Trauma and Nutrition Work Continues at Food Connects
Townshend Elementary School Launches Farm to School Program
Honoring Two Local Heroes
Food Explorers
Central Elementary Students Explore the Maple Harvest
Growing Farm to School with the Monadnock Food Co-op
Joey Jacques Wins Jr. Iron Chef Competition!
Two local Farm to School champions were honored this year by the School Nutrition Association of Vermont and Hunger Free Vermont—Ali West and Harley Sterling!
The Outstanding Achievement Award for “Directors or Managers whose efforts exemplify positive attitudes, creativity, and expertise regarding the challenge of providing nutrition services to Vermont students, especially in times of elevated standards, fewer resources, and recently, a pandemic” went to Ali West, Brattleboro Regional Food Service Director for Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU).
The Innovation and Advocacy Award for “any school nutrition employee who has taken an idea, developed it into a goal, and carried out a specific project to help their program expand student access to quality school, afterschool, and/or summer meals as well as elevate their community’s image of school meals and school nutrition personnel,” went to Harley Sterling, Food Service Director for Windham Northeast Supervisory Union (WNESU).
A summary of both nominations follows. Congratulations, and thank you, Ali and Harley!
Ali West is an incredible asset to Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU). She has worked tirelessly during the pandemic to ensure that all students in our community are well-nourished. In March of 2020, she pivoted her entire operation and sent meals home to students within three days of school closures. She managed teams of volunteers in her kitchen throughout the spring of 2020, creating efficient systems for getting students fed at home daily. Ali maintained a positive attitude throughout all the challenges that presented themselves during the pandemic, from staffing shortages to supply chain issues, finding creative ways to solve numerous seemingly impossible problems.
Ali is committed to serving high-quality, nutritious food to students and staff. During her five-year tenure, the food quality has increased enormously, prioritizing purchasing local food whenever possible given her tight budget and a shift to scratch cooking. Ali tries out bold new recipes on her menus, such as French lentil soup with fennel, carrots, onions, and thyme and Asian chicken salad with crispy veggies, mixed greens, and a sesame ginger dressing. Her menus always feature a vegan option. For example, when hot lunch is a tuna melt, she also makes a chickpea “tuna” melt. Meal participation among students and staff has increased dramatically. For example, staffing changes have allowed her to become much more hands-on with managing the BUHS kitchen during the 2021-2022 school year. As a direct result of the changes she has made to improve the food quality and the menu, staff participation has increased by 20%, and student participation has increased by 25% this school year alone.
Ali cares deeply about all students, and she is committed to equity in her work. She strives to make all students feel welcome, no matter where they are from, and that desire inspired her to create the Where in the World are We Eating Program, a monthly program where the entire school community celebrates diversity through their taste buds. Ali collaborated with teachers of English Language Learners in the district to compile a list of the 22 different countries students are from. Each month, cuisine from a different country from this list is featured on the menu, and Ali also encourages the entire school community to get involved by learning about the featured country in their art, music, library, and social studies classes.
Ali recently embarked on a new journey, nourishing a group of Afghan refugee families who moved to the Brattleboro area. She is committed to welcoming them with warmth and care through what she does best, food! She has all pork items in the cafeteria marked haram so that these students know which food to avoid to honor their cultural traditions. She has also translated her menus into Dari to make them accessible to these newest students.
Harley Sterling is laser-focused on one goal—feeding kids the best quality food possible. And when Harley has a goal, he makes it happen. Throughout 2021, we’ve seen Harley feed more students than ever before, increase his already impressive local purchasing, reimagine how school meals can be used to feed families, and continue to value and champion his staff.
In the fall of 2020, students were back in school, but Harley knew families were still greatly struggling from the pandemic and its ramifications. He and his team worked hard to feed students nutritious and delicious meals every day, as he has done for years. But he wanted to do more. Over the Thanksgiving break of 2020, the food service team offered the first “meal boxes” to the community, modeling the idea off of a program the Burlington School Food Project had undertaken. Anyone in the community who had a child could pick up a meal box, which included enough groceries for 2-3 meals a day (depending on the time of year), seven days a week, for one child. Boxes were filled per child—so if a family had five children, they could take five boxes. Each box contained fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, milk, and packaged foods and recipe ideas for meals using the boxed ingredients. On top of all this, Sterling purchased as much local food as possible. Think Bread Shed bread, Miller Farm milk, and Vermont grass-fed beef and produce. This amounted to Sterling’s program spending over $100,000 on local purchases from Food Connects, his local food distributor, for meal boxes alone.
The first two meal box distributions were a roaring success, with over 700 boxes going home with families over the December break. Sterling and his team knew then they were meeting an essential need in the community and vowed to continue making food available to families in whatever ways possible. The team offered boxes over the February and April vacations and made a plan to continue this service throughout the summer.
During the summer of 2021, Harley and his team sent hundreds of meal boxes home every week—averaging around 500 boxes/week., They also continued to feed children who were participating in summer programming at the schools in WNESU. In addition, Sterling secured a contract to feed the children in Keene summer programs. This meant that approximately 500 additional students a day were being fed scratch-cooked meals with a large portion of fresh and local ingredients. ISterling and his team were serving roughly 2000 meals per day throughout the summer of 2021.
Why would Windham Northeast District be feeding students in Keene? This is where Harley’s exceptional innovation, leadership, and passion combine to allow him to identify and capitalize on opportunities—which leads to benefits not just for students but also for his team, local farmers and producers, and the community. Sterling believes strongly in his team and even more strongly in rewarding and elevating them. He offers his staff some of the highest kitchen wages in Vermont, alongside great benefits. One staff member reflected “I’ve never made more money in a restaurant. This is the best paying kitchen job I’ve ever had, and I’ve had many.” Harley doesn’t decline requests for time off. Once a staff member is trained, they are trusted and given a lot of autonomy. He is serious about elevating the community’s image of school nutrition personnel. Sterling is trying to inspire a new movement that he believes is just beginning—a movement to transform school food. Sterling explained, “It starts with taking care of people. Paying them. Giving them great benefits. And elevating them so that people see them and value them for what they are: badass chefs.” He hopes this will motivate others to join the effort.
How can Sterling pay more than “any other kitchen job?” By being innovative, creative, determined, and extremely hard-working. By contracting with the Keene summer program, he nourished more students with high-quality food andsecured more funding to pay respectable wages and pay for high-quality ingredients.
Food Connects is honored to work with Harley, and we are inspired by his work. Many school food professionals are doing amazing work in Vermont. But his steps towards increasing access to high-quality food, decreasing stigma, and elevating his team prove he is an exceptional innovator and a true School Nutrition Hero.
In our March Newsletter, we wrote about Bellows Falls Union High School students competing at Junior Iron Chef VT. Due to a winter storm, the competition was postponed and was rescheduled for April 2nd. Due to rescheduling, teammate Kevin Patterson could not compete, so Joey Jacques had to cook solo—a rarity at Jr Iron Chef, where teams are usually three or more students.
However, cooking solo did not damper the team's abilities. In fact, Joey won the Mise en Place award cooking by himself! Quite a remarkable achievement!
Coach Jake Gallogly remarked that “watching Joey cook was pretty awesome. I don't know if he noticed or not, but all of the judges and many of the coaches kept coming up to me and asking if he was really competing alone. They were really impressed.”
So Jake wasn’t completely surprised when they announced Joey’s name as the winner. But the extra reward came when the captain of the judges told Jake, “his dish was by far the best, and they’d pay for it in a restaurant!” I had felt exactly the same when I tasted it during a practice session.
Jr. Iron Chef helps build confidence in students and offers them a unique opportunity. Jake reflects, “Jr. Iron Chef is a great program. All three times that I have had the opportunity to coach a team, I feel that the kids walked away with more confidence in the kitchen. Cooking aside, I think some of the students that participate in the program aren't always involved in competitive sports, so showing up to the expo center with all the energy and the big crowd of people there has to be exciting. Everyone needs a few butterflies in their stomach once in a while!”
We’ll be waiting with anticipation to see if Joey competes again next year.
In early March, the 2nd-grade students carried on the Vermont tradition of tapping maple trees in the waning days of winter. We tapped two maple trees at school, neither of which was a sugar maple, but instead a Norway maple and silver maple. Thanks to Librarian Jody Hauser for scouting and identifying our trees! The Norway maple has a very slow sap flow, but the silver maple began flowing immediately! Mrs. Kane’s brother Thad came to help us tap the trees, and we were thrilled to get that hands-on experience that generations of Vermonters have had before us.
Later in the week, we enjoyed “sugar on snow,” using maple syrup that Mrs. Stoodley’s family had boiled last year. We took a walk down School Street to Leah’s house to experience their sugaring operation on Friday afternoon. We have all decided that maple syrup is DELICIOUS. We thank Tim and Whitney Patterson, Ryan and Karen Stoodley, and Thad and Jan Guild for helping us understand the experience of making “liquid gold!” We also had a blind taste test to compare silver, Norway, and sugar maple sap to decide which is the sweetest. The results were surprising! While most students thought the sugar maple sap would be the sweetest, the taste test indicated that the Norway maple sap actually tasted the sweetest to the students, as shown in our graph.
Erica Frank in our cafeteria baked up delicious maple-sweetened blueberry oatmeal cakes for the students to enjoy. They were a hit!
Farm to School efforts continue to expand with regular taste tests and activities tied to Harvest of the Month. And we’re getting ready to ramp up our garden, with cold frames already set up and a garden workday planned with help from the Rotary Club to repair and build new raised beds for Spring. Stay tuned for more!
Just in time for its ninth birthday, we celebrate our partner and Farm to School sponsor, the Monadnock Food Co-op (MFC).
It’s hard to imagine that the Keene community didn’t have a co-op less than ten years ago. MFC has become an integral part of downtown Keene, serving as an accessible downtown community marketplace featuring local, nutritious, and sustainable foods. The co-op provides a valuable resource for the community and local farmers to connect and enhance our local food economy.
But beyond being a grocery store, the Co-op supports food systems organizations throughout the community. Each month the Co-op holds a monthly Round It Up donation drive “to raise funds for initiatives that improve the health of our community and help create a vibrant, sustainable local food system.” At the register, community members can “round up” their change—last year, shoppers contributed more than $65,000 to 11 nonprofit organizations and initiatives.
Food Connects has been lucky enough to be one of the Round It Up donation drive recipients. Last year, the Monadnock Food Co-op shoppers donated over $6,000 to our Back to School with Food Connects campaign to raise funds for our Farm to School program. And we’re excited to announce that we will be the August recipient of the Round Up this year. Every dollar we raise goes directly towards our Farm to School programming. We continue to build our partnership with the Modanock Farm to School Network through professional development support and mini-grant funding. This April, you will see us at the Monadnock Earth Day Festival, creating sprouting kits for kiddos to bring home and grow with their families.
We are fortunate to have a strong partnership with the Co-op beyond our Roundup—we deliver local food to the store, partner with them on the Kitchen 2.0 series (a virtual cooking class for kids), participate in many of their events, and more. The Co-op is one of our top customers and exemplifies what it means to be dedicated to improving the local food economy.
Like many other organizations, we are grateful for the support that the Co-op provides our community. Aside from their regular donation requests and their Round It Up initiative, they also serve farms through the Monadnock Food Co-op Farm Fund. This program’s mission is to “support local farmers in increasing sustainable food production and wholesale sales to contribute to a thriving local farm economy.” Many farmers who received these grants work with our Food Hub. Since starting the program in 2017, the Farm Fund has raised over $87,000 for sixteen local farms.
This March, Townshend Elementary School launched its Farm to School Program, opening with a maple syrup tasting event to celebrate the Harvest of the Month.
During the last week of March, physical education teacher Carla West shared facts about the maple syrup harvest in Vermont. On Friday, March 25th, there was a taste test session in each classroom. Teachers Kelsey Taddei and Kathy Gatto-Gurney lead the effort with support from Food Connects staff Jenny Kessler. They asked students to share what they had learned or already knew about maple syrup. Not surprisingly, there were many experts in the house! At least half of each class had either made maple syrup themselves or had visited a friend or family member who makes it. And it was clear that Ms. West’s teaching had stuck—many students in each class told us right away that it takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make just 1 gallon of syrup!
Discussing that fact (and the related time and energy required to make real maple syrup) helped students understand why someone had the idea to make imitation syrup out of corn syrup. But could imitation syrup taste like the real thing? Pre-K through 5th-grade students did a blind taste test of Vermont maple syrup and imitation syrup made with corn syrup. They were asked to choose which syrup they preferred and guess which syrup was “from the tree.”
Not surprisingly, most Townshend students could tell right away which was the real thing. “This one tastes like chemicals,” said 4th grader Seamus Crockett. His classmate Stella Cleveland agreed. “This one tastes buttery and sweeter, and chemically. You can taste it in the aftertaste”. Daniel Sullivan knew it too, “This one tastes like butter. Butter taste comes from store-bought; it doesn’t come from a tree.”
These comments were echoed throughout the school. Students also looked at the ingredients in each product and discussed differences like distance traveled to the store and homes and the reasons for different price points of each syrup.
Students also tasted fresh sap that had been collected that morning. Most students were less familiar with the sap, and it helped them understand the 40:1 ratio a little more concretely.
Both students and teachers are looking forward to monthly taste tests and more Farm to School events in the future. The school would like to thank Ms. West’s family for the generous syrup donations.
Since she began working at Food Connects in the summer of 2018, Farm to School Coach Sheila Humphreys has been developing expertise on the rich topic of trauma and nutrition, including Trauma-Informed Cafeterias and Trauma Sensitive Farm to School programs. Sheila is a leader on this topic, presenting at statewide, regional, and national conferences and acting as a resource for educators and School Nutrition Professionals far and wide.
Most recently, at the request of several Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU) principals, Sheila partnered with Brattleboro Area Food Service Director Ali West of Fresh Picks Cafe to record a 30-minute professional development session on the topic of Trauma-Informed Cafeterias to help support WSESU staff welcome new students from Afghanistan into the school district. The video is relevant to schools that recently welcomed new Afghan students and all schools interested in making trauma-informed changes to their school meal programs.
This professional development is free and available to all. To learn more:
Click here to watch the video
Click here to view the recommended practices for school communities
Click here to view the resource document for more information
This video and supporting materials are based on a full-day training that Sheila Humphreys developed with Vermont-based trauma-informed specialist Joelle Van Lent in the summer of 2019.
In addition, last month, Sheila led her first in-person Trauma and Nutrition Training for educators since the start of the pandemic. She presented to approximately 20 staff members at Winston Prouty’s Early Learning Center. “It felt great to connect with educators in person, get a sense of how the material was landing with people in real-time, and see their whole faces!” says Sheila. And the training was well received by the staff.
“I thought the training was great,” said Katrin Morgan, Child Care Referral and Food Program Specialist at Winston Prouty. “I think that the material was presented thoughtfully. And I appreciated that you shared at the beginning that there could be topics that could be triggering to some people and gave permission to step away or whatever to take care of themselves if needed. I think that this field we are in attracts compassionate and passionate people, and the fact that some people were tearing up and crying and continued to stay in the training showed that you created a safe space for such a hard topic to present.”
Want to know more about these powerful trainings offered by Food Connects? Click here to dig deeper.
Welcoming our New Afghan Neighbors with Culturally Relevant Foods
Junior Iron Chef Debuts at BFUHS
Sponsor Spotlight: Brattleboro Food Co-op
Oak Grove’s Pre-K Students Eat Up Their Local Veggies!
My grandmother taught me that a thoughtful way to welcome new neighbors into the community is to bake them a pie and deliver it to their front door with a warm smile. Here in Brattleboro, our schools and community are in the process of welcoming approximately 100 new neighbors from Afghanistan. That’s a lot of pies!
In Windham Southeast Supervisory Union (WSESU) schools, Food Service Director Ali West and her staff welcomed Afghan students through her Where in the World are We Eating program. These special meals often take more work for the food service team, so our Marketing & Outreach Manager, Laura, joined the team to help peel potatoes and prepare the meal for the following day.
On a windy, cold Thursday in February, several Food Connects staff joined Ali and Brattleboro Union High School (BUHS) students for lunch to enjoy these delicious new flavors together. On the menu that day for the “Welcome Home Afghan Allies” meal was Borani Banjan (fried eggplant with tomatoes, mint, and garlic yogurt), Bolani (Flatbread stuffed with potato, onion, and peppers), Beef Kafta Kebab, and Lavash. The mix of flavors and spices was outstanding! Here’s what a couple of the students had to say about the meal:
“I like it. I like the naan and the meat has good flavor and seasoning. And the yogurt is good in flavor and texture.”
“Oftentimes the cultural food is a lot better than the other food.”
WSESD’s Nutrition program is not the only way the Brattleboro community is welcoming our new neighbors with nourishing food. The Brattleboro Multicultural Community Center-Ethiopian Community Development Council (MCC) is leading the effort to welcome our Afghan neighbors in many ways, including multiple opportunities each week for community members to provide a fresh main dish for lunch daily through a Meal Train site. Volunteers are encouraged to use a collection of Afghan recipes linked on the site, and feedback from our neighbors so far has been that our locally made versions of their traditional recipes are “somewhat bland.” Therefore cooks are encouraged to “be generous with spices, herbs, salt, and oil in the recipes.” Our neighbors say, “We especially want spicy food when we feel sad.” My coworker Beth and I made a meal a few weeks ago, and my kitchen smelled deliciously spicy afterward, those spices perhaps offering a tiny bit of healing to our new neighbors who have been through so much.
In addition, school garden coordinators at WSESD schools, in collaboration with Food Connects and Wild Carrot Farm, are planning to grow two culturally relevant crops in school gardens this season, gandana and nigella, and Kathy Cassin, the Garden Coordinator at Academy School, is featuring some Afghan dishes in her cooking projects with students. The Brattleboro Community and Food Connects family are so happy to play a small part in helping our new neighbors feel welcome, and we look forward to continuing to support and learn from them as they integrate into our area.
When Food Connects reflects on some of our partnerships throughout the community, one business stands out as one of our top supporters—the Brattleboro Food Co-op (BFC).
A monolith in Brattleboro, BFC has served the community since 1975 by providing high-quality locally sourced, organic, and nutritious foods. Food Connects is fortunate to have BFC as one of our top wholesale customers—purchasing our source-identified New England foods to share with the greater community. And with over 8,000 active members, that means more local food is getting into homes across the county.
Not only is the Co-op a major partner to our Food Hub, but they are also a huge supporter of our Farm to School (FTS) program. Last August, they chose our FTS program as one of their Round Up For Change recipients. Because of the generosity of the Brattleboro Food Co-op and its patrons, Food Connects raised over $7,000! These funds went directly to our programming for the 2021-2022 school year, including coaching for Brattleboro schools and professional development for teachers and garden coordinators.
However, the Brattleboro Food Co-op’s generosity doesn’t end with Food Connects. Between December 2020 and December 2021, the Co-op raised over $84,500 through their Round Up program that they distributed to 13 different non-profits. This year, each month is shared between two different organizations to share the wealth among different causes and organizations. This month’s recipients are Brattleboro Time Trade and our partners at Edible Brattleboro. So, next time you are shopping at the Brattleboro Food Co-op, ask to Round Up your change at the register!
