One year ago this week, the Obama administration launched Let’s Move, an initiative to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.  It’s an ambitious–but critically important–goal.

In the last 30 years, the percentage of American children who are overweight or obese has tripled. Diet-related disease, diminished academic performance and a shortened life expectancy threaten the future of our kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in three American children born in the year 2000 is on a path toward Type II diabetes. Among children of color, the figure approaches one in two. Retired Generals describe a coming crisis of national security: already, 27 percent of 17-24 year olds are ineligible for military service because of excess body fat.

This administration has placed a strong emphasis on healthy futures for our children, and rightly so: America’s sweeping epidemic of childhood obesity requires us to martial a national response. The Obama Administration has facilitated the development of the USDA Farm to School Team, Chefs Move to Schools program, Let’s Move Salad Bars to Schools, Walmart’s Nutrition Charter, and the signing of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which created $5 million per year in mandatory funding for a Farm to School Competitive Grant Program. First Lady Michelle Obama has put powerful muscle behind the Let’s Move cause.

When I was at the White House Childhood Obesity Forum in April 2010, one of the First Lady’s statements truly resonated with me: “What we have done is start a national conversation. But we need your help to propel that conversation into a national response.”

Ask and ye shall receive.

This week, FoodCorps, a brand new and much anticipated national service organization, opens applications for its first class of service members.  Those selected will dedicate one year of full-time public service in school food systems–sourcing healthful local food for school cafeterias, expanding nutrition education programs, and building and tending school gardens.

Those activities are directly referenced in the May 2010 report to the President, where the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity outlined 70 specific recommendations to create an action plan for solving the problem of childhood obesity in a generation. Among its recommendations, numbers 3.6 and 3.11 highlight Farm to School and school gardens as community based solutions to childhood obesity.

The Task Force prescribed the kind of programs FoodCorps leaders will implement: “Where possible, use school gardens to educate students about healthy eating. School gardens offer opportunities for fun and physical activity while also serving as an important educational tool to help students understand how healthful food is produced.”

FoodCorps seeks up to 80 young men and women with a passion for serving their country by building healthy communities.  Beginning in August 2011, service members will get their hands dirty in one of 10 states: Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina or Oregon.

Aiming to utilize successful public service models, FoodCorps will leverage a modest amount of federal, philanthropic and corporate funds to answer the administration’s call to action: place young adults in high-need communities, with the mission of improving children’s education about and access to healthy food.

I call that a national response.

Check out our recruitment video:

Applications and more information can be found at www.foodcorps.org.

A new service program promises to recruit an army of volunteers to help transform school food and, perhaps, groom a new generation of farmers.

Over the last three years, I have received thousands of emails, calls, letters, and in person requests from around the country reiterating the same query: “I love the concept of Farm to School programs, but how do I get started in my community’s school? Our budgets are tight and we just don’t have the sweat equity and the labor to pull it off.”

Normally, I answer by walking through the steps of starting a program and briefly assessing the situation in the school environment: do they have a working kitchen? Are there local farmers interested in selling to the school? Is the Food Service Director on board with incorporating fresh, local product? And so on.

But this time, I can excitedly add to my answer, “Have you heard of FoodCorps?”

FoodCorps is a national AmeriCorps program in development that focuses on improving school food systems in high obesity, limited access rural and urban communities around the country. Service members will build and tend school gardens, conduct nutrition education, and facilitate Farm to School programming that brings local food into schools. The program aims to at once serve vulnerable children, improving access to healthy, affordable school meals, while also serving its service members by training a cadre of leaders for careers in food and agriculture. The first troop of FoodCorps members are planned to hit the ground in fall 2011.

So for all of you who have ever wanted to transform the tray, here’s your chance. FoodCorps is searching for vibrant, connected, and supportive host sites that will be instrumental to the success of the FoodCorps mission.

The open period for Letters of Inquiry from potential Host Sites closes on Friday, September 17th. Go here to learn more. Or join us on our monthly open conference call on Thursday, September 2 at 5:00 pm EST to ask questions about Host Site selection.

FoodCorps is a program of the National Farm to School Network, developed in partnership with the National Center for Appropriate Technology, Slow Food USA, and the documentary and advocacy organization Wicked Delicate.

Debra is one of the founders of FoodCorps and the Communications and Outreach Director of the National Farm to School Network, which is a program of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. Debra is also an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellow. Debra’s previous non-profit work spans the globe in the humanitarian, conservation, sustainable agriculture, and food justice realms. She works from her fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion for organic farming raising fruits and vegetables.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

DE: It ranges from food policy, Farm to School, school gardens, school food, rural sociology, obesity, dairy policy, commodity policy, food justice… basically from seed to stomach. The whole gamut.

CE: What inspires you to do this work?

DE: I am a dairy farmer’s daughter and given that there are fewer than 60,000 dairy farmers in the United States, not many people can really understand what that means. But, I grew up with a dairy chip on my shoulder, watching how working for this food system is hard work and when you see that it’s broken even after all of that hard work, that’s frustrating.

When I went to college, I wanted nothing to do with farming. I wanted to save the world, of course, but with a salary and paid vacation because farming is a 24/7 job and Mother Nature is in charge of your paycheck no matter how hard you work.

I undertook humanitarian and conservation work and the more I learned the more I realized that it all ties to sustenance and how that relates to culture. When I was working for The Rotary Foundation in India, the underlying threat was to their ownership of seeds and food sovereignty. In D.C. when I worked for Conservation International, it was about how harmful slash and burn techniques were infringing on ecosystem hotspots, thus killing endangered species. It all comes back to how food relates to civil society. I thought, ‘who am I kidding?’ I had to go back to the farm. When I was living in D.C., I also worked for the National Family Farm Coalition and worked for a small sustainable farm, and then my husband and I decided we wanted to walk the walk on what we believed about food and rural communities. So, my husband and I bought a fifth generation family farm from his side of the family in our hometown in Ohio. I have continued to work on Farm to School, which I believe is the best snapshot of a community based food system, while also working to grow our farm.

CE: What inspired Food Corps?

DE: All the great work of existing Farm to School and school garden programs and the need to conquer obesity in children inspired FoodCorps, and it is really exciting. The ultimate goal is to increase the health and prosperity of children while investing in the next generation of farmers. FoodCorps was developed to answer one of the consistent queries I hear, which is “Oh, we love Farm to School and we love school gardens, but our budgets are tight and we just don’t have the sweat equity and the labor to pull it off.” Enter FoodCorps.

The seeds for FoodCorps as a program sprouted from many minds other than my own including Curt Ellis, Cecily Upton, Crissie McMullan, and Jerusha Kemplerer, which is now the five member planning team working to get Food Corps members on the ground in fall 2011. I attribute some of FoodCorps developing from more than just an idea to the IATP Food and Society Fellowship; I am in class VII of Fellows. The Fellows were in a meeting brainstorming, and I said I wanted to develop a FarmerCorps. Curt Ellis, class VI Fellow, was in the room and his mind was plotting the same. So, we had a meeting in D.C. last year in July to develop a FarmerCorps to help create the next generation of farmers. The idea quickly morphed into Food Corps: putting AmeriCorps members to work with Farm to School and school gardens. The time is ripe with opportunities like Let’s Move and The Edward M. Kennedy Serve American Act that passed in 2009; the Act grows the service members in AmeriCorps from 75,000 people to 250,000 by 2017.

I want FoodCorps to be the Habitat of Humanity of school food.

CE: What’s your overall vision?

DE: Although my focus may change day to day by what brings me passion, by what drives me to make change, the main reason I do this work is to make safe, healthy, delicious food available to everyone. And, to help people see farming as a viable profession, that it’s a beautiful, honorable act to work with nature for the benefit of society. Through all I do, whether writing or farming or advocacy, I want to restore the connection between food, community, land and place.

CE: What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

DE: The blogs I read regularly include Civil Eats, Obama FoodoRama, Ethicurian, La Vida Locavore, Eco-Centric, Grist, Meat Poultry.com, Farm Policy, The Progressive Farmer, AgriNet Radio, Agri News, and Pork Magazine. I like to make sure I’m looking at the right and the left so that I don’t silo myself. For example, I listen to Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow. It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing a Sarah Palin 2012 t-shirt or that you’re an Obama devotee, everyone should get behind Farm to School and improving school lunch and the overall food system.

On my bed stand, I’m re-reading Collapse by Jared Diamond, and also re-reading My Antonia since I’m back to the land again. Free for All by Janet Poppendieck, Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl … and of course, two Wendell Berry books. The History of School Lunch is also open. I’m a rotational grazer in reading.

CE: Who’s in your community?

DE: My community is very close knit and extremely broad, because I live in a rural community of less than 900 people but at the same time I do national work and my employer is Occidental College (in LA). So, I include those I work with everyday, virtually, as well as those physically around me. Because of technology, I can have a breadth and a depth of connections and that has liberated me to have an organic farm flanked by soy and wheat fields in the middle of Ohio. But all of what we do comes down to relationships. Relationships create the strength and unity to build a movement—whether it is a direct relationship to the land in planting a seed or meeting the Food Service Director who controls what your baby will eat for the next 13 years.

CE: What are your commitments?

DE: Definitely to my family and my land and to my work (food systems) and between those I try to strike a balance. I actually just moved back from D.C. because I wanted to rebalance more towards my land and family.

Now I’m trying to strike a balance between our farm, and Food Corps and the National Farm to School Network.

CE: What are your goals?

DE: I want Farm to School programs active all over the country (we are in all 50 states now!) enabling every child to have access to nutritious food while simultaneously benefiting the community and local farmer with a consistent market. The lunchroom provides an opportunity for a classroom without racial and economic class barriers to overcome the injustice of poverty and food insecurity. I want FoodCorps to be in every state in 10 years. And that people see it as a green job, a way to work in community.

Part of my goals is that I’m always grounded in what works, what I call groundtruthing. I want to make sure what I’m promoting is feasible, that it works for the budget, the body, the palette, the planet…and is sustainable and viable.

CE: What does change look like to you?

DE: Change varies as there’s policy change, movements change, etc. Change would be apparent in how the average person defines a farmer – that growing your own food is the norm, not some hippie or fringe thing. That students at Brown, Yale, Xavier and community college alike see farming as the job they want to do. Successful change is when Jaime Oliver comes back to the states at 45, and a kid can identify a carrot and a tomato. Change is when we measure ‘good food work’ in five, 10, 15, 20 years, we’re on the path to reclaiming our future. That American food is delicious fresh food. I want people to visit the U.S. and see a divine culinary culture beyond the Fast Food Nation.

For policy change, it’s going to take time so in 30 years I hope the current Farm Bill has morphed into legislation that truly benefits all people from consumer to farmer. We need to make policy makers look at farm and food policy through a new metric—nutrition per acre should be just as important as bushel per acre. Our society and health depends on it.

Also, we need to immediately bend the trend on the increasing rate of diabetes. Just the fact that we have $218 billion in diabetes costs every year, when just giving people the tools to eat right could prevent it is astounding.

Change is that we all have opportunity to eat and enjoy food that is wholesome in both taste and its path from field to table. That will be made real though policy, through consumer education. Change is when people see the power they have through their food choices

CE: Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

DE: In my role, it takes every definition of outreach. We sometimes rely too heavily on tools like Facebook and Twitter, but if we can text message our way to a healthy culture, let’s do it. We need a diversified outreach strategy including old-fashioned town hall meetings. We need to sit down and have dinner with policy makers and kindergarteners alike and explain what this means to have real food.

We need to work in all different segments. It takes everyone knowing they are empowered to do this. It takes equal responsibility from going to the grocery store to the ballot box, we are responsible for the outcome.

CE: What projects are affiliated with yours?

DE: My projects include Food Corps, OneTray, the National Farm to School Network. Partners include grassroots groups to national organizations, like National PTA, USDA, School Food FOCUS, FFA, SNA and an endless novel of acronyms.

CE: What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

DE: This emerging reporting group, FERN. The idea is to get good food journalists out there, getting paid to do investigative pieces on the food system.

REAL, a new non-profit headed by Anim Steele. The group he is working on creating is really terrific and exciting. The organization will essentially have a whole new tech platform for youth between 14 and 40 to connect local food systems work into what’s happening nationally—politically and in the community.

I’m following everything Let’s Move. It’s amazing to digest how this Administration is taking advantage of all that is social media, especially with an initiative that is so closely tied to my work.

CE: Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

DE: I see strategic and small changes in the next five to10 years. Small local food initiatives building up from what we destroyed in the last 50 years, which will take a lot of hard work and perseverance. I appreciate the steps the current USDA is taking and believe that we will be reaping the true impact of their work for years to come.

More Farm to School, more school gardens, educating that next generation of consumers that will then already have the habits, the taste buds, the palette so that it’s easier to talk policy with them because they grew up with a school wellness committee and their corner store sold local fresh greens. Essentially, access, if food policy can focus on improved access for everyone to good food, then we can have more and better case studies and a groundswell of people to build on for real change. And, we can start thinking more optimistically and systemically.

CE: What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

DE: Power. And to get power, we need more educated voices, different voices, and more diversity in age and color. We need to be everywhere: rural, urban, suburban. The successful meeting of food leaders in the future will have a racially, economically, and age diverse attendance– a serious diversity of voices from all sides of the table bringing a diversity of cultural and class baggage, but still singing the same tune. We must also engage with those in the food and agriculture world on all scales of agriculture from small to large if we are going to create real change. I try to focus on outreach to all sizes of agriculture in my work.

CE: What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

DE: It totally ranges by season, but if it was a last meal, it would be surrounded by friends and family – that would be a huge part of it tasting good. I would have a similar meal to the Harvest Birthday Celebration my husband organized for me last year where all my family members had to create a dish from an ingredient from our garden, much of the vegetables standing alone save for some olive oil, sea salt and pepper. The menu included heirloom tomatoes, roasted garlic, edamame, fennel salad, potatoes, and pulled pork (from our pig sweetened from our maple syrup). Then, for dessert, homemade ice cream, paw paw cake, and to top it off, some form of deep, deep dark chocolate. But, if all I could have is a fresh heirloom tomato, preferably Cherokee Purple, I’d be a very happy camper.

James Johnson-Piett is responsible for the overall management of operations and strategic vision for Urbane Development, a community and economic development firm based in Philadelphia. He specializes in neighborhood scale development and the revitalization of urban commercial and retail amenities. His work focuses on strengthening neighborhood commercial and retail enterprises by providing services and expertise that infuses principles of social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and technical acumen into the core of his client’s operations. He serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors of the Community Food Security Coalition, is a co-convener of the Healthy Corner Stores Network, and a member of the Philadelphia Development Partnership’s Young Entrepreneur’s Advisory Board. James is an alumnus of Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Studies. I sat down with James to ask him a few questions last week for our new series, Faces & Visions of the Food Movement.

JD: What issues have you been focused on?

JJP: A real grab bag, I kind of come from a public finance, retail development space. I help people become engaged in sustainable food and food access from a business or economic development perspective. To drill down specifically, grocery retail, the development of stores, working with store owners to make them better entrepreneurs; and you know, it’s interesting because people hear about the corner store work, and corner store conversions, cracking them open, doing gut rehabs, but it’s really the larger systems work that I enjoy most. Connecting that entrepreneur to the larger movement and showing them what they can do to make a difference.

I traveled with Juan Carlos Romano, a bodega owner I work with in Philly, to Terra Madre a few years ago and showed him all the people from around the world involved in this work, then watched him connect the dots. I think that connector role, as much as the individual work I do, is exciting. Can I get into an entrepreneurs head and get them to think about how selling healthier food or operating a sustainable business is a way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace? And that you’re getting not just that differentiating factor, you’re becoming a better entrepreneur, and making a real difference.

I work with city agencies, like economic development, public health, and urban planning, around designing programs for grocery development. I was a manager of the Fresh Food Financing program in Philadelphia and had been working with cities like Detroit. In two weeks Detroit will launch its Green Grocer Project, which is a grocery expansion and attraction program to help with operations, financing and giving them a direct liaison housed in the City for anything they need. To create a space in the city for a grocer at any level to get involved and give them a contact for anything they need: bookkeeping, accounting, store design, product handling, you name it.… the Mayor will make an announcement on May 17th and it’ll be like watching my baby be born.

So yeah, I’m in that space within the larger food access movement. But I think because I’ve been doing this for a little while now I see where the pieces connect. Local grocers selling local producers products and creating those networks and getting those networks to scale and getting that local web connected to other local webs and connecting it all.

JD: What inspires you to do this work?

JJP: Honestly it’s problem solving. It’s seeing an issue and whether it’s a specific one – a grocer can’t sell healthy products, or a larger one – a city can’t attract a grocer to a corridor, then cracking it open and creating interesting, innovative and efficient solutions. That’s really what drives me. And, that food is connective and universal and a great way to bring communities together. It’s a great rubric to look at urban spaces; I love cities, it’s something that always moves me and watching the food culture in that city gives you a sense of that city’s culture and when you can affect positive change in that city, that’s a great to way to impact positive movement and growth.

JD: What’s your overall vision?

JJP: Ultimately, to create networks of entrepreneurs who utilize food and other resources to help communities in general become more dynamic; and offering wealth creation opportunities to folks who haven’t had them to create food-based enterprises. To create livable, viable communities people can enjoy. To make “live, work, and play” not just a cliché of the development world, but to create viable spaces for folks who want to be able to have a nice life despite their socio-economic station, or simply because they live in the middle of a “concrete jungle”. They should have the same amenities as anyone. And, if you can make those people the agents of change through social enterprise … that’s good.

Re-entry is big for me. You have African Americans and Latinos, former prisoners, coming back into their communities and we don’t have a system where restitution and rehabilitation are emphasized. There are few ways for ex-offenders to get back into mainstream society and have opportunities for growth. Food-based enterprises are a great opportunity to bring at risk youth and ex-offenders back into society in a positive and fruitful way.

I think we miss opportunities to connect food advocacy and other fields of interest because the nature of the work (and the method of funding) breeds specialization rather than integration.

Food and the environment. Food and entrepreneurship. Food and community. Food and public spaces. These things make sense to me.

JD: Who’s in your community?

JJP: My community’s global. I know that sounds trite. After Terra Madre, I went to Rome and I met these Afghan proprietors of a hookah shop. It was maybe two a.m. and I talked with them about mixed martial arts and where to get great tomatoes and what areas in Italy have the best meats. I told them about how I just stayed next to a row of pig farms in Fossano up in the north. I think about them and how the next time I go to Rome, I will seek them out and see how I can connect them to my work more explicitly. They are a part of my community.

A guy who’s come out of prison, he was trained in gardening and horticulture in the prison and is trying to figure out a way to make a living doing that.

The guy who’s a local grocer who can’t figure out how to do his books.

The people I get to work with … they are my community. It’s about bringing together people who aren’t a part of this work into it. People who don’t or haven’t been a part of the conversation need to get into it.

For me, that’s everybody.

JD: What are your commitments?

JJP: My commitments are to my clients. I don’t do a great job of sticking to my scopes of work. You spend all this time with a client figuring out what your responsibilities are for a project, but the manager in me never left. I get much more invested than I should according to the contracts I set up. Commitment to me for a project is really soups to nuts, even if my part is supposed to be just 10 percent, clients know I’ll do whatever I can to see it through to the finish line.

Whether in my work, family life, and with friends I try to be a straight shooter and be honest about things.

The way we fund food-based initiatives creates unreasonable expectations for projects, particularly if they are profit-based. You create outcomes for grants that make no sense within the lifecycle of business. I don’t know one initiative in any field of interest that has been able to create sustainable, game-changing outcomes within 12 months. Even a venture capital or private equity firm, where a project has to exhibit crazy 500 percent, super explosive ROI to be deemed successful, recognizes the need to have a three-to seven-year window to execute the project. But in the food movement, we overpromise and underfund, then get mad when we don’t change the world after a year.

I try to see it through with the actors I’m working with. If I’m working with a grocer, I try to think like that grocer and what will motivate him to change their business model, because he has to own what he’s doing. If it’s changing the entire product mix, he has to be involved. I can’t make you want it, but my commitment is to be the best advocate and provide the best support I can give to show that grocer she has what it takes to pull it off.

If I give a business owner reasons to make the quantum leap, great. If it matches with a grant narrative, all the better. If it doesn’t, c’est la vie. It’s seeing a project through to its most logical and effective ending. I trust my gut enough to know when you look at a project and know how it should end, to make sure I’m committed to making that happen.

JD: What are your goals?

JJP: My goals are one, to finish what I start. I see so many connections and try to do too many projects at one time. It’s a personal crusade that Urbane Development succeeds. I haven’t don’t have a full measurement of what it would mean to succeed yet. But, my goal is to watch some sort of fundamental system change occur, where all pieces of the puzzle slowly fit together.

Schools, gardens, grocery stores, neighborhood businesses… all working in tandem to imbue concepts of healthy and active living, while offering opportunities for entrepreneurship and life-skills training, and providing safe spaces and routes within neighborhoods. That’s already happening in some places, but usually this work happens in disjointed pieces instead of collaboratively. Particularly when business is involved.

I absolutely want to create technologies that allow these neighborhood-level connections to occur faster and more efficiently. Cell phones are the predominate method of communication for youth, we need to be thinking about ways to take advantage of this delivery system to market the things we think are important for them to know and share with others.

Finding ways to create wealth for those with limited access to capital and to those networks. And utilize my expertise to give them ways to do that. Unless we decide we want to live in a more communal-based economic system, we need to look at the world that way a little more than we do.

Give people opportunities to create. There’s a great book called Bad Money, by Kevin Phillips, that talks about the eminent decline of the U.S. as a economic superpower due in large part to our reliance on financial services as the predominate method of wealth creation. We need to start making things again in this country! Food is a great way to create, to produce.

We are missing the boat with innovative food projects. Create the idea of localized systems that connect to each other to create at a global scale. How can the systems, materials, and resources we create in our food-based enterprises inform and transform projects in other industries or fields of interest?

Investing in communities to create things. Be a part of the creation movement.

JD: What does change look like to you?

JJP: It’s like the Chris Rock joke: when America has a really dumb black President and no one cares that he’s black. In other words, when we live in a society that values and strives for meritocracy. When people who are pigeonholed and stereotyped have the opportunity to do what they want without anyone caring about their backgrounds.

Multiple ways of doing things… allowing for space in all these movements to get to a point where people are judged by what they do and what they create not so much who they are. It goes both ways, people in power, people who are marginalized. Having candid conversations about solving problems. Getting down to the issues and finding strong creative solutions to our problems and cutting out the white noise that distracts from that. Taking personal stock in your space and mode of thinking and solving problems and looking inwards. Change is very personal. How can I be a better x? Any x.

Thinking about how we affect personal actions, how we make an impact. People being looked at as individuals and what they bring to the table and seeing what they bring however incremental.

JD: Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

JJP: What we’re doing right now [the interview]. Like Heather Wooten telling me to be more vocal. Me speaking my mind. Social media is very powerful. I don’t know how people think of me, but that perception has got nothing to do with me personally. Most people know me from my work or my public persona — whatever the hell that means. Sometimes I don’t recognize how much perception of me colors people’s actions towards me. Engagement is very personal when it comes to change. I see my nieces and nephews behaving in ways I don’t like, so talking with them about their actions and behavior and how they are not operating in a vacuum.

The outreach is to public officials. We give them this mandate to speak for us. Then we abdicate it by not talking to them.

If you’ve talked to people on the Hill, the people who really run this country, operationally at least, they are 25-35 years old. They are writing the bills, they are trying to figure out what’s going on, but there are so many voices in the gallery that we end up at the lowest common denominator, and that doesn’t make sense.

In my mind, the art of the sale is something that’s missing from the repertoire of the average change agent. On some level you have to be a Viking about it. No fear. When you’re selling change to a constituency that fears it, you can’t be hesitant or apologetic. But you have to be knowledgeable about what motivates that constituency and what aspect of the change are beneficial to them. There’s a great concept in sales that is germane to change work: the sale is never done until you lose. With change, there’s always an up-sale.

The next bodega boot camp I do, I’m attacking it straight Tony Robbins style. We’re going to create a dynamic sales force for change.

As a practitioner, if we can prove things out in the real world, that is powerful. This is our economy. A movement where we’re talking to entrepreneurs and small businesses about their power is not really happening right now. Telling them they have a lot more dynamism than they think.

It’s a continuum from individual to collective actions. Like a flash mob, all of a sudden a cacophony of connections. Give people an opportunity to see the connections.

JD: What projects are affiliated with yours?

JJP: The Healthy Corner Store Network is a really awesome group of advocates across the country trying to work with small stores in whatever ways possible. Social marketing, full store conversions, helping entrepreneurs be better, connecting to larger food systems work.

The Green Grocer Project in Detroit. I have to give a shout out to DEGC and the City of Detroit. They are doing awesome things around grocery stores and local entrepreneurship and local food issues. Seeing food retail as a means to economic change. As an attractive business opportunity, improving the quality of life in Detroit, which makes it much more attractive to people with options. Good grocery options attracts the types of folks who can build up their tax base will make spaces better to live in.

Fresh Foods Initiative – Small Grocers Program in Newark, NJ. BCDC, the economic development arm of the City sponsors a comprehensive food retail economic development strategy: a farmers market, a supermarket, and small grocers program. This is an example of a city and its economic development agency providing opportunities for capital and technical assistance resources to the grocery community in Newark.

The Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development program by the USDA that’s being administered through the Wallace Center and I review those enterprise grants and I whole-heartedly believe food creation as a way to create change.

LISC, Local Initiative Support Corporation, a national community development firm. I work with LISC Philadelphia. They are doing a commercial corridor engagement program supporting community development corporations to create vital commercial corridors for neighborhoods. I work with local grocers to stabilize those corridors as community anchors.

Philadelphia Development Partnership. I am an adviser for their Young Entrepreneurship Program.

Writer’s Bloc. A screenwriting collective I’ve been part of for a few years. My buddy Jason is the worker in the group. He just pumps scripts out. I’ve been milking my magnum opus for years. It’s about astrology, mathematics, and snuggle buddies.

JD: What projects have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

JJP: I’m super curious to hear what Slow Food USA will do next. They just hired a cool director of national programs with a background in immigrant rights. I think they are an important organization to connect people with affluence and means of wealth with social justice issues and they are a connector for these issues with a strong base of support.

The city of Seattle. Folks there are doing interesting work with planning. Branden Born, an urban planning professor who is kicking ass. It’s a place where many players are putting together a neat package of projects that will create a better food system in Seattle.

So many interesting enterprise projects are out there. There are so many people around the country doing awesome work. Hopefully the Wallace Center, HUFED program will show people how many innovative ideas are out there.

The slow money stuff is interesting to me, not so much about food aspect but the idea of local stock exchanges, local equity funds, and other localized, community-derived financing mechanisms for small business projects. Those are opportunities for folks to be creative and create better communities with their own wealth.

I have to give a shout out to Philly and the Mural Arts project. It used to be if you saw a mural on a building you knew it wasn’t selling, but they’ve created a neat canvas using dilapidated buildings to give Philly a visual voice. They engage youth in a positive way. Teens 4 Good, a youth-based urban ag project out of Philly is super dynamic and I’d bet those kids start a land-use revolution in Philly.

Steve Warshawer at La Montanita Co-Op in New Mexico. That guy is a force of nature. You want to figure out ways to deal with rural food access issues, just talk to him for 10 minutes.

I just read an article about Heather Hilleren in Inc. Magazine about her website Local Dirt. I love projects that use technology to increase scale for small businesses. Really want to see how this and businesses like this help small producers capture additional markets.

JD: Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next five to 10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

JJP: The change I described in the earlier question, no. The change in the incremental fashion were used to? Sure. For instance, the national Fresh Food Financing Initiative bill will find its way through. It’s a neat program, but it could be so much more. If we had the political will we’d be talking about why there’s a food access problem in this country — lack of wealth in urban/rural communities and the cost of specialty crops.

The Farm Bill is the same way, specialty crops, the products that make us healthy don’t get subsidized. Subsidizing corn isn’t going to work. Kind of runs counter to all the money we’re spending on public health initiatives. Let’s move on that.

Real policy change is getting agencies to talk to each other. To this administration’s credit that’s happening more.

The best things about America to me come out of the marketplace. How amazing of a time do we live in right now. At this moment, entrepreneurs can create businesses and produce products with high social value and still make a living. When policy can encourage that, it’s a blessing.

I don’t think in the next five years there is the courage or the focus or the trajectory where folks are thinking of that stuff, big or small.

Whenever the term “innovation” is used, it’s an excuse to fund something at a small scale. Why aren’t we funding those things, taking those risks at a large scale? Instead everything has to be piloted and done at this baby scale. By the time we get to critical mass, it’s too late because policy moves too slow.

Farm to School is a great example. Instead of farm to school advocates pouncing on the food safety issue in schools and selling their work and their producers as an alternative to conventional food service distribution methods, we allowed that option to be framed as a quality control nightmare. Clearly the system in place is failing, yet the voices of an alternative are never heard beyond the choir. The moral imperative is clear, but we need to make the economic and logistical justification in much more aggressive ways. There are so many lessons, products, and resources being creating within local, sustainable value chains. We need to market these solutions as innovative market opportunities as well as promoting health, wellness, and sustainable production for our kids. That still makes me mad, it was such an opportunity. The next time we have an e-coli or salmonella outbreak, we need to ready to pounce with farm to school/institution as a cogent alternative.

Anything that will stimulate products we can move in the global economy and finding solutions to the political and social challenges that ail us, why aren’t we incubating that? If policy can help, great, but if not, why not get out the way? Don’t be obstructionist.

I’m not a nihilist. I just think people don’t have the cojones to do what they need to do. Which is get aggressive and take some risks. In politics, in advocacy. Hopefully the marketplace can take care of some of that.

JD: What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

JJP: Oh man, last meal, last meal, it would probably have to be the most succulent roast pork sandwich out of John’s Roast Pork in Philly, provolone, thinly sliced slightly melted, broccoli rabe, fried onions, and honestly I’d throw a little sriracha on there for a kick. Washed down with a black velvet, a nice amber cider and an oatmeal stout mix. Bread pudding definitely.

[he pauses, thinking]

Scratch that, my grandmothers’ brown Betty. That’s what I’m eating. If I can’t have it ever again, that’s what I’m eating.

[Editor's Note: It's coincidental that we've highlighted two people in the retail space in our first two posts of this series. We want to talk to everyone we can, and with timing, etc., we are fortunate to engage in conversations with two men working to connect local producers with local markets at this time. If you know someone you'd like to see featured, please contact Jen Dalton.]

With one in three children (and one in two children of color) overweight or obese in this country, the health of America’s kids is under the microscope and, for the first time in our history, children born now will not live as long as their parents. Michelle Obama has launched her Let’s Move campaign, and chef Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution brought the school cafeteria to television. But as Oliver’s program showed, one of the biggest barriers to changing kids’ health outcomes is a lack of dedicated labor and expertise.

That is where FoodCorps comes in, an AmeriCorps program that would put service members to work building school gardens and establishing farm-to-school relationships in towns across the United States, specifically in places lacking regular access to fresh produce. A collaboration between the National Farm to School Network, Slow Food USA and other groups, the FoodCorps team has raised more than $215,000 from the Kellogg Foundation and AmeriCorps to develop the program, which could begin as early as 2011.

AmeriCorps began in 1993 as a domestic service program similar to the Peace Corps that mostly recruits new graduates. As more and more young people seek to get involved with farming and food access initiatives, FoodCorps would provide volunteers with the opportunity to work in this field while earning a modest living, health care benefits and a chance for additional money after their term of service is fulfilled to use for future schooling or to pay off educational loans.

In working through the framework of AmeriCorps, the program utilizes existing funding avenues to get programs up and running on the ground. Unlike the Child Nutrition Act, which determines the funding for school lunch and continues to suffer delays in Congress–and which some argue does not allocate enough money to make significant change–FoodCorps could make a difference in child nutrition more swiftly.

““FoodCorps will deliver a significant additional infusion of resources in just a handful of schools: the places where childhood obesity has hit hardest and healthy food is most urgently needed,” said Curt Ellis, a member of the planning team and co-creator of the documentary film King Corn. “The program complements existing school food programs, without being constrained by their challenges.”

The impetus for the project was the Kennedy Serve America Act, which will raise the number of available AmeriCorps volunteer positions from 75,000 to 250,000 by 2017. The FoodCorps team has also taken inspiration from similar successful programs utilizing state-based AmeriCorps funding in Montana, Wisconsin and Iowa. The planners will take the best of these models and scale them up to produce the first national program focused on farm-to-school procurement and school garden-based education.

Crissie McMullan, who started Montana FoodCorps and is now on the planning team for the national program, said one of the difficulties faced by FoodCorps service members in Montana was finding local food for the federal reimbursement rate of around one dollar per child per meal. But it wasn’t impossible. “One Montana FoodCorps member figured out that some apple growers had a surplus of fruit too small to sell at the farmers market,” she said. “Those apples were a perfect fit for the schools, who saw them not as ‘too small’ but instead as ‘kid sized.’”

The program also aims to raise the profile of the profession of farming, and thereby inspire newcomers to consider the occupation. “FoodCorps provides a gateway into careers in food and agriculture for a generation of young service members who want to get their hands dirty,” said Ellis. “To me, that’s what makes the program so exciting, that we serve the communities where we are working by getting fresh healthy food into school systems and teaching kids where food comes from, and we serve the service members in the program by giving them an opportunity to try their hand at farming, and see if that is a career they would like to pursue.”

The FoodCorps planning team will be hosting a summit in Detroit May 19-20 that will bring together leaders in school food issues, former AmeriCorps service members, farm-to-school program coordinators and more to discuss the future of the program.

Photo: Second-year Montana FoodCorps volunteer, Sarah Kester, and food service staff at The University of Montana checking out a fresh harvest of local melons, which they quickly bought and served up in the cafeteria. Photo by University of Montana University Dining Services

Originally Published on MarkBittman.com

U.S. Rep. Rush Holt (NJ-12), an actual rocket scientist and five-time Jeopardy winner, has introduced legislation that would create a Farm to School grant program to fight childhood obesity and support local farmers.

“Farm to school programs exemplify the best use of federal school lunch dollars,” Holt said. “This is a rare opportunity for a win-win solution– a program to ensure our children get the best quality food at school, help foster local farm job growth, and create local economic growth.”

Watch for yourself as Holt speaks about the legislation with school nutrition experts at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and Labor, who is in charge of crafting the school meals legislation on the House side.

Representative Holt asked Dora Rivas, President of the School Nutrition Association: “Despite being authorized, the existing federal Farm to School program hasn’t been funded. What would you say about making the funding mandatory?”

“ABSOLUTELY!” Ms. Rivas replied. Mandatory funding is key as that would enable advocates to focus on actual implementation of said programs instead of fighting for dollars every year in the nitty-gritty appropriations process.

A recent poll of over 1,000 American adults demonstrated that 81% support Farm to School programs in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization (CNR).

The people have spoken, will their representatives on the hill listen and support mandatory funding for Farm to School in the CNR?

Backing up the rocket scientist Representative, researchers recently recognized three reasons why school food service professionals engage in Farm to School programs: (1) ”The students like it,” (2) ”The price is right,” and (3) ”We’re helping our local farmer.”

As reported in the Elsevier press release,

“researchers found the farm to school programs benefited both the school and farmer. School food service professionals (SFSP) reported that the lower price for produce was attributed to a shortened supply chain. SFSP were able to buy produce that is not typically offered in school cafeterias such as asparagus, blue potatoes, Asian pears, etc. This research is being presented at a time when budgets are tight and there is a huge need for nutrition education in schools. The farm to school program may help to promote healthful eating and improve our school food programs.”

The full study is available in the March/April 2010 issue of the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Volume 42, Issue 2. March is national nutrition month and this year’s theme is fittingly “Nutrition from the Ground Up.”

Another new survey, released Tuesday by the Minnesota School Nutrition Association (MSNA) and IATP, reported that the number of Minnesota school districts purchasing fresh food from local farms has more than doubled in the last 15 months.

Digging Deeper

As the Child Nutrition Act is being addressed by Congress right now, Rep. Holt is working to improve how food is sourced for the 31 million children that eat at school five days a week, 180 days a year.

His Farm to School Improvements Act (H.R. 4710) would establish a competitive grant and technical assistance program to increase the use of local foods from small and medium sized farms in schools. The grant funds also would improve the relationships between schools and local food providers. The legislation would provide $10 million in mandatory funding each year for the duration of the program and require that grant recipients provide a local match to ensure serious commitment to the project.

The grants authorized by this legislation would provide communities the seed money they need to develop robust, economically-sustainable programs linking agricultural producers with schools.

“This seed funding could not come at a better time as the interest and need for Farm to School programs is at an all time high,” said Marion Kalb, co-Director of the National Farm to School Network. “HR 4710 will create competitive, one-time grants that can be used to develop vendor relationships with nearby farmers, plan seasonal menus and promotional materials, start a school garden, or develop hands-on nutrition education.”

Farm to School programs can:

• Strengthen children’s and communities’ knowledge about, and attitudes toward, agriculture, food, nutrition and the environment.

• Increase children’s participation in the school meals program and consumption of fruits and vegetables, improving childhood nutrition, reducing hunger, and preventing obesity and obesity-related diseases.

• Benefit school food budgets, after start-up, if planning and menu choices are made consistent with seasonal availability of fresh and minimally processed whole foods.

• Support economic development across numerous sectors and promote job creation.

• Increase market opportunities for farmers, fishers, ranchers, food processors and food manufacturers.

• Decrease the distance between producers and consumers of fresh agricultural products, thus promoting food security while reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and reliance on oil.

“In these challenging fiscal times, every dollar we spend must not only meet immediate needs but also make lasting improvements for the future,” Holt added. “Because school food programs currently provide more than half the daily calories for many children, it is vital that these calories are healthy ones. Farm to school programs increase the availability of fresh and locally grown food that improve our children’s daily nutrition and can lead to permanent improvements in their diets and productivity and can reduce future health care costs associated with obesity by billions of dollars.”

In the meantime, what can you do? Contact your Congress person today to encourage action on and passage of HR 4710. That part, at least, is not rocket science.

Originally Published on The Huffington Post

As I entered the gymnasium of Lakeview Union School for Harvest Dinner, students buzzed busily around tables piled with plates of food – quinoa salad, beet and apple salad, pita bread, local Jasper Hill Farm cheese, turkey, squash, corn and mashed potatoes. Many are dishes that these students made themselves in the classroom using local ingredients, and most of the rest was grown in the school garden. A third-grader takes a bite of the pita bread made by the fourth graders and chews thoughtfully. Then he checks a box underneath a smiling face that proclaims, “I liked it!”

My two children are students at Lakeview, a small elementary school of 74 students nestled among the hills in one of northeastern Vermont’s most picturesque small towns, Greensboro. Here, in the heart of a pastoral landscape, you might think that local, farm-fresh foods in the cafeteria are a given. But due to budgetary constraints and other challenges, this hasn’t always been the case. No matter how rich the local food system, it can be difficult to produce quality lunchroom food.

Several years ago, a movement began with students and has grown into a revamping of the school lunch program, with direct-farm purchasing, a school garden, and even a whole-school composting system. It started when two fourth-grade students accompanied Lakeview’s principal, Linda Aiken, to a Vermont Rural Partnership conference and returned with an enthusiastic plan to start a salad bar. With the help of their teacher, they surveyed the students to find out which foods they would want and with food service staff support they set up and began offering it one day a week.

From the salad bar, the idea for a school garden grew – and with it, community interest in the food served at Lakeview. Staff, parents and teachers collaborated to build raised beds for the garden. One student’s grandfather donated his time and machinery to excavate a space for the garden, while another grandparent donated the materials. Ag Day, a biennial celebration of local farmers, launched in the spring of 2006. Farmers bring their animals to the school and children get a chance to experience farming, hands-on.

Alongside the garden, a natural cycle unfolded. The school set up their own worm bin and began composting food scraps. By 2007, the program had expanded, and Lakeview was sending cafeteria scraps to the nearby Highfields Institute in Hardwick, and in return received compost for the garden. Teachers tied the study of composting into science units, and students learned how food that would otherwise be thrown away was transformed into rich nutrients for growing veggies.

The kids loved the garden. My daughter proudly informed me when I had lunch there one day that the zucchini muffins contained zucchinis she had grown, and as I made my way along the salad bar, students pointed out which items came from the garden (most of them!). Dawn Desjardins, Lakeview’s Food Service Director, noticed that the children were much more likely to eat the food that they had grown themselves. She also became an expert at folding vegetable purees into various baked goods and slipping them into soups.

It was in this environment of growing student involvement and enthusiasm that the Farm to School Committee formed in the fall of 2007. I jumped on board. I’m a parent but also a small-scale farmer raising pastured chickens with a personal interest in the farming side as well.

Besides myself, there were other farmers on the committee as well as Lakeview’s principal, the Food Service Director, Jeff Roy, the Maintenance Director (who grew up on a local farm), several parents and three students. We were awarded a competitive grant by the Vermont Department of Agriculture to implement a Farm to School Program. Our objectives were to set up several purchasing arrangements with local farms to buy fresh food in bulk. The foods would be used as ingredients in new recipes that would be taste tested with the students. The most successful recipes would then become part of the food service menu.

With the idea to connect the kids more directly with the origins of their food, the objectives included both a guest farmer coming to the school to talk about what they grow, and field trips to local farms where students would learn more about how the food was grown and even participate in harvesting some produce. Our culminating activity was Harvest Dinner, where the students served dishes they prepared themselves in the classroom, using local foods, including produce from their garden.

The grant funds helped us purchase a refrigerator to store the bulk foods as well as begin construction on a storage shed – a kind of root cellar – for cold storage of root veggies and other produce. Without this infrastructure for storing large quantities of farm-purchased food the project would never have gotten off the ground. It was one of the first logistical hurdles we faced.

The support of food service staff members was key to the program’s success as well. One challenge is that bulk-purchased farm foods require more preparation than packaged foods from a food service distributor. More prep work is required – peeling carrots and potatoes, shredding zucchini, and so on. And there are stringent federal regulations for what foods can go into school lunches and how they must be prepared.

Over the past two years, the school has achieved its grant objectives. Among other successes, farm to school has become integrated into the curriculum, with the kindergarten class experiencing a whole cycle: they grew wheat, harvested and threshed it, ground it and made pizza dough and bread with it. This tied in with a literature unit on the book, The Little Red Hen.

The circle felt completed when parents, students, teachers, staff, farmers and community members joined together to eat locally-grown food for Harvest Dinner last year. The kids were proud to show off what they’d learned, and they felt invested in the dishes that were displayed for taste testing.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some challenges as well. As I mentioned, managing the storage, rotation, and preparation of the foods has been a logistical obstacle to overcome. And the development and coordination of delivery systems, we found, can be particularly difficult. The unknown factors involved in working with bulk-purchased whole foods can cause stress for food service personnel as well. It’s one thing to look at a can of pumpkin puree and see what quantity it provides for a recipe. But how many pumpkins do you need to roast and scoop to generate a certain number of cups of puree? Using farm-fresh food often requires rethinking recipes completely, not just adapting them to fresh ingredients. Yet as much hard work as it is for kitchen staff, they have risen to the challenge.

For farmers, the benefits abound: it’s great to know that you can count on the school to purchase a set quantity of product at specific intervals. It’s also a chance to connect with the community in a new way. Both the school and the farms appreciated the opportunity to keep school lunch funding in the community – there are so many benefits, both tangible and intangible, to exchanging money for goods locally.

Linda Aiken is excited about what’s next for the project. The school is in the process of developing a sustainable plan to continue the initiative now that the grant money is spent. It’s really important to have community and especially parental support, so there’s motivation to continue bringing healthier, locally-sourced lunches to students.

Most college campuses have land to spare — and now as farming has become a focus of interest for students, and willing participants are lining up to volunteer their time planting, weeding and harvesting across the US, there couldn’t be a better time to think about starting a farm on campus. The idea behind the guide was to empower students to harness this momentum, showing step-by-step how to start a campus farm, as well as providing students with resources for seasonal planning, maintaining relationships with buyers, food safety, building community around the garden, and forming composting partnerships so that it continues to thrive.

One of the most successful university farm-to-lunchroom projects is the Yale Sustainable Food Project, which began in 2001 after students began pushing for better food in their lunchrooms. I wrote the director of the project, Melina Shannon-DiPietro, because I wanted to get an idea of what is possible for a student farm, even on a small plot in the northeast, and to ask her how this program has affected the campus community. This is what she had to say:

The farm is one-acre, and the produce grown at the farm is shared with volunteers, sold at farmers market, and tops pizza from our wood-burning hearth oven. In one year, this one acre inspired nearly 30 interns to make 1,500 pizzas in our brick oven, more than 1,300 students to volunteer during afternoon workdays, and more than 300 community members and school children to get their hands dirty. Another 600 students visited the farm for events like a pig roast and a harvest festival. We grow 300 varieties of vegetables, fruit, flowers, and herbs, and we grow in all 4 seasons. One of the most exciting numbers last year is that over 850 students took courses related to food and agriculture. Students are hungry for this work.

The farm is an entry point for students to become involved in other initiatives involving food, agriculture, and the environment. Students talk about how important the Yale Farm is to them as a space to learn with their hands and minds, a place to enjoy long conversations with friends while working, and a place to spend time outdoors and develop a connection to land and food. They also tell us that the Yale Farm is the place where they  first connect the dots and understand that the way we live is a political act, an ethical act, and even, today, part of a movement.

Each of these gardens around the nation can teach students what good food means – what tastes good, what’s good for our health, what’s good for farmers and for the land, and what’s good for our communities.  These gardens can teach our children to be better learners by opening their senses, to be environmental stewards by connecting them to the land, and to be better citizens by connecting them to community.

Sounds terrific, right? So as the school year begins in this period of new thinking on agriculture, here is a tool that students can use. Besides the vital world of books, an opportunity awaits to get dirty and produce food — right outside of your dorm room. It is a chance to build a community on campus around food, while turning the tide on a corporate-dominated food system that is making us sick.