we're starting to go beyond academic knowledge and skills and into what I like to call the habits of success and agency building in a child. A sense of agency, I think, is one of the most important things that schools can and should be doing. Rob, in your view, how does food connect to building an individual's, and, indeed, a generation's sense of agency?
Rob Harvey:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I agree with you. We often are using a phrase called habits of practice. And a habit of practice that we believe at FoodCorps that I believe schools also should take seriously, is a young person's ability to make sense of and therefore make decisions that impact their own lives. So, when we think about some of the higher order outcomes of schooling, the higher order outcomes of teaching and learning communities, it is, does that child have the belief within themselves that they have the knowledge, they have the tools, and they have the analysis to be able to make decisions informed by knowledge that are most meaningful to them? So, when we think about what shows up on a lunch tray, when we think about a child's sense of knowledge about where food comes from, when we think about the menu design that's happening in cafeterias, those are three opportunities at core that allows the child to be able to use their sense of agency - again born of knowledge - to determine what works for them and what they don't. And so what we care about at FoodCorps is by giving children food education, by taking them on a journey of learning. From where a carrot comes from, where and how lettuce is grown. And how that then results in a dish that is culturally affirming. A dish that gives them joy. A dish that also takes care of their physiological well-being. That child begins to navigate a world of agency in their mind. Where when they leave the corridors of their school, they have knowledge to be able to make decisions in community. Around what they will eat and what they won't eat around what they enjoy and what they don't enjoy around what gives them that sense of comfort and belonging on a plate. But it is informed by having opportunities to make those kinds of decisions in the school environment. And what I will offer is that when we think about the universal experience of agency. The thing that everybody can participate in, every single child can participate in the agency of choosing what shows up on their plate. Every single child can participate in activating that sense of internal power. Which for us is also an equity and justice lever. That when you don't have agency in so many other areas of your life. Namely, if you're black or brown, born in densely metropolitan urban communities, but you have agency to decide what you eat on a daily basis, it is one of the greatest senses of joy and power that we believe food can instill. For young people who know quite well where they don't have agency in the rest of their lives, that I can at least stake my individual power in my cafeteria on a daily basis, twice a day, for what shows up on my plate. That's an amazing sense of power being unlocked.
The Nuts and Bolts of the Work
Michael Horn:
It's so interesting, and it's often actually so different from the way we think about kids. And what power they do have over their food choices often in households, unfortunately. I love that take on it, Curt. Let's talk a little bit about the work itself. And what you all are doing in FoodCorps to make a dent in the ways that you all have been talking about. How many schools are you in? What are those programs like? What does it look like to grow the food in maybe an urban school, and the life cycle of not just growing and then eating but learning through those gardens. Get us a little more concrete in the “what.”
Curt Ellis:
So, FoodCorps serves, at our direct level, a couple hundred schools and districts across 17 states. Our work in those places is either or both of school-level work where we're helping put in place great hands-on food education for kids that advances mastery through food literacy, work that advances agency through the kind of things Rob's talking about, getting kids involved in reshaping the menu, giving kids the skills they need to grow food that then can show up in their schools, and belonging. Because we work to help kids have an experience of food in school that lifts up and celebrates the beautiful cultures that are present in that particular place. That's our school-level work. Our district level work is really about supporting menu change. We embed AmeriCorps members within school nutrition teams where they help districts make the conversion to scratch cooking, make the conversion to having more locally sourced, farm direct, minimally processed fresh fruits and vegetables coming in, and make the shift to student driven, culturally affirming menus by doing recipe development and making sure the link between things that are getting tested or voted on by kids then get shown up at large scale in school lunch menus. That direct impact work is all organized around the multi-year goals of our school and district partners. We really see ourselves as being in service of what the local vision is for how food education and great nourishing meals in school can be advanced from that direct impact work. We do a lot of leadership development work, in particular work with FoodCorps alums, with children and families and caregivers to help them find and exercise more of their agency around food in school. And with BIPOC school nutrition leaders, we convene a really extraordinary network called FOLCS, Food Operators and Leaders of Color in schools who's an intergenerational peer mentoring space and creative space for visionary and entrepreneurial school nutrition leaders to advance in their careers and bring fresh thinking to their communities. Then we do a lot of policy work. It's both state level, in places where FoodCorps is the right organization to lead in that work or federal level. And our policy goals are really organized around making school meals free for every student and then elevating what those school meals look like through support for scratch cooking. So, we advocate for additional funding for cafeteria infrastructure and school kitchen infrastructure. Local sourcing, so we in Connecticut just got a great win through the coalition we're a part of there that introduces local purchasing incentives. So, if schools and districts are buying food from local farms, they get some additional resourcing to do that and bring that beautiful, fresh, healthy food into schools. And we invest in the food education workforce and the school nutrition workforce. From a policy standpoint, all of those add up to a future where we believe every kid can and should have free, nourishing meals in school and access to hands on food education.
Michael Horn:
Gotcha. And so, I think the natural question then is, as you started to segue into some of the policy work and establishing the conditions for what you do, is, what is the state like? How would you characterize it - beyond the direct schools and districts you are supporting - how would you characterize the state of food and nutrition education in schools across the country? And maybe, Rob, a question for you out of that is the state of understanding of leaders of these districts and systems, of the importance of this lever and component of a child's well-being.
Curt Ellis:
I'll start by naming three underlying dynamics that I think are in play. And then we'd love to hear from Rob. I think there has been progress in very significant ways what we've seen in school meals since the kind of low point of the 1980s when decreased funding for school meal programs very significantly, declaring ketchup a vegetable, moving everything to be heat-and-serve kind of operation. We've seen the rise of a lot of really beautiful practices, farm to school practices, school garden practices, scratch cooking on the rise. So, progress is, part one, that march of progress is really real and happening and should be celebrated. Part two is it's a time of real pressure. School leaders are, of course, under extraordinary pressure to regain the academic ground that was lost during the pandemic. And that often is resulting in things like shorter lunch periods or less time for experiential learning in school gardens or a divestment of meal quality at a time when inflation and labor shortages are putting a lot of pressure on what schools and districts can serve to kids. And then the third element is potential. There is amazing work happening in state-level policy right now, in particular, that is unlocking free school meals for children across eight states at this point, and more getting ready to line up for that expansion and really exciting investments in things like California is doing basically a wholesale conversion to scratch cooking right now. Like really extraordinary investment in professional development for school nutrition professionals so that they can cook fresh, healthy meals using fresh, local ingredients. So those are the three things I'd lift up. Progress and pressure and potential all kind of crashing together right now.
Michael Horn:
Rob, as you start to answer what leaders recognition of those levers is, I'd love you to also just dig into one part of what Curt just said, which is, and I see this, too, where a school leader will say, or district will say, gee, we got to have shorter lunch periods because that's what's going to get math learning back. Or, gee, it's not just, frankly, food, right? I'll see. Gee, you were acting out, therefore I'm taking your recess away. And that impacts movement and physical health in my mind. How does that connection play out? How are leaders learning about this? Are they learning about the importance of these elements?
Rob Harvey:
Yes, it's a great question. And what I am finding in conversations with colleagues is that answer is why that on average, most school leaders, particularly those who are operating schools in contexts that have deep literacy gaps, have deep opportunity gaps, are not prioritizing food education and prioritizing the food experience, and in part born of their own trauma, of expectation, of accountability built into the state and built into federal resourcing. And so, to some degree, I have great grace and understanding for school leaders who are struggling to figure out how to prioritize food ed amidst a set of competing priorities. When you have to submit your annual report card to the state authorizer or to the accrediting body, then nowhere on that report card does it say, how's food education happening with your 10,000 kids? And because you don't have to answer that question, but you do have to make a case of how you are demonstrating literacy gains and demonstrating math gains in order to not risk the school, school leaders are immensely stuck. And so what happens is we wind up relying on, and therefore defaulting to very conventional notions that time equates to progress, right? That if we cut this to add more time to math and students will all of a sudden learn more, versus a posture I took when I was leading schools, which is, it is not amount of time in isolation, but it is, in fact, practices that are happening. So if we lean into bodies of knowledge that we know about science, of reading, we know that we don't actually need a two hour block for an effective internalization to happen around literacy, that we can give a child 40 minutes to eat and enjoy community with their colleagues and with their friends and still see demonstrated gains. I'm a firm believer, though, that what it will take is it will take a set of school leaders to be willing to make the risk to go see another model. And oftentimes, one of the very things that prevents school leaders from being able to take this journey is low social exposure, is that when you don't have the visibility of exposure, that two things can in fact be true at the same time. Then your consciousness gets stuck in the cycle of trauma. But there are so many leaders and school leaders who I will name who have taken the risk. And when I talked to them, most of them said I was visiting a school and I saw children playing in the garden and I realized I wanted my kids to have the same thing. Or I was talking to a colleague at a conference and I heard that they had just built a hydroponic farm in one of their unused classrooms. And I decided I want my children to be able to see fresh fruit and vegetables growing in a classroom. And so, we have an opportunity to continue to increase exposure through conversations like this and others where school leaders can in fact give themselves the spaciousness to pause and ask, can something else in fact be true? Is there an alternative way for me to take this journey with my young people? And then lastly, to what you raised up about like recess and others, because we have increasing intersecting traumas, namely post a COVID world, we are seeing more and more schools default to more body policing methods that take away senses of joy and power and agency for children. And again, these reactions are reactions born of a set of leaders who are often up against the wall every day with a set of questions and a set of demands that transcend their expertise area. And so, it requires high social exposure, it requires deep conversational engagement with alternative methods, and it requires work like FoodCorps to show up and show teachers and to show administrators and to show district leaders we have an alternative that can do multiple things at one time, that can be both a literacy moment for your young people and a hands-on moment, and a joy filled moment, and a moment of agency. Oh, and a moment of mastery and a family engagement moment, and a math moment all in one lesson. And that becomes a great unlock.
Are Universal School Meals a Good Idea?
Michael Horn:
I love so much of that. I'm going to dig in a little bit here, too, because I feel like what I'm learning is I love the way you give empathy and understanding for why this is occurring. And the importance of high social exposure seems a critical element so that we can change the narrative of instead of these allocations of time being in competition with each other in some sort of sense of zero sum, instead we say, actually, good food and nutrition works toward your reading and math goals. Good food and nutrition, actually, by the way, especially when born in a scratch kitchen where you're designing menus and things of that nature, is going to give you an exposure to language and literacy that is going to improve you in the long run. It's going to more science opportunities that's going to improve your literacy as well. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. The cutting of social studies and science in favor of larger reading and math blocks. When we know literacy, after you learn how to read, becomes knowledge, which means all the other areas. So, it's so much I love here. I guess I want to end with both of you in terms of the policy piece that you touched on and the curiosity I guess I have there is twofold. And just because I've kept you both over what I said I would, I'll try to combine it, which is always dangerous. But I'm curious. One of my perspectives seems to be sometimes we've put into place policies that seem good toward valuing good local sources of food and have unintended consequences. Sometimes I'm curious for you just to sort of name what you've seen in that area and what a more helpful policy framework or orientation might be so that we can sort of end on principles. And I guess the second one, you've mentioned this a couple times, Curt, about the universality piece of this. Eight states, I think you named - Massachusetts is one of them, where I am - to go to universal school meals and the like. And I'm just sort of curious, the tradeoffs there, because it struck me - just to be direct, kids in my household have a lot of resources going toward their meals and nutrition and education and others don't. And so I'm just sort of curious, the tradeoffs between, or the logic for universality versus more targeted for those who maybe need the resources the most. And I'm just sort of curious how you both think about that.
Curt Ellis:
I started on the tradeoffs piece because I think the logic framing you offered makes more sense to me than the tradeoffs framing. That's because the value of making school meals free for every child is that it fundamentally changes the role of food in school. It goes from being some kind of service that is offered to kids who qualify or something we charge other kids for. It goes from being a business that is in the business of trying to make money to being a part of the educational experience. It is a part of what every school can then provide to every child is a shared and communal experience, gathering around the table, breaking bread, and finding common ground. That's a powerful thing that we deeply need in this country, and we need it to start in our schools.
Rob Harvey:
Yeah, I second that. And I continue to hold where I opened up, which is that when we think about the dimensions of classism that have continued in public context, when you remove the mind that those kids need it and my kids don't, you also lower the stakes by saying, what does it look like to say that this value of a nourishing meal is in fact the place where income stops being a marker of difference in a context that is meant to be public and communal in the first place? So, let's build a community that is built on public ideals and democratic concepts. But let's also keep one factor in place that reminds children on a regular basis of the class that they are not a part of, because these folks can pay. Let's just make sure that it's universal for these sets of children. It in fact increases to some degree. This is the counter logic right of isms and phobias. It actually increases my sensibility of being on the underclass of a thing when it is free for me and people who share my economic reality. But I have friends who pay for it regularly, and therefore there is still something that divides us fundamentally twice a day, versus in this context, I go home knowing my point of difference. I go home having to live through my ism. But in this context, in this community, I actually get the freedom of liberation to not be reminded for at least 8 hours that something does in fact divide us. That that is in fact one of the highest embodiments of the democratic ideal. That can we create the conditions for people to transcend the isms that we know they have to carry in their daily lives outside of this place? Can we at least give them the opportunity to lower that sense of trauma for 8 hours a day while they're in community with their friends?
Michael Horn:
I think that's a really beautiful place to leave the conversation. Rob, Curt, really appreciate you joining me, doing what you're doing for kids and communities in schools all across the country, and the continued work that FoodCorps will do. Thanks so much for being with me.
Rob Harvey:
Thanks, Michael, for having us.
Curt Ellis:
Thanks, Michael.
Food for Thought: How FoodCorps is Supporting Health, Well-Being, and Learning in America’s Schools