To Omaha and Beyond

Last week Mass. Farm to School Project’s Farm to Cafeteria Director, Simca Horwitz, attended the annual conference of the National Farm to School Network in Omaha, Nebraska.  Mass. Farm to School is one of the founding members of the Network, which now has representation from all 50 states and Washington, DC.  The Network was founded in 2007 to promote farm to school programs by leveraging shared resources, ideas, and strategies, and engage in creative problem solving. The Northeast was very well represented at the conference, with all of New England and New York showcasing the robust, well-established farm to school activities in our communities.

The conference offered an opportunity to network with a group of very dedicated, smart people working on the whole spectrum of farm to school issues and provided lots of inspiration for new projects and collaborations back home in Mass.

Some clear themes about the future of farm to school emerged from the conference:

• Farm to preschool is an incredible opportunity to do more holistic programming that integrates experiential, garden based learning, nutrition education and parent engagement.
• Local, state and federal policy and advocacy work is important to create a school food and educational environment conducive to farm to school programming.
• Regional food systems have amazing power to organize support for farm to school efforts.

A service project at City Sprouts, an Omaha based community gardening organization got our hands dirty and ensured we stayed focus on the roots of our work.

A wonderful workshop on Community Engagement in Underserved Communities led by the Praxis Project pushed us to think deeply about the ways in which our work sufficiently addresses issues of social injustice and how we can ensure that all voices are represented in the farm to school movement.

We arrived back from the heartland inspired to move forward with our work in Massachusetts.  We’ll continue to build strong relationships with other organizers in our region, and to adapt successful models from other parts of the country here in Mass., while sharing our own home-grown innovations with the National Network.