Building Resilient Communities (BRC) is Groundwork’s program that makes available grants and Groundwork staff to support food pantries, schools, farms, and other organizations in increasing the amount of locally grown food available to people in Michigan communities. In this piece, Groundwork’s Melanie Wong Tran discusses a BRC project she managed at Battle Creek’s Stars and Stripes Learning Station.
Groundwork is currently recruiting for our 2025 Building Resilient Communities sites statewide. If your organization is interested in getting involved and participating in BRC please fill out this form: forms.gle/dXKxDz9zcj7eApQy7
Stars and Stripes Learning Station was one of six sites we expanded to in the Battle Creek, Grand Rapids, and Detroit regions to test Groundwork’s Building Resilient Communities (BRC) program outside of Northwest Lower Michigan, thanks to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. This first phase of expansion of Building Resilient Communities has allowed us to impact more communities and ready us for expansion statewide in 2025 with funding from the Michigan Health Endowment Fund. Learn more about how the Building Resilient Communities program works in this post written by Christina Barkel, Groundwork’s Food Equity Specialist and BRC project lead.
Located in Battle Creek, Michigan, Stars and Stripes Learning Station, a child care center, wanted to expand on previous farm to early care and education (ECE) experience, which included buying and serving local food for the center and offering hands-on on-site gardening. To do this, the project team strategized and decided to work on formalizing the center’s farm to ECE commitments in a nutrition policy, and host a Family Night, where parents and children could participate in nutrition and farm to ECE activities together. Groundwork selected the center as a BRC site this year, and they received a $2,000 stipend and staff support from Groundwork to work toward their project goals.
Participating in BRC encouraged the center to strengthen existing nutrition policy, and add additional commitments including details and goals for serving local foods, educating children and families about local food, and gardening.
From left: Love it—taste test in action! Freezer bags are an easy way to preserve the flavor and nutrition of locally grown foods.
Promoting a Willingness to Try New Foods
As a part of Family Night, there were taste tests! Cooks Jody and Mikayla prepared homemade zucchini bread and samples of blueberry and kale smoothies. They made vegan zucchini bread to include the range of diets children at the center have. The zucchini couldn’t have been more local—it came directly from the on-site garden. For the smoothies, blueberries were purchased from the farmers market, and the kale came from local farm Sunlight Gardens—another BRC site we worked with in 2024. At Family Night, children and parents all tried the offerings and voted for how much they enjoyed them using a sticker chart.
Ever since Jody and Mikayla started working in the kitchen, the kids have had more opportunities to try fruits and vegetables, incorporating offerings like smoothies and roasted vegetables into the menu. They have been hard at work increasing the variety and options for meals and snacks offered to the children, and the food they make has even changed eating habits of the staff. When standing by the tasting station, one staffer said she hadn’t eaten “zucchini since I was a kid, until Jody made it.”. What was once a memory of mushy zucchini from her childhood has been replaced with nicely roasted zucchini with chili powder Jody had prepared with the seemingly endless amount of zucchini the summer garden produced. The infrastructure funds BRC provided allowed the center to invest in new kitchen wares, such as a food processor and pots to replace ones that were over 10 years old. New equipment will help staff continue to prepare delicious meals and snacks for children at the center.
Talk to the Dietitian
Being on-site during Family Night was also a great opportunity for me to interact with families. As a registered dietitian, with a background in child nutrition, I hosted a “Talk to the Dietitian” table to share food and nutrition resources and chat with parents about approaches to feeding their children. Parents received a cookbook—purchased with BRC funds—that had affordable, approachable recipes. We also provided resources for how to use the family freezer to preserve local food. And we offered information about phrases to use and phrases to avoid when talking about food with children.
Conversations with parents included talking about easy ways to include children in preparing meals to help increase their willingness to try food and navigate food allergies. One parent was concerned that her child with many allergies would miss out on opportunities to try the same foods as peers at the Stars and Stripes Learning Station. It was a great time to remind her of the dedication of the staff who purposefully made the event’s zucchini bread vegan to be more inclusive of people with dietary restrictions.
“Everyone enjoyed our Family Night. It was nice to hear the parents ask the children what they wanted our cooks to make them for food. We were able to get great feedback to share with our cooks and create new menu items,” Angie Torres, Executive Director at the center, shared. ”We have been wanting to do a family night for a few years, and we just have not put time into creating a plan and executing it. Without the help of BRC/Melanie, this would have not been possible.” 
Melanie Tran is Groundwork’s Farm to Early Care and Education Specialist
melanie.tran@groundworkcenter.org
