Today started with a bunch of students racing into our city office, eagerly washing potatoes that they grew, cooking them in different ways, and chomping down on their finished products. Apparently the classes have been waiting for a month to come into the kitchen to work, and their energy was pulsing throughout the morning.

School Partnerships is a program we have that pairs with elementary schools to work with third graders once a week in the fall and spring. The students get to learn about plants, gardening, working hard, and eating healthy as they help us through the food cycle by planting potatoes and garlic that they take from seeds to the table.

Right now, as I am writing this, two of the third graders stopped into the office to say hi and hang out for a few minutes. It’s clear that they have loved working with us, are now more interested in food and farming, and enjoy having the city office in their neighborhood, where they can stop by and say hello.

It reminds me that one of my favorite things about working at The Food Project is working in a community and getting to know the people around me. The schools we work with draw almost completely from the surrounding area and, as a result, we work with a huge proportion of the people in our area. By reaching out to the students and engaging them, we are truly getting to a large number of people in the immediate community, through those students, their friends, and their families. We know this because they tell me when they try to get their families to cook new or different things and the teachers fill us in when the students rave about the program.

It’s been a great experience for everyone involved, including the children who start by not wanting to sit down in the mulch and end up digging in the ground with dirt up to their elbows, those students who perform much better in our experiential environment than in the classroom, the teachers who help pull all of this together, and the staff that gets renewed energy from the youth. The kids might be loud and hard to control sometimes, but that’s because they are having a great time and can’t wait for the next activity, even if it’s scrubbing the dirt off of our potatoes.

The two third graders visiting today just finished trying to come up with excuses to tell their families why they’re coming home a little late. In response, I was trying to get them to go home so that nobody was worrying about them and to say that they stopped by here so that they can ask their families to come by and work with us more in the future. I don’t know if I won out in the end, but it’s great to see them stopping by and having interest in us and our work.