The Campus Kitchens Project partners with high schools, colleges, and universities to promote hunger relief and create self-sustaining food systems for communities. A leader in community service for students, Campus Kitchen Project has student volunteers who use campus kitchens to recover food and deliver meals to those in need in their communities. In addition to all of the kitchen work, the student volunteers also develop nutrition education curriculum and teach it to children and families. They aim to create sustainable and lasting systems in communities to meet hunger and nutritional needs from resources that are already in place.
Campus Kitchens Project’s two curricula are Building Blocks for Healthy Kids and Sowing Seeds for Healthy kids. There are six individual lessons for each, and can be found at http://www.campuskitchens.org/curricula/. The first curriculum consists of simple nutrition principles that children can easily understand. Learning about MyPlate, eating the rainbow, and fun physical activity examples are some of the lesson topics. Each lesson is organized with a cover page that includes the objectives, materials needed, amount of time it will take, and how to prepare for the activity ahead of time. Most of the activities are focused around a hands-on activity or game, which is very useful when trying to engage children. Also, there are healthy recipes at the end of each lesson, which the children can take home to their families. By doing this, the curriculum not only reaches the children, but also encourages their families to take part in a healthier lifestyle.
The second curriculum, Sowing Seeds for Healthy Kids, takes a different approach to traditional nutritional education for children. It aims to teach children about where their food comes from, promoting the awareness of how to create sustainable food systems and why they are important. This is something that relates to the Campus Kitchen Project’s goals of helping the community to create sustainable food systems, which are designed to end the cycle of malnutrition due to poverty or low income. Children will learn the importance of eating different food groups in order to access different vitamins and nutrients essential for their growing bodies.
I think this is a very important set of curricula, as more and more children in the United States are becoming overweight and obese. By implementing nutrition education to the population at a younger age, healthy behaviors will start at an earlier age, and will be more likely to stick around into the children’s teen and adult years. Learning about food programs and how what you eat affects the community is something that is not commonly found in nutrition curriculum, let alone those aimed towards children. Instead of trying to mask the problem of hunger by only donating foods to the communities in need, these lesson plans aim at creating a solution to the problem through sustainable food systems. This type of approach may be more difficult, but will be much more beneficial to not only individuals, but also the community as a whole.