Last year I served as Groundwork’s FoodCorps AmeriCorps service member at Boyne Falls Public School. This year I returned for another year of service at Boyne Falls, but I’m also working in Pellston Public Schools. Both schools are located in rural northern Michigan, but each have their own unique situation that shapes the goals and focus of my service.
Staff are often left out of discussions about improving the quality of food served in hospitals and nursing homes. Autumnwood of McBain in Missaukee County is using a Building Healthy Communities grant to improve the health of both staff and residents.
Nathan Bates and Boyne Falls Public School are a shining testament to the impact of northwest lower Michigan’s flourishing farm to school movement. It is a movement that is benefiting schoolchildren both nutritionally and academically and, at the same time, is giving small and mid-size farmers a growing market for their crops and helping them stay on their land.
To celebrate Alice Waters’ visit to the National Writers Series, the first-annual Local Harvest Restaurant Series will feature a variety of Grand Traverse area restaurants, all of which will demonstrate their devotion to the local food community by featuring a “Harvest Week Special” menu item that is either 100 percent locally sourced or a recipe from one of Waters’ cookbooks.
Read individual stories that we excerpted in our September 2017 report, “Health Kids, Thriving Farms” which covers Groundwork’s 15 years of building the Farm to School movement in northwest Michigan.
This is Pellston Public Schools’ first year as a FoodCorps service site. New food service director Sherry Sedore, staff and students will benefit from the presence of this AmeriCorps program dedicated to “creating a future in which every school is a healthy school, and every child is well-nourished and ready to learn.”