Wellness Policy Resources

Center for Ecoliteracy

The Center’s Rethinking School Lunch program uses a systems approach to address the crisis in childhood obesity, provide nutrition education, and teach ecological knowledge. The Center spent five years researching 10 interrelated dimensions vital to achieving this vision.

www.rethinkingschoollunch.org

The Center

The Center provides a collection of brief essays entitled Thinking outside the Lunchbox hat form the conceptual framework for change. Leading thinkers, educators, and policy makers probe the connections that link childhood obesity and other health issues, the interdependence of human and ecological communities, education for sustainability, and access to safe, fresh, and nourishing food for all people. New essays are added regularly.

www.ecoliteracy.org

Chez Panisse Foundation

The Chez Panisse Foundation is committed to transforming public education by using food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower young people. The foundation envisions a curriculum, integrated with the school lunch service, in which growing, cooking and sharing food at the table give students the knowledge and values to build a humane and sustainable future.

www.chezpanissefoundation.org

The Edible Schoolyard

The Edible Schoolyard, in collaboration with Martin Luther King Middle School, engages 950 public school students in a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen classroom. Using food as a unifying concept, students learn how to grow, harvest, and prepare nutritious seasonal produce. Experiences in the kitchen and garden foster a better understanding of how the natural world sustains us, and promote the environmental and social well-being of our school community.

www.edibleschoolyard.org

The School Lunch Initiative

The School Lunch Initiative (SLI) envisions revolutionizing school lunch by making food a central part of the academic curriculum. SLI includes gardens, kitchen classrooms, and lunchrooms as contexts for learning. It restores connections between what children are taught and what they experience, between nutrition, health, and the ability to learn, between local communities and the farms that feed them.

www.schoollunchinitiative.org

Slow Food USA

Slow Food USA’s Slow Food in Schools is a unique national program of garden-to-table projects for children that cultivates the senses and teaches an ecological approach to food.

www.slowfoodusa.org

National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity

The National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity advocates national policies and programs to promote healthy eating and physical activity to help reduce the illnesses, disabilities, premature deaths, and costs caused by diet- and inactivity-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity.

www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/nana.html

National Farm to School Program

The National Farm to School Program is a project of the Center for Food and Justice, a division of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. The project brings together nine partners from four states to work on promoting farm-to-school programs nationwide.

www.farmtoschool.org