When the Chicago-based team at Common Threads began thinking about the robust urban agriculture network in the Chicago area, a lightbulb went off – why not build local food into their programs? Common Threads is a national nonprofit that provides children and families hands-on cooking and nutrition education. In Fiscal Year 2020, the Common Threads Chicago team was awarded a $100,000 USDA Farm to School grant to develop the programmatic infrastructure needed to source food from community-based urban farms for its school-based cooking and nutrition education programs. As they began implementing the grant, they quickly realized that procuring local foods is not just a transaction, but a partnership.
Growing connections between the programs Common Threads leads in Chicago Public Schools and nearby urban farms was the key to their local procurement success. Building these connections started with an intentional effort by the Common Threads team to have a stronger presence in the local food and urban agriculture space in the Chicago community. They started attending convenings of local food stakeholders to learn to build local food into their programs in ways that made sense for farmers, chefs, and school curricula.
As connections started to take root, Common Threads began taking a "farmer-informed" approach to local procurement. They got feedback from urban farmers about their growing seasons, which led to setting up planned purchases further in advance. The Common Threads team also asked urban farming organizations to provide input on their program curricula. By meeting with local farmers often, they aim to continue making local procurement work for everyone.
Today, Common Threads has incorporated local foods into the curriculum and recipes of the cooking and nutrition education programs they lead for Chicago Public School students during and after school. They've developed two lesson plan series that emphasize seasonality and local food systems. The first is a three-lesson Small Bites Workshops series through which students learn about the local food and farming community in Chicago and make a healthy, locally grown snack with a trained chef. The second is a five-lesson Farm to School Cooking Skills series designed for students to learn from a professional chef how to roast, bake, sauté, and use proper knife skills while preparing healthy meals made mostly of ingredients sourced from Chicago-based urban farms.
Common Threads' ultimate goal is to create a scalable model for local procurement that can integrate local foods into similar nutrition education programming at other schools both in Chicago and across the country. For the Common Threads team, building local procurement wasn't a clean, linear process but a rewarding journey that led to lasting partnerships with Chicago's urban agriculture community.
Categories: Illinois, Business