On Monday August 1, 2005, six BLAST interns went to meet with our local state representatives and senators at the State House in Boston. We met primarily to discuss two bills coming up for debate in the fall regarding nutrition. These two bills call for making school meals much healthier and setting nutritional requirements for meals served by schools to students. We urged those who had not signed onto the bills to support them, and we thanked those who had signed on in support and offered our ideas as to how the bills could be made more comprehensive. We were unsure of what to expect going into the meetings as we had never met with politicians or their aides before, but everyone we met with was very kind, courteous, and supported the health of children in the schools even if they hadn’t yet signed on in support of the bills.

All in all, we had 14 meetings with our local representatives and senators or their aides. All went very smoothly, and we came out of every meeting feeling that we had been listened to and appreciated. Seeing as we are an internship where everybody lives in different areas (for the most part), we met individually or in pairs with our respective representatives and senators or their aides. We also met with aides for the two representatives who had written the bills, Stephen LeDuc of Marlborough and Peter Koutoujian of Waltham. We had scheduled all of the meetings ahead of time (or so we thought!), using the techniques that we had been taught by Maureen Ferris, the head of the Massachusetts Legislative Children’s Caucus with whom we had met at the beginning of the summer. We had written letters expressing the importance of the two bills regarding school nutrition, and had then followed them up with phone calls to schedule a time to meet. One of our meetings, however, was entirely impromptu, as State Senator Stephen Brewer heard that we were in the building and called our Roxbury offices to ask them to get in contact with us so that we could meet with him. Senator Brewer is a great supporter of The Food Project and our sudden, unexpected meeting with him was lively, informative and interesting.

All in all, we had a great morning at the State House, in which we were able to meet with our local representatives and senators and discuss the importance of good school nutrition and the health of children in Massachusetts’s public schools. Every one of the people we met with agreed on the importance of school nutrition and supported making school meals healthier even if they hadn’t yet signed onto the bills. At the end of the morning, we were confident that we had learned about how to advocate with politicians for a cause you firmly believe in, and had ably discussed the importance of school nutrition with some of our most important local elected officials.