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To address inequities in community food access and to build a more equitable and sustainable regional food system, FRESHFARM works to reduce barriers that many face to access healthy, local food. The nonprofit offers farmers markets and farm stands across D.C., Maryland (Montgomery County) and Virginia (Fairfax and Arlington counties) and provides wholesale distribution to community-based organizations. In conjunction with these efforts, FRESHFARM partners with early childhood programs on local procurement and nutrition education through its ChildCare Share program. This program provides an opportunity for busy parents and caregivers to pick up ingredients for a nutritious family meal at the same time they pick up their children — and it also works to ensure that early childhood educators have the resources they need to introduce healthy food to the community’s youngest eaters.
“We take advantage of the fact that parents will be at these centers twice a day to give them access to local food outside of the farmers market,” notes Sebastian Muenchrath, Pop Up Food Hub Senior Manager. This program is particularly important because taste preferences are formed in the preschool years, and many children receive most of their daily nutritional intake in these programs. The ChildCare Share program was created to leverage funding provided by the DC Healthy Tots Act, which provides an additional five cents per meal reimbursement to the Child and Adult Care Food Program if child care providers include locally sourced food in their meals.
By providing delivery at no cost and removing minimums required by conventional wholesalers, the ChildCare Share aims to simplify shopping for healthy, locally grown foods for time-strapped early childhood educators. But when FRESHFARM sought input from parents and educators on the ChildCare Share’s services, the organization uncovered areas for improvement, which they were eager to act on.
In the summer of 2020, FRESHFARM started gathering feedback from the centers and families that had been participating in the program. The feedback led to some important insights and changes.
“We heard ‘Well, we love the produce, and we love that it’s sometimes free or subsidized, but we don’t know what to do with eggplant,’ or ‘I don’t know what to do with bok choy’ or ‘Kale isn’t culturally relevant to who I am,’” says Tailor Coble, Food Access and Education Coordinator at FRESHFARM.
FRESHFARM used that feedback to tailor their resources.
Coble explains, “For our ChildCare Share customers, we now have a blog with QR codes that people can scan, and then they’ll see recipes or ways they can engage their families. And for child care providers, we have ways they can engage the students at their centers. We’ve really been trying to bridge that gap between food access and food education, because it’s honestly not enough to just give people food.”
“For our ChildCare Share customers, we now have a blog with QR codes that people can scan, and then they’ll see recipes or ways they can engage their families. And for child care providers, we have ways they can engage the students at their centers. We’ve really been trying to bridge that gap between food access and food education, because it’s honestly not enough to just give people food.”
FRESHFARM’s philosophy is that every single member of the community must promote nutrition education and be an advocate for their own food access and security. To support residents in this role and to further bolster the work of the ChildCare Share, FRESHFARM uses Community Food Educators (CFEs) to provide families, educators and other caregivers with the needed resources to become food advocates in their own households. “We look to CFEs to encourage, empower and inspire parents [and families] to cook more with local fruits and vegetables, source more local fruits and vegetables, and participate in the Market Share program,” explains Coble. The CFEs also promote food education and food literacy and provide cooking demonstrations for parents, families and educators in early learning programs.
FRESHFARM’s adaptability, additional support and commitment to being a responsive partner did not go unnoticed. Andrea Lopez, Food and Wellness Program Officer at CentroNía — a D.C. center that participates in the ChildCare Share — notes, “Early childhood education centers are very overwhelmed. Having a coalition to help take things off the plates of our staff is really helpful. For a lot of centers and homes, these initiatives are just another thing to do, so we need it to be easy. We value FRESHFARM’s approach in listening to our perspectives and crafting training and support activities that reflect our needs and wishes.”