Fueling Potential: How Summer Meals Support Youth at the Boys & Girls Club

At the Boys & Girls Clubs of Middle Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson Clubhouse, every day is filled with opportunities for youth to learn, grow, and connect. And thanks to Sweet Peas Summer Eats for Kids—sponsored by Jackson National Life Insurance Company® (Jackson®)—those days are also fueled by healthy, made-from-scratch meals from The Nashville Food Project.

We handle the food so BGCMT can stay focused on its mission: to help all young people—especially those who need us most—reach their full potential as productive, caring, responsible citizens.

“When school is out, many children and teens lose access to regular meals,” says Denise Carothers with BGCMT. “The Nashville Food Project’s summer meals ensure that youth have access to healthy food even when school is out. These meals do more than fill plates—they strengthen support systems, create safe spaces, and help children and teens thrive.”

Each week this summer, the Andrew Jackson Clubhouse receives hundreds of meals packed with local produce and kid-friendly favorites like veggie pasta and chicken tacos. And they’re just one of many partners receiving meals through Sweet Peas this summer. With Jackson’s incredible support—now in its sixth consecutive year—we’ll serve more than 100,000 meals this summer to children across the city.

This partnership is part of our Community Meals program, which provides nutritious, made-from-scratch meals to organizations already gathering people in meaningful ways. Our meals help reduce barriers to food access by showing up where people already are—programs like BGCMT that offer stability, community, and a sense of belonging.

This work is only possible because of corporate partners like Jackson, who share our belief that good food is a powerful way to build stronger, healthier communities—one meal at a time.

Partner Spotlight: Nashville Launch Pad

It’s a warm afternoon at Nashville Launch Pad, and a team of volunteers is working to prepare a brand new community garden behind their Mobile Housing Navigation Center, where a group of unhoused young adults currently live. “This volunteer team is a cool one,” says Corrine Elise, Launch Pad’s Associate Director of Engagement and Administration. “Today we have a staff member, board member, Community Ambassador, AmeriCorps volunteer, community member, and former shelter guest working together.” It’s a perfect illustration of the diverse community that Launch Pad nurtures with the young adults who find shelter, solace, and a sense of belonging there. 

Volunteers work together to weed Nashville Launch Pad’s new community garden beds.

Nashville Launch Pad operates out of spaces across town to create a network of temporary, safer, street-free sleeping shelters for unhoused young adults which are open and affirming to LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies. They currently do this in three ways: through an Emergency Shelter program, a Mobile Housing Navigation Center, and an Independent-Supported Living Program.

Their Emergency Shelter runs nightly from November 1 through April 1 and is designed to meet an immediate need for young adults, offering a bed, a shower, and a hot meal. This program is supported by a network of church hosts, with the only requirements to host being that the space must affirm LGBTQ+ individuals, be on a bus route, and include access to a kitchen and showers. All staff and volunteers are trained in trauma-informed care and all work to create a welcoming, secure, and healing environment for guests.

Volunteers serving meals during Emergency Shelter.

“During shelter season, volunteers and guests eat meals together, building community with one another before settling in for the night,” explains Corrine. “We encourage emergency shelter volunteers to not only spend time organizing resources behind the scenes, but to make intentional time to enjoy dinner with guests who come in.”

Nashville Launch Pad is also a Mobile Housing Navigation Center, a federally funded initiative developed by Community Care Fellowship and the Metro Council. Currently, six sites across the city operate as Mobile Housing Navigation Centers, providing up to 20 people each with "immediate stabilization and intensive support services" to help individuals work toward the ultimate goal of obtaining housing. 

Volunteers help paint the Mobile Housing Navigation Center last fall to prepare for guests.

Launch Pad’s Mobile Housing Navigation Center has space for 15 young adults to stay for free of charge for 90-120 days while they obtain identification, secure employment, and in some cases, find permanent housing solutions. The program just launched in December, but so far has provided an important temporary solution for folks who have previously utilized Launch Pad’s Emergency Shelter. They also prioritize providing homemade, nourishing meals for their guests. Currently, they are supported not only by The Nashville Food Project — we share between 20-30 meals each week, depending on their need — but also Arnold Myint of International Market. 

Arnold Myint of International Market.

“General pressures on any young adult to succeed in society is stressful enough, and I feel that food should not be a daily burden when considering the tools we need to ‘make it in the world,’” says Arnold, who has prepared weekly meals for Launch Pad for several years. “The way I see it, by dedicating a weekly meal for Nashville Launch Pad, the organization can shift their allocation of funds to other fundamental needs so individuals can focus on opportunities to better enrich their lives. Food is my love language and by sharing a meal, I hope the LGBTQ+ youth in this program know that, from a distance, we are cheering them on.”

Some of the guests that Nashville Launch Pad hosts are ready to transition into longer-term housing, living independently in community with other young adults. Launch Pad’s Independent-Supported Living Program, or ISLP, provides the setting for this. The program offers apartment-style accommodations where formerly unhoused young adults can take up to six months to focus on employment, education goals, permanent housing solutions, and more. Guests live among a small group of other adults ranging from ages 18-26, selecting residents based on an interview process when spots become available. This setup is intended to foster community and provide an environment where everyone feels safe and affirmed.

Nashville Launch Pad’s Independent-Supported Living Program provides apartment-style housing.

Nashville Launch Pad supports the young LGBTQ+ population in the city on purpose. Young adults who are part of this demographic are 120% more likely to experience homelessness than their heterosexual, cisgender peers. While this is a staggering statistic, Nashville Launch Pad is ensuring that homeless LGBTQ+ youth have an affirming space to sleep now and pathways to stable, long-term housing when they’re ready for it. The difference that makes is immeasurable, and the fact that former shelter guests are spending their Wednesday afternoons volunteering at Launch Pad is certainly a testament to the rich community they cultivate.

“Our work is all about building trust,” says Corrine. “If this can be a place where our guests can find peace, then we’re doing something right.”

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There are lots of ways to get involved with Nashville Launch Pad! You can support their Amazon Wishlist, sponsor a “Welcome Home Kit” for guests graduating out of the program and into permanent housing, or volunteer with their new community garden initiative. In addition, Nashville Launch Pad’s annual breakfast, Biscuits for Beds, is coming up on June 1 — right in time to kick off Pride! You can grab tickets here. 

Sweet Peas Partner Spotlight: Window of Love

In front of her home on Jo Johnston Avenue, Samaria Leach is setting out a stack of chapter books. “Especially during the summer, I like to make sure the kids have something to read when they come to get their food,” she explains. “They seem to really like it.”

Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, Samaria serves lunch to the J. Henry Hale neighborhood out of her front window. It began during the COVID-19 pandemic when schools shut down, leaving children who relied on schools’ daily breakfasts and lunches without food. As 2020 trudged on, Samaria continued to spread much-needed joy and food throughout her community, becoming known throughout her neighborhood as Window of Love.

Eventually, schools resumed for the fall semester, as did regular school meals for the kids who had become frequent visitors to the Window. But the question stuck with Samaria: where were these kids normally getting food during the summer months, or even spring break? She knew that Window of Love needed to stretch beyond those lonely pandemic months.

“God placed on my heart to continue and continue, so that’s what I did: continue and continue and continue.” —Samaria Leach, Window of Love

With support from her neighbors and a network across the city, Samaria was able to continue, opening the Window three days a week during the summer and other school breaks. Now, she shares food with between 50 and 75 kids each week during the summer months, in addition to educational resources and even the occasional field trip!

The gap that Window of Love fills is one that affects thousands of children every summer: local school systems provide a reliable source of nutrition for families that are impacted by food insecurity. In fact, every school year, Metro Nashville Public Schools serves around 4 million breakfasts and 8.4 million lunches. But during the summer months, without these daily meals, many youth are at risk of hunger. The Nashville Food Project is proud to work alongside partners like Window of Love through our summer children’s meals program, Sweet Peas, sponsored by Jackson National Life Insurance Company (Jackson®) for the fifth year in a row. This summer alone, the program distributed nearly 11,500 meals to kids across Nashville.

Through Sweet Peas, The Nashville Food Project was able to help Window of Love scale up their efforts to build community and alleviate hunger this summer by supplementing the snacks Samaria was already making with 90 additional nutritious snacks full of hard-to-come-by fruits and veggies each week. The partnership made it possible for kids in Samaria’s North Nashville neighborhood to try new foods, too.

“One day we had salads,” explains Samaria, “and one of the little boys was like, ‘I don’t eat salads!’ I said, ‘what if I add something special?’ So I put some turkey on there for him, added a little cheese, and he asked for a salad again the next day. It’s life-changing for the kids.”

It takes a lot of collaboration to get salads like this one in front of — and in the bellies of! — these kids. And Window of Love isn’t the only place it’s happening. In addition to Window of Love, funding from Jackson® made it possible for us to share meals with children at 18 other sites this summer.

“It takes a community,” says Samaria. “It’s not just about me. The Window is about everybody — communities working together — because our goal is the same thing: to make sure no child is going hungry.”

Partner Spotlight: The Ark

The Nashville Food Project staff and our new friend, Butch

By Lilah Abrams, AmeriCorps Member

Butch usually starts lunch with a joke — an evident ritual that manages to draw a number of giggles from individuals throughout the room. Since 2001, Butch, alongside his wife Marilyn, Melanie Smiley, and Anne Carty, has guided the Senior Lunch program at The Ark, creating a regular space to laugh, share, connect, learn and eat.  

These weekly lunches seem to exemplify the core of the Ark’s work in their community: creating a web of care that is fundamentally personal. 

While the organization was officially founded in 2001, their meals programming has roots reaching back to 1995 – led by two volunteers who remain active Meals on Wheels delivery drivers. Dedicated to the goal of “addressing severe gaps in social services and community resources for seniors in South Cheatham County,” The Ark’s programming takes many different forms: hosting weekly a “Senior Lunch” out of Pegram United Methodist Church  providing utility assistance to seniors throughout the community, offering a robust food pantry, and subsidizing “back-to-school” shopping through their thrift store, Noah’s Ark, among other modes of community involvement. 

However, their work of community building – through humor, generosity and hospitality – seems as foundational as much of their programming. The exuberance and warmth of The Ark’s organizing, around and with their meals, embodies much of what The Nashville Food Project holds as a value – “bringing people together” and “cultivating community through food.” In experiencing this, I was reminded of a sentiment I’ve heard repeated here at the Food Project, pulled from words first spoken by Tallu, that imagines a world in which people “have enough to eat and people to eat with.” Experiencing the Senior Lunch at The Ark and their thoughtful, yet incredibly natural ways of creating spaces to explore ‘being together, this sentiment felt brought to life. 

This mother-daughter pair helps with Meals on Wheels deliveries and makes regular appearances at Wednesday Senior Lunch.

Sharing these values and goals, The Nashville Food Project has been partnering with The Ark since 2018, serving about 100 total meals each week for both the Meals on Wheels program and weekly Senior Lunches, cooked in our kitchens. Like the work we seek to do in our spaces, Melanie Smiley, a former director of meals for the local school district, often adds and alters based on what folks have been asking for (usually including some dessert options and homemade drinks gathered from donation), before serving inside the church’s community space or distributing among volunteer drivers. 

It is over these cake slices, glasses of lemonade, and plates of homemade beef stroganoff that The Ark draws people in to gather – forging new connections and nurturing years-long friendships…eating and having people to eat with.

You can learn more about The Ark’s work to create community in Cheatham County on their website.

Partner Spotlight: The Village at Glencliff

Photo by Cecelie Eiler

by Annie Slaughter, Food Access Coordinator

In Southeast Nashville twelve micro homes are making a big difference in both the housing and medical fields. The Village at Glencliff is a medical respite community which aims to bring people experiencing homelessness dignified and quality medical care after they have been released from the hospital. While the average stay is 90 days, residents can stay in their program until they are able to secure permanent housing. In addition to medical care, the Village at Glencliff offers their residents homemade, nourishing meals provided by The Nashville Food Project. We share about 85 meals a week with the residents. 

The village, which is located at the Glencliff United Methodist Church, had their groundbreaking in July and hit the ground running in late summer. “We had a COVID program since folks were being put in the old jail. They were literally having to stay in jails because they were unhoused and they had COVID,” said Zoey Caldwell, the organization’s volunteer and program manager. “It was scary, initially, I will be honest. I was so glad not to be a worker on the front lines and then suddenly that is my job. But there was a need and we had to do what it takes a village to be and do and that was to step in where we were needed.”

The Village at Glencliff is the first medical respite community in the country that allows residents to bring a partner and have pets while offering three meals a day and guaranteed, individual housing until a permanent living situation is found. “We want to be the national and even international model of what that grace looks like,” says Caldwell. 

Zoey Caldwell (left), Cecelie Eiler (right)

They also have a rain garden, raised beds, and various medicinal and edible plants around their campus. The gardens, which were designed and implemented with the help of Nashville Foodscapes, were the dream of Cecelie Eiler, the Village’s administrative and data manager. “One thing I realized with my research was that gardening and having access to more hands-on food production, localized food production, has a lot to do with our mental, spiritual and physical healing. Which are all large components of who we are as humans,” Eiler says. 

Photo by Cecelie Eiler

If you would like to help The Village of Glencliff, they offer twice monthly volunteer garden work days as well as volunteer opportunities to provide companionship and skill classes to their residents. “We need people to come and be a friend. That was a big thing, we didn’t want people to come and feel isolated,” Caldwell said. “We want this to be a community.”

Sign up to volunteer here: https://www.villageatglencliff.org/volunteer. 

Reflecting on Summer's Sweet Peas

Katie Scarboro remembers hearing from a parent who was shocked when her child requested fruit rather than chips at the grocery store. The child had tasted grapes or strawberries for the first time during YMCA Fun Company programming. 

“The parent was just floored that the kid had that kind of response,” she says. 

Truth be told though, Katie says she hears similar stories often as Anti-Hunger Initiatives Director at the YMCA of Middle Tennessee — especially when it comes to the fruit. 

”They cannot get enough of it,” she says. “You’d have kids come back over and over for fruit salad. And when you have kids who have the world at their fingertips in terms of gummy bears and candy in general and prefer to eat fruit salad? That’s fantastic.” 

While fruit might seem simple, it takes a lot of collaboration to get salads like this one — and other snacks and meals — to the table.

The Nashville Food Project often relies on donations of fruit from partners like Whole Foods Market, Costco, local farmers or generous suppliers such as The Peach Truck. The fruit salads go alongside snacks or meals such as barbecue chicken and roasted vegetables. They’re prepared, packaged and delivered to 16 meal partners (such as YMCA Fun Company) for Sweet Peas, a summer program sharing healthful meals with kids during the critical months when school is out. Also critical, Sweet Peas happens thanks to the generous financial support of sponsor Jackson®, which funded the program to help share more than 18,000 meals this summer!

“In the summer we know the need is so much greater,” Katie says. “We also know that kids get a break from school in the summer, but parents don’t get a break from work during the summer. They still have the same hardships of providing care and food for their kids for the summer as the entire school year. We want to try to bridge that gap as much as we possibly can.”

Fun Company provides all day care through their Summer Adventure Programming, beginning at 6 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m., which gives kids a safe place to be along with a meal or snacks. “It helps the parents not have to worry about rushing home to cook a hot meal or get fast food on the way back,” Katie says. 

This year, the YMCA staff also helped facilitate the new Promising Scholars program, which helps kids catch up on the learning loss that happened during the pandemic and virtual learning. Even still, Katie noted the ongoing and new phase of pandemic life: “We know that things have improved for some and not improved for others— and have gotten drastically worse for other folks.” 

In addition to YMCA Fun Company, Jackson® funding allowed Sweet Peas and TNFP to partner with 15 additional organizations such as Nations Ministry, Preston Taylor, NICE, Project Transformation, Nashville Freedom School and LETS Play. 

In summer months, we thankfully have a range of fresh produce to inspire meals to provide “not just food but good, healthy and whole food,” Katie says.

“It’s really nice to have mixed greens,” she adds. “They start to wonder why there’s a little green stripe or red stripe in this leaf. It opens up a bigger conversation about the world of food.” 

As the Sweet Peas program comes to a close, we reflect with gratitude for the many hands and hearts that funded, fueled and fed this work. 

“We have parents or kids who will say, ‘We just really appreciate this existing and this being there in our community,’” Katie says. “We are really grateful that things like this exist and center around helping us meet the need as the need has been presented. It’s an integral part of the work we’re able to do.” 

Partner Spotlight: Community Care Fellowship

The Nashville Food Project currently shares 80 meals a day with Community Care Fellowship — a new meal partner in 2020 — for the nonprofit’s lunch program, pre-school, and a program that temporarily provides hotel housing during COVID-19 to folks who have previously lived in encampments.

 Community Care Fellowship has a long history in Nashville, and we are thrilled to be in partnership with these folks! We caught up with Executive Director Ryan LaSuer recently to hear more about their mission.

 What particular challenges have you faced with COVID-19?

“The thing I love about Community Care Fellowship is we are so family-oriented and very relationship-oriented. Obviously in the South, hugs as greetings aren’t being done at the same click as prior to COVID,” he said, noting that the numbers of folks they’re able to have in the building has been reduced. While some meals are served indoors alongside other stabilizing services such as hygiene, laundry, mail services -- others are served as grab-and-go out the front door or at temporary hotel housing.

“There are a lot more logistics,” he said. “We’ve had to figure out how to have relationships in a different way and be sure we’re still hearing people and their stories.”

 Many people know of Community Care Fellowship as Ken & Carol’s. Can you tell me a little more about that? 

“If you ask anybody who’s in an encampment or on the streets about Community Care Fellowship, they will call it Ken and Carol’s, because Ken and Carol Powers were some of the original founders and because of the way they built relationships with our guests.”

 Ryan says it was the hospitality of Ken and Carol that started the culture living on at Community Care Fellowship today.

 “We originated downtown at McKendree United Methodist Church. It was in the early 80s, the beginning of individuals experiencing homelessness in Nashville. They used to serve lunch for the working class downtown. It goes back to food, right? Slowly but surely folks came in who couldn’t pay and community members would pay for individuals behind them. It wasn’t the church, it was the community—a neat point about how the community can problem-solve and be part of that solution.”

Image from Community Care Fellowship website.

By the late 80s, Community Care Fellowship had expanded services and moved to East Nashville. While stabilizing services were an early offering of the nonprofit, it also led to developmental services, which helps create pathways through employment and enterprises such as Unlocked, which encourage creativity and teaches women how to manufacture jewelry. CCF also offers pathways to permanent housing through our master lease with Urban Housing Solutions. . 

 “Toxic Charity is one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. The main point of the book is what does it look like to empower versus enable?” he continued.  “Our stabilizing services go back to Matthew 25: ‘I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me…’ That became the starting point of our stabilizing serves. But then we need to create pathways out. That’s the empower part.” 

 Learn more about Community Care Fellowship here.

Partner Spotlight: Legacy Mission Village

by Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Community Engagement Manager

The introduction of COVID-19 to our world and our city has created devastation for so many. And while COVID-19 did not break our systems, it has exposed and deepened our country’s existing inequalities, gaps in care, and further alienated some of our most vulnerable members. 

As a people of fierce hope who believe in intersectionality and interdependence, we’ve also seen generous creativity implemented to help neighbors care for each other. We found this type of resistant and persistent care in the work and community fostered by Legacy Mission Village.

Legacy Mission Village (LMV), as explained by their Director of Operations, Tim Mwizerwa, “was founded by refugees to serve refugees in Middle Tennessee.” 

“Traditionally, we are an educational organization that works towards workforce stability and economic stability for families,” he says. LMV typically provides English learning, financial literacy, digital literacy, citizenship test preparation, and children’s education support. Tim notes that their goal is to support every member of the family “from cradle to grave.” He explains that seemingly standard programming, such as after-school support for teens, can be drastically different for refugee families. Often a teen or child may be the only person fluent in English within a household, leaving them to navigate complex situations like insurance claims, tax documents, and other elements that lead LMV’s team to provide intensive support that spans beyond traditional homework help. 

With the risk of COVID-19 continually looming, LMV’s community is unable to meet in any kind of classroom setting so their team has been challenged to imagine how to support the families they serve in relevant ways that span beyond their core programming. 

Earlier in the summer, LMV began to purchase pantry goods in bulk to help their participants experiencing food access struggles. Staff soon wondered how they could offer their clients a more balanced COVID-19 relief box beyond the non-perishable items they had secured.

The Nashville Food Project was able to support LMV’s existing efforts by sourcing local, fresh foods to enhance the dry food items that LMV was offering the families they serve.  Each week TNFP was able to leverage our resources and relationships to source locally raised proteins from TN Grassfed, eggs through KLD Farms, milk from Hatcher Family Dairy, and robust quantities of fresh produce from our Growing Together farmers, Sweeter Days Farm, West Glow Farms, Green Door Gourmet, and others. Throughout the summer approximately 80 families had access to fresh, local, high-quality food through this vibrant collaboration. In addition, through TNFP’s relationship with Henley Nashville, which acted as a satellite TNFP kitchen during the early days of COVID-19 shutdowns, LMV was able to receive culturally appropriate family-sized, scratch-made meals. Over the course of a month and a half, through Henley, TNFP, and LMV, a total of 1,360 servings of from-scratch goodness was shared with families alongside the bulk groceries provided.

As we move into fall, LMV is pivoting once again, to support the families they work with as they navigate the complexities of online learning. While making this shift they’ve heard from about 40 families that fresh food support is still a critical need for their households. This opened an opportunity for TNFP to continue to provide support in a new, specialized way. TNFP will provide weekly produce boxes of culturally-appropriate produce, grown by and purchased from the farmers in our Growing Together program. Many of the families that LMV works with share a Burmese heritage with several of the Growing Together farmers. We love that the vibrant, organically-grown produce that Growing Together yields can be leveraged to nourish the needs of that same community. 

During a recent conversation, Tim shared that the silver lining through current struggles is that this time has allowed for the fostering of new community partnerships. For LMV, he says that has allowed them to step up and provide new types of care for the families and continue to adapt and serve in more substantial ways. Our relationship with LMV has allowed us to leverage our resources to share high-quality food in new ways that are meeting expressed community needs while simultaneously allowing us to invest in Growing Together farmers and other local farms who have long been generous and supportive of our work. 

Tim shared some notes that the Legacy Mission Village crew has received in response to the food assistance they have been able to provide: 

“We are good. You take care [of] our family.” 

“I'm good and my family too, thank you for everything you helped me and my family [with].”

For the millionth time, we are reminded that we belong to each other, and we are grateful to be a small part of the collaborative work happening in Nashville. In a time when we are socially distant, this type of connection feels more delicious than ever. 

Sweet Peas 2020 with Gratitude for Good Neighbors

Like so many of us in 2020, Sarah McCormick, Senior Director of Operations & Impact at one of our partner organizations Project Transformation, has had a challenging year. And yet, she also has had the opportunity to see folks, as she beautifully puts it, “rediscover what it means to be a neighbor.” 

As planning began for Project Transformation’s summer camps for children, she and her colleagues knew would need to look different in the time of COVID-19. Through that planning, they heard two overwhelming needs from parents: Something for the kids to do and something for them to eat. 

Meanwhile, they also knew they wanted to stay committed to their core goals of literary development and social-emotional development—even at safe distances. Volunteers and partners jumped in with open hearts and minds to make necessary shifts launching grab-and-go locations for meals and “summer camp in a bag,” which included a new book each week for building young home libraries as well as activities for inside and outdoors. 

As for nutritious meals and snacks, we’re proud to partner with Project Transformation at three of their sites this summer. We know one in six children do not have access to the food they want and need. Lack of access can be even greater during the summer with the absence of school meals. Given this alarming information we launched a program last year called Sweet Peas: summer eats for kids. Now in its second year—amidst the current crisis—we know the need for nourishing meals is even greater. 

Nashville Food Project meals ready for pick-up at a Project Transformation site.

We also understand, though, that food can’t solve all inequities and that’s why we love to work in community with partners like Project Transformation. As author Francis Moore Lappe says: “People go hungry not from a lack of food but from a lack of power...with a wider lens we can see that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food but scarcity of democracy.” Literacy is power. Emotional intelligence is power. We believe the work of partners like Project Transformation helps break down inequitable systems. And by providing meals alongside their work, we’re building stronger communities together.

McCormick says research shows that children in communities experiencing marginalization often lack access to tools and enrichment activities over the summer especially. “We want to make sure kids aren’t regressing,” she says. “For us there’s a wider gap potentially (during pandemic) because kids are out of school longer. It’s even more important to get books into the homes and let them know they are supported.”

Just as Project Transformation worked through COVID-19 challenges with the help of supporters, likewise, our Sweet Peas program got a big leg up from this year’s sponsor, Jackson National Life Insurance Company. Our volunteer program has been suspended since March leaving the kitchen staff with 380 fewer sets of hands to help prepare meals each month. Yet we still needed to increase summer output and share about 12,500 meals with kids. So in addition to helping fund the program, Jackson rolled up their sleeves to help cook. 

With the Jackson offices mostly closed to staff, Jackson converted their dining services facility into a satellite kitchen preparing nearly 4,500 nutritious meals for Sweet Peas. The Jackson dining services team stayed busy while helping us expand our reach to partners. Over an eight week period, the Jackson team served 140 kids, four days a week to two Project Transformation summer camps. 

Meal prep at Jackson’s headquarters for Project Transformation sites.

“It feels good obviously,” says Wess Victory, Food Services Director at Jackson. “I think it’s helped morale around here to know we’re doing some good.” 

While Victory and team offer healthy options for Jackson employees on a regular basis, they worked even harder to pack summer lunches for kids with vegetables and whole grains. But when neighbors work together, we like to believe lunches come packed with power for a better future too. 

Jackson’s kitchen serving as a satellite kitchen for The Nashville Food Project.

Jackson meals headed for Project Transformation sites.

Senior Meals Make A Big Impact

By Grace Biggs, TNFP’s Impact Manager

Photo courtesy of St. Luke’s Community House

The barriers our community face can seem overwhelming. Today's seniors are more likely to have chronic diseases such as diabetes, high cholesterol and obesity than ever before, leading to increasing healthcare costs which further burden seniors living on a fixed income. 

More and more, research is showing the importance of nutrition to good health among older adults. According to this report on Tennessee seniors, about 1 in 6 older adults in our state is food insecure. This report also found that for every 100 seniors with independent living difficulty in Tennessee only 3.6 home-delivered meals are available: the lowest percentage available among all other US states.  

At The Nashville Food Project, we understand health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being -- not merely the absence of disease. And we know that good food alone is not a solution to these complex problems. That’s why we make sure our nutritious meals and snacks are supporting the vibrant, creative work of other anti-poverty and community-building organizations in our city. 

TNFP volunteer plating mobile meals at St. Luke’s Community House

Meals On Wheels and Mobile Meals programs are an essential service, supporting not only nutrition but also regular social contact and ‘safety checks’ for homebound seniors. Or as one mobile meal participant put it, “All the carriers make me feel that a friend dropped by.”

TNFP is on track to cook and share over 51,000 senior meals this year, thanks to deep partnerships with incredible local senior-serving partner organizations and significant support from West End Home Foundation, National Benevolent Association and Dandridge Trust.

Here’s a look at the many ways a few of TNFP’s senior-serving meal partners are supporting seniors in our community with home-delivered meals and community-building programs:

The Ark

The Ark, a senior-serving TNFP meals partner added in 2018, was founded to address severe gaps in social services and community resources in South Cheatham County, including Pegram and Kingston Springs. TNFP provides made-from-scratch meals for The Ark’s Meals On Wheels program 3 days a week, as well as a weekly community meal shared in their Resource Center.

“Our motto is very simple,” says Anne Carty, Program Director with the Ark. “We want to help people stay afloat when they have a time of need. Rather than leading the food prep and the decision-making of menus, we’re able to pick up the food from The Nashville Food Project, repackage it to send out for Meals On Wheels or serve it at our Wednesday lunch. Then we can really concentrate on the other services, especially for homebound seniors, like home repair and utility assistance.”

These meals wouldn’t be served without the hard work of committed Ark staff and volunteers. Butch Rogers and Melanie Smiley, who both work with Ark’s Meals On Wheels program, pick up the food from TNFP’s California Avenue kitchen 3 times a week. The following mornings, Melanie arrives at Pegram United Methodist Church to package the meals to be ready for volunteers to make the home deliveries. On Wednesdays, she also heats up the food for seniors coming to the resource center for a weekly community meal.

Photo courtesy of the Ark

“They love the companionship,” says Melanie. “They get to see each other each week and catch up on things that are going on. And there’s also a hot game of bingo after the meal. And nobody interferes with that hot game of bingo, let me tell you!”

“I think the food plays a big part of it, because they’re talking to people they haven’t talked to before, and they’re talking about the food -- ‘I haven’t had this before, I haven’t tried this before.’ You have to sell it because it’s not food they’re used to. I’m a big seller. Then they come back and say, ‘Oh Melanie, you were right, it was so good!’ And they’re cleaning their plates. That makes me feel really good when they clean their plates.”

Visit the Ark’s website to learn more about their work and what you can do to support.

Fifty Forward

FiftyForward has been in existence since 1956, and their home-delivered meals started in 1969. So for about 50 years, they prepared their own meals in-house with their own cook and an assistant cook. “The meals were what people would typically think of as a home-delivered meal,” shared Gretchen, Associate Executive Director at FiftyForward. “We did a great job, but then we looked up and saw their were community partners like The Nashville Food Project available. TNFP brings all that expertise of fresh, locally sourced food. And we can bring the senior service piece. So it’s been just beautiful.”

When FiftyForward first began considering a partnership with TNFP, Gretchen shared that some were unsure about the change and whether the older adults would be interested in the menus. “It’s a different variety of food than we’d had,” explained Gretchen. “So we did a two week pilot, and every day we had a nutrition student ask participants ask what they thought about the lunches. And on the very last day, I’m walking through the adult day service area one of our participants called me over, saying ‘Ms. Gretchen, Ms. Gretchen, come see what we’re eating!’ It was this beautiful, very fresh potato salad, and fresh green salad, and a barbeque sandwich. Then she said, ‘This is the best meal.’ And there you go! Right from the mouth of the person that we’re aiming to serve. From there, we expanded our partnership to cover all of our meals beginning in 2018, and it’s just been a wonderful partnership where we can share our expertise and really serve seniors well.”

Photo courtesy of Fifty Forward

The Nashville Food Project currently supports FiftyForward’s home delivered meal program, FiftyForward Fresh Meals On Wheels, and a daily lunch for their adult day service program for older adults who can’t remain home safely alone during the day -- a total of about 550 weekly meals. This summer we were also able to prepare extra meals for a senior’s summer singing program at FiftyForward’s KNOWLES center.

“We understand now that nutrition is so important to older adults as they age,” says Gretchen. “We used to work with older adults who thought, ‘I’m 85, I can eat Hershey’s Kisses, and that’s my daily food.’ And we’ve really worked with them to understand you could eat that now, but you’re going to feel a certain way if you do. Whereas nutrient dense food like the Food Project’s will give you the energy to live your best life at 85 and beyond.”

FiftyForward operates a network of seven centers and offers a wealth of resources for adults 50+ in Middle Tennessee. You can learn more on their website, including volunteer opportunities in support of their work.

St. Luke’s Community House

St. Luke's Community House, a United Way Family Resource Center, has been meeting the needs of families in The Nations community for more than 100 years through programs and services for children, youth, adults, seniors, and families as a whole. In 2016 we formed a unique partnership with St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, operating a portion of our meals programming from their commercial kitchen and serving 1,330 meals each week for the St. Luke's preschool and mobile meals programs.

St. Luke’s senior services support seniors aged 60 and over and adults with disabilities who live in specific West Nashville areas. Mobile meals are delivered to each participant’s door by trusted and trained St. Luke’s volunteers. And their Friend Senior Club offers weekly social and recreational opportunities for West Nashville seniors of all ages, such as bingo parties, crafts, group fitness classes and more. 

Each weekday morning, TNFP volunteers help with plating St. Luke’s mobile meals lunches as part of morning meal prep. Most days, the lunch is shared with both the seniors receiving mobile meals and the preschoolers. At about 10:15 AM, St. Luke's mobile meals volunteers arrive to pack up the lunches and begin deliveries to seniors and adults with disabilities throughout the West Nashville community.

Photo courtesy of St. Luke’s Community House

Running the kitchen on site means we hear more stories of the impact of the meals shared in partnership with St. Luke’s firsthand. As one St. Luke’s mobile meals participant shared, “Before I wasn't eating, I was forgetting to eat. Now I'm eating more regularly. It's helping my health. I had a stroke about 3 and a half years ago, and the healing process is taking a lot of my energy. This is a convenience for me, because it's brought right to my door. And a lot of the time it has brain food. I don't have to cook a meal when I'm about to conk out. You have no idea how much of a help it is. It's just beautiful.”

St. Luke’s Community House offers lots of ways you can get involved in their mission to create a community where children, families, and seniors from different backgrounds can easily access the resources needed to live fulfilling lives.

Crossroads Campus

“We don’t derive strength from our rugged individualism, but rather our collective ability to plan, communicate, and work together.”

— Brene’ Brown

By Elizabeth Langgle-Martin, Community Engagement Manager

At The Nashville Food Project, we are passionate about many things: a freshly pulled carrot making its way from our gardens to our kitchen, an especially generous produce or protein donation from a local farm, watching young volunteers make popcorn on the stove top for the first time, and seeing neatly stacked pans of incredible food being loaded into our vehicle, ready to make a trip to its final destination. But perhaps most of all, we are passionate about our meals being served in partnership with diverse, essential non-profits doing poverty interrupting work in our community.

When Katie Kuhl of Crossroads Campus approached The Nashville Food Project about providing a meal to be served alongside their Wednesday afternoon self-development and skills training activities, we knew that we wanted to leverage our efforts to support the work the Crossroads team is doing with young people and with animals in our city. Crossroads Campus is nestled in the center of Nashville on the edge of Germantown towards North Nashville. It boasts a multi-use space which includes a retail store for pet supplies, a full service grooming facility, kennels for small adoptable dogs and a cat room brimming with soft kittens ready for a place of their own. Four apartments also are wrapped into their expansive space, offering respite for young people who have experienced barriers to stable housing. Crossroads retail store, grooming services, humane education efforts, dog treat social enterprise and adoption mission all provide a job training environment for additional young Nashvillians termed interns who need both a soft place to land and a launching place from which to prepare for their next steps. These young folks, age 17 to early 20s, engage in paid internship experiences and become proficient in retail, pet grooming skills, and animal care with extra attention to humane education. Interns have access to weekly case management support and Wednesday afternoons are reserved for special activities which range from yoga and learning about taxes to button making and conflict resolution. TNFP recently began providing meals to accompany these essential times, from jerk chicken and island rice to chicken parmesan, always with hefty portions of fruit and seasonal salad.

The Nashville Food Project holds tight to this idea of interdependence, one of our key values. TNFP sees its work of growing, cooking, and sharing nourishing food in order to cultivate community food security as only possible and only valuable when we do it in relationship with others. When we see our food served alongside the deeply invested work of groups like Crossroad Campus, we see our mission realized in new and vibrant ways and are encouraged by organizations that see our meals as a resource to enhance the unique community that our partners foster. 

To see our list of other non-profit partners, check out our website.

Interested in exploring meal partnership? We will be opening up space for new inquiries at the beginning of July! Add your email here to receive a notice when we start to explore fall partnerships.

Not Just About the Meal

It’s not just about the meal…. we want our food to be the backdrop, the engine, the song in the background of all the good work of our partners. A few weeks ago, we received the note below from our amazing meals partner Preston Taylor Ministries - her feedback on a recent meal shared by TNFP with their community.

“Just wanted to let you know what an amazing time we had last night.  With holiday music playing, red sauce aromas coming from the kitchen and parents streaming through the door in droves speaking 3 different languages, it was a magical night. As always, we were able to share your story, not just about the meal, but with all the fresh produce, fruit, labor and love that you lavish on us all year long. I’m always so grateful when I get to brag on how rarely I serve a Cheezit and I couldn’t do that without the consistent and intentional ways in which you serve our students and families. We had about 8 new families there that had never experienced our community supper and several came up to me to tell me what a delicious meal it was.  We had 96 RSVPs and as usual, close to 120 plates handed out. The meal was super simple to serve and with all the prep work done by you, it gave me time to kiss new babies that weren’t here last year and hug on grandparents I haven’t seen since our summer meal. Wednesdays are long because we have students at PTM starting at 1:30pm and very little time to turn the gym into an event space. But your hard work of getting a meal prepared gives us the freedom to love them well, so it’s with a grateful heart that we say thank you. ”

— Lisa Lentz, Preston Taylor Ministries

The Nashville Food Project is more committed than ever to making our Nashville community healthier and happier by supporting partners like Preston Taylor with good food! Is there a way food could support the work of your organization or community group? Click here to learn more about becoming a meal partner.

Health As Healing

By TNFP's Food Donations Coordinator, Booth Jewett

Since I started as the Food Donations Coordinator at The Nashville Food Project (TNFP), healthy living has been at the forefront of my mind. Our garden programs bring people from all walks of life into the fields together to grow local, organic produce for people in our community. Our meals program thrives on the gifts, generosity, and creativity of individuals every day to make nourishing meals that are shared all around Nashville. As we’ve grown our food donation and recovery efforts, it is always with these same values and our mission in mind!

Booth picking up a produce donation from Currey Ingram Academy's garden.

Since 2016, TNFP’s food recovery efforts have brought in about 120,000 lbs of food each year, including fresh produce, proteins, and pantry items. We use as much of this recovered food as possible in our own meals. Any food that is unsalvageable but compostable goes to our compost system to be broken down and put back into the gardens to grow more food!

Ultimately, we are always seeking creative ways to share the food in our care in ways that best fit the needs of our partners, supporting shared efforts to build community and disrupt poverty in our community. In the past year, this has meant expanding our meals partnership model beyond our own meals and snacks. Now we include fresh produce and other ingredients as potential opportunities for food support to our partners.

One of these partners is Trevecca Towers, a retirement community that is committed to serving seniors and persons with disabilities with a caring living environment that promotes dignity and relevance. Every Wednesday morning the Towers open their chapel and fill it with donated food for residents to “shop”. After a few months of this, Nick Polk, the Director of the Service Coordinator Department, noticed a trend in the food they were receiving. “We had food co-ops delivering almost exclusively bread, sweets, and processed foods. While these items can be helpful, I started getting more residents asking if we might be able to receive more fruits and veggies. This request resulted in us reaching out to The Nashville Food Project and becoming a sharing partner.” The Nashville Food Project has been sharing extra produce from local farms and pre-packaged produce from Whole Foods with Trevecca Towers each week for the last year. “The reality is that it’s way easier to get ahold of sweets and processed foods than it is organic food and fresh produce, and The Nashville Food Project has made strides in changing that reality for our residents”, says Nick.

Contrast Trevecca Towers with another sharing partner, Safe Room. Safe Room is a Tennessee Department of Children’s Services program that provides designated spaces for children waiting for placement in a foster or kinship home. When Safe Room reached out to The Nashville Food Project, it wasn’t for fresh produce but instead for what they called “comfort foods”. Dana Eskridge, a Volunteer Service Coordinator with Safe Room, explained that “Since the kids that come through here are in transition, we try to keep foods stocked in our fridges that can act as a comfort while they are with us.” In response to this request, we have been able to share Whole Foods donated prepared food items ranging from soups, salads, and sandwiches to frozen pizzas, pastries, and desserts with Safe Room twice a week.

I used to think that being healthy was exclusively tied to eating nutritional food and living an active lifestyle. But after being apart of The Nashville Food Project’s work the last couple of years and seeing so many nuanced expressions of our mission in action, I am starting to realize that being healthy is also about meeting each others needs and having balance and connection in our lives. At The Nashville Food Project, we strive to embrace the complications and conflicts that exist not only in our current food system, but in our collected response to that system. I really love that about this place.

Painting a Future Together

How do you create a community? It’s a big question with a complex answer. At The Nashville Food Project we believe it happens one meal and one relationship at a time. St. Luke’s Community House and TNFP are teaming up to paint a future filled with connection and meals for even more Nashvillians by sharing a space at St. Luke's called the Mural Room.

In May, the doors to the Mural Room were opened to the The Nashville Food Project to use as a meal prep space. Since 2004, the mural room has been used as a conference, meeting and program space which could be divided into two rooms. Its name comes from the inspiring and reflective mural showcased on its back wall featuring the old Tennessee State Penitentiary, This N’ That Thrift Store, and the community members in between. The mural was a collaboration project between St. Luke’s and the Frist Museum. An artist worked with children to complete a three part mural depicting the history of St. Luke’s and its community partners. Now, 14 years later, The Nashville Food Project is a collaborator and symbiotic partner sharing half of the namesake room.

What difference does a half of a room make? Kelli Johnson, TNFP St. Luke’s Kitchen Manager says “It’s really been a game changer in the amount we can do. We’ve doubled our number of volunteers. And we’ve hired another staff member to oversee volunteers. We’ll also be making 650 meals a day.” To give you perspective, two years ago TNFP was preparing 150 meals each day in the St. Luke’s kitchen. The bump in capacity has allowed us to take on four new sites this summer - 2 YMCA Summer Camps, an open Picnic at McGruder Family Resource Center (next to our garden), and the Margaret Maddox YMCA. Having access to the mural room has allowed us to touch each of these sites and provide healthy meals to children who may not have consistent meals now that school is out.

St. Luke’s and TNFP have a supportive relationship. TNFP is able to reside and access the St. Luke’s Kitchen for any project supporting our mission. In exchange we make sure that St. Luke’s program participants are getting nourishing food in their preschool and senior mobile meal programs. The impact is easy to see.

“When you walk through the preschool at lunchtime, you won’t see microwaved corn dogs, syrupy canned peaches or honey buns anymore. You will see homemade turkey pot pie with fresh fruit salad and a homemade oatmeal cookie. It’s amazing to see what kids can do when they are nourished – mind, body and soul!
”

— Corey Gephart, CEO, St. Luke's Community House

We are so grateful and excited to be a part of the Nations community and for our second home at St. Luke’s Community House. Every year we both support each other to ensure the health and vitality of the neighborhoods that we serve. What’s the next step? Another mural in the mural room with our ever continuing story of sharing nourishing food and building community relationships.

For more information about St. Luke’s Community House visit their website at www.stlch.org. To volunteer at the TNFP’s St. Luke’s Kitchen sign up here.

Wedgewood Towers Grows Community

The Nashville Food Project’s newest meal site is right around the corner from one of our Gardens at the Wedgewood Towers community, located in the Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood. This apartment complex has 121 units and is managed by First Cumberland Properties specifically serving low-income disabled and seniors over the age of 62.

Senior residents of Wedgewood Towers and students from University School of Nashville working on a craft together.

As long time residents of Nashville can attest, this is an area that has changed a lot in the last 10 years, and those changes have had lasting impacts on the Wedgewood Towers community.

A recent craft: paper rainbows and pots of gold in honor of St. Patrick's Day!

When Kita Davis was recently assigned as a social worker for this building, she polled the residents to better understand their needs. At the top of the list was access to food, healthy or otherwise. The last, walkable grocery store, a save-a-lot, was torn down for condos not too long ago. Most residents of Wedgewood Towers do not have access to regular transportation and have a hard time getting out. With no grocery stores within walking distance, it’s no wonder that access to healthy food is at the top of the list.

As a result, Kita reached out to The Nashville Food Project. Now, every Tuesday at lunch and Friday at dinner, residents of Wedgewood Towers gather together around activities and a hearty, made from scratch meal.

On Tuesdays before lunch the residents are joined by students from the University School of Nashville. Each week a different class comes and leads an activity for the community. One week it was a game, the next a computer lesson. Last week, in preparation for St. Patrick’s Day, the kids led a craft, making paper rainbows and pots of gold for the residents to decorate their doors with.

Lunch is served!

After the craft it was time to eat. Residents blessed the meal with words of gratitude before digging in. On the menu was barbeque chicken, roasted sweet potatoes, a kale salad & fruit. Similarly, on Fridays volunteers join the residents for a “lively game of bingo” while they eat.

Before this meal and these activities, Kita said that there weren’t many community wide activities at Wedgewood Towers. It’s taken a little while for the programs to grow but every week she has more residents coming back to join in and receive a meal.

Her goal with these meals and community times are simple, to promote wellness, build morale, and strengthen relationships between residents and staff, fostering a friendly atmosphere and a strong sense of community. And really, isn’t that what a shared meal is all about? Every week, Kita says, the community grows.

At The Nashville Food Project we embrace a vision of vibrant community food security in which everyone has access to the food they want and need through a just and sustainable food system. As the sweet potatoes from a local farm, the greens from our garden around the corner, fruit salad prepared by volunteers, and chicken donated from a local restaurant filled up these plates it all came together, a meal Nashville can be proud of.

Food is Comfort

The statistics of domestic violence in our country are staggering. One in four women in the U.S. experiences intimate partner violence in her lifetime. Approximately 15.5 million children are exposed to domestic violence every year. And in our own community, The Metro Nashville Police Department received over 26,600 reports of domestic violence in 2014 - that’s one report every 20 minutes.

In January 2017, we began a partnership with the YWCA, providing weekday dinners for their Weaver Domestic Violence Center. This 51-bed shelter is the largest domestic violence shelter in Tennessee, providing a safe space for women and children escaping domestic violence (men are housed at another partner facility).

“The women, the children, our staff - anyone who walk through these walls - deserves a clean, welcoming, healthy place,” says Laura Clark, the Residential Coordinator at the shelter for the past 17 years.

The YWCA empowers domestic violence survivors to take control of their lives, while offering them safety and the resources to ensure their self-sufficiency. The YWCA’s programs are designed to empower women and offer opportunities for self-determination in every area of life, including the design of their food program at the shelter.

“Food is so powerful...And sometimes the women couldn’t eat what they wanted. They couldn’t buy what they wanted. Everything was locked up. Everything was centered around the control of their abuser.”

— Laura Clark

In contrast, the two kitchens at the shelter are stocked with pantry items and ingredients for the women and families to have access on their own schedule. They have spaces for any of their personal food, and can add requests for spices or other pantry items to a community shopping list.

"At first when they talked about having (TNFP) I didn’t know exactly what it was – they started and thought, ‘Oh my gosh - I don’t know why we couldn’t have found you all years ago!’"

The dinner meal at the shelter, provided by TNFP, is advertised to start early evening, but the women can come at whatever time works for their schedule. “Many of the women work, have school, and are taking care of their kids. When they come here, we want to offer at least one good meal a day – which is (TNFP),” Laura tells us.  “Food is comforting. And our goal is to make sure they’re fed and they’re taken care of – it’s just one less thing to worry about.”

When asked about how the food has been received, Laura shared, “I have seen positive impacts. Some of the women have never eaten like this. It’s healthy, and it’s flavors that you don’t get just anywhere - even in the restaurants,” she adds, smiling.

“This is a different way of life for a lot of these women and kids. And I’ve seen a difference. I’ve seen a difference in people and the way they eat.”

And of course, this is just one small piece of the much broader impact of the YWCA’s work. In 2016, the YWCA served 453 adults and children at the Weaver Domestic Violence Center, providing not just a safe space, but also case management, safety planning, support groups, and counseling.

We are so grateful to be a partner with the YWCA in this important work! Learn more about the YWCA’s mission and programs on their website.

Supporting Academic Perseverance Through Food

Earlier this month we sat down with one of our meal partners, Preston Taylor Ministries, to learn more about their program and how they are using The Nashville Food Project's food to support their work to education and instill students with academic perseverance.

Tell me a little about your organization and specifically the program that is supported with TNFP food.

Preston Taylor Ministries has been operating for 19 years. Next year will be our twentieth year. We have seven elementary and middle school sites that we partner with throughout the 37209 zip code. We own one of the buildings that we run programming from, but the majority are partnerships with other organizations. We really try to have a presence in the footprint that exists in the neighborhood. 

We try to be that school-home-afterschool connection to close those gaps. Here at St. Luke’s Community House we are a K-8 program so we actually have two programs running simultaneously: a K-4 elementary school program and a 5-8 middle school program. 

What’s the specific program that you run here at St. Luke’s Community House?

Our primary feeder school for elementary is Cockrill Elementary. We’ve worked out a transportation system with Metro Nashville, and they bus those students directly here, which is great. Of the 35 elementary school students that come, probably 25 of them are all Cockrill students. Other feeder schools are Charlotte Park Elementary, Eakin Elementary and Gower Elementary. For our middle school program, our primary feeder school is Nashville Prep. That’s a charter school that is a block away. Probably 28 of the 35 middle schoolers come from there, and they walk here. 

We’re after-school from around 3:30 to 5:30, and our primary mission is “Joy-filled friendships, Christ-centered atmosphere, and a love for learning.”

We are in an air conditioned gym, and we take full advantage of that. Our program consists of physical education, academics, reading intervention and chapel time. We have a total of 70 students that rotate…

Wow! That’s a lot of kids.

Yeah, it doesn’t feel like it. When you get it down to everyone knowing where they’re supposed to be, it’s manageable. You’ve just got to trust me on that!

That’s such a great focus on filling the gaps to create a holistic experience. One of The Nashville Food Project’s primary goals is filling gaps for our partners, supporting their work that is breaking cycles of poverty. Education seems so important in that work. How are you all working in the education space?

Our goal when it comes to education and academics is really what we call “academic perseverance.” We know that in the 25 minutes we have for homework help in a two hour after-school program, it’s very difficult for us to increase a grade level. What we can do is use all of the two hours that we have with those students to build an atmosphere and a mindset of perseverance and follow-through, doing hard things and doing the next, right thing. That carries over into the academic pieces of our program. So that’s really our first approach - understanding that we’re creating a framework of perseverance in everything that we do. 

Then, we have a reading intervention piece. We know that in K through third grade, students are learning to read. In grades fourth through eighth, students are reading to learn. In those latter years, we know that most of the information they intake academically will be through reading comprehension so that becomes our focus. As they become better readers, they become better learners. There are things that we have to do in that third rotation that revolve around giving that student a better chance at focus and concentration, breaking barriers of distraction. Food is a big part of that.

Why do you think that offering food alongside this program is important? How does it support the work?

When I say the word food, what I mean is healthy, nutritional snacking. We don’t want to give our students anything that then steals their energy, ability to focus and ability to concentrate. What we want to give them is food that’s going to support the next hard thing that they have to do. 

We’re always looking for ways to introduce healthy snacks with the mindset that Cheetos are going to keep you from wanting to do your homework, but hummus and carrots are going to energize you and give you the brain power that you need to be able to do that next hard thing, which might be math. That’s the approach that we take, and that’s why The Nashville Food Project is such an important and integral partner to academic excellence here. 

It sounds like you all are carrying out your program in a way that’s helping the students learn more about how to feed themselves and what the food that they eat does for their ability to learn and be active. What do you think the students are learning about and through this food?

We also partner with Second Harvest, and they have a lot of literature that we can use to educate the students in their native language. They give us those to help support the education piece. We use that alongside cooking lessons and other things. We have cooking rotations with our students where the approach is always to get kids to make their own healthy snacks. If there is a particular snack that we’re serving from The Nashville Food Project, we have a conversation with our volunteers about introducing those foods, talking about the colors of those foods and what the colors mean in terms of what that gives you - what orange food gives you, what red food gives you and what green food gives you. We’re always sending that message right through that window into our kitchen. 

It also gives us the opportunity to have conversations around perseverance when it comes to trying new things and why it’s important to at least take a bite. You can’t explain to me what you’re saying “no” to until you try it. That’s been a huge part of getting students into the whole mindset of what perseverance means in every aspect of their life including how they feed themselves. That’s an emotional decision so the social and emotional learning part of that - of not shutting yourself down to trying new things - is a big piece of it as well.

It’s great to see you all thinking about food and its impact on your students in such a meaningful way.

Yeah! It’s a very holistic and integrative approach here, and everything that we do points to those goals. 

Other than food, what do you think are the biggest factors outside of your control that are impacting the education and development of the students you work with?

Here at the St. Luke’s facility, 100% of our students are living below the poverty line, and 68% of our students are native Spanish speakers. They are the first English speakers in their families so for reading comprehension, they always have to go the long way around the barn. 

Particularly in our fifth through eighth grade population, Nashville Prep is a college preparatory school teaching high order and critical thinking skills. Reading a paragraph and being able to extrapolate data, form a conclusion, find evidence to support a question - those sorts of things take a lot of concentration when English isn’t your native language so ELL and being able to work with that population in homework help is always a challenge. 

The other problem is that for this population their support system is often not in the country. Having a caring adult, having high participation in our mentoring program where there’s a caring adult in their lives other than their mom has been a big part of our mission at PTM because their support system isn’t even here. Not down the street. Not in another neighborhood. In another country.

I know that one of the things that The Nashville Food Project has been doing here at PTM that’s different from some of our other after-school program partners is the Community Suppers you do. I’d love to hear about how that came about.

When I first came and sat down with The Nashville Food Project and talked about the programs that you offered, we decided that rather than having healthy snacks coming four days a week, we wanted a way to be able to share that experience in a family setting, bringing the community together around healthy food. So we negotiated that once a quarter we would have a Community Supper, and we could share that experience, where students could communicate to the parent about the food they were eating. I think we had 42 people here for the first Community Supper, but for the last one we had about 120! 

It’s a huge huge part of what we do here! It gives us an opportunity, a way for us to increase our parent engagement and find out what’s going on in the home and just sit down and break bread together. Just share a meal together. It has turned into Community Supper/Dance Party. There’s a lot of dancing that goes on! Which is great.

During Community Suppers we always talk about The Nashville Food Project and go into depth about the people that gleaned the food, the people that prepared the food, the people that transported the food. The meal is always so beautiful and so colorful, and we go into what we’re eating and why it’s important. I stand there at that microphone, and that’s what we talk about. We always have the food portion of the evening, then some sort of enrichment where we’re highlighting something in the program to give them a little bit about what we do while their kids are here.

We have four Community Suppers a year. The one in May has become our graduation ceremony and volunteer appreciation dinner. The one in September is sort of our open house when we’re launching the program, getting to know the families, meeting some parents for the first time. The one in November/December becomes sort of a holiday meal. It has become an integral part of what we do, and I’m so glad that we’ve structured it this way.

You hear a lot about how much parent involvement can impact a student’s performance. Have you all seen a difference in your students after being able to get their families more involved in your program through these Community Suppers?

What’s great about it is that it helps us to close that loop in terms of what’s going on in the school and how that needs to be communicated to the home base. When that’s carried through a child, a lot gets lost in translation so we do get to be that unifying arm. We close that loop in terms of what’s happening in the school and after-school environment. That’s one piece of it. 

Like I said, 68% of these students are learning in English instead of their native language, so it is so difficult for parents to be a help. That’s one area where we can bridge the gap. I just had a parent meeting a couple of weeks ago, and we instilled a new homework policy where we’re not only looking at homework, we’re correcting it, and we’re initialing off on it. This is a way for a parent to know, “Hey, there’s been a caring, educated adult that’s looked at this. I don’t have to feel shame or pressure to be the person who helps with this when I’m not an English reader.”

These are some of the ways in which having Community Suppers and having parents come alongside us builds rapport, credibility and trust.

Spreading Joy Through Nourishing Food

by Patricia Bing, St. Luke's Community House Family Resource Center Director

On any day of the week, you can walk into the kitchen at St. Luke’s and be greeted with a smile and warm hello in the midst of all of the hustle and bustle that takes place when over 200 meals are being prepared for the day. This warm and inviting atmosphere is just one reflection of the great partnership that has been established between St. Luke’s and The Nashville Food Project.  

The partnership between the two organizations began in March of 2016, sprouting from two separate places- St. Luke’s need to provide quality and nutritious food to our clients, and The Nashville Food Project’s desire to begin a social enterprise. After being connected with one another, talks ensued, and that, as they say, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The Nashville Food Project now provides food for two programs at St. Luke’s. The first being our Senior Services program, that provides freshly prepared lunches that are delivered to seniors in their homes Monday through Friday and meals for our weekly senior activities. The second program is our preschool, for which The Nashville Food Project prepares breakfast, lunch, and snack daily.

There was a period where we had to transition the participants of both programs to the new menus and foods they were now being served. The Nashville Food Project did a great job of finding compromises that mixed in the foods clients were used to being served with healthier alternatives. The communication between the two organizations was essential to a successful partnership. The Nashville Food Project did, and still does, an excellent job of making sure they understand what both our seniors and children like and want. They talk to the teachers. Seniors are polled and asked questions, and they are always open to any idea or suggestions that may come from the St. Luke’s staff.

At St. Luke’s we recognize that food is a vehicle. It is a way to educate, bring people together, and help us discover what other needs the members of our community may have. Through this partnership, we are able to not only introduce nutritious foods to our clients, but it gives us an opportunity to educate them on why it is healthy and what other healthy food options may be out there.

We have heard stories from individuals about how this change in their diet has improved their quality of life. One of our seniors let us know that since switching to the healthier meals, her blood pressure is lower, blood sugar is better controlled and she has lost 8 pounds. Today, I walked into a classroom of two-year olds during lunch time and they could not get enough of the salad, green beans, and spaghetti they were eating. Most had abandoned their forks in favor of their hands to make sure they got every delicious bite.

There is now a positive energy that surrounds the preparation, delivery, and consumption of the food that is pure joy to witness. These examples truly show what a success the partnership between St. Luke’s Community House and The Nashville Food Project has been and will continue to be.

We're always looking for volunteers to help prepare these delicious meals at our St. Luke's kitchen! Click here to sign up.

Celebrating Community at John Glenn

Its lunchtime on a Thursday; which, means it’s time to load the truck up and hit the road. The destination: John Glenn and Peggy Ann Alsup Arbors Residential Center. John Glenn is a part of National Church Residences which provides housing for seniors with low incomes who meet the criteria set by HUD.

When first entering this community, you are greeted with a warm welcome, in the form of a smile, wave, or “Thank You for being here.” Later in the day, one receives more kind words, jokes that turn into laughter, and hugs that turn into friendship. So much so, that the usual one hour lunch run called for more. We decided to add music, games, and fellowship to the mix, turning it into a fun Community Day.

The Nashville Food Project has been serving a weekly lunch for the residents of John Glenn since 2013. Since then, we’ve built deep relationships with the community, and we’ve watched as they have done the same. What began four years ago as residents of two disconnected buildings has become a thriving community where the men and women interact like family. When one wonders what we mean when we say that nourishing food cultivates community, look no further than the incredible community at John Glenn.

On our recent Community Day, we had a balloon race, tunes from Earth Wind and Fire, and a room full of participants in a fun game. The music even led to shaking and dancing. To top it off, this day was a part of National Volunteer Appreciation Week at The Nashville Food Project. Thursday was marked as Backwards Day, and John Glenn Residents decided to join in on the fun. Almost everyone was in backwards clothing! This excitement led to an even greater afternoon. 

An hour of sharing the meal and joking around wasn’t enough. Nonetheless, we packed up and headed back to TNFP, leaving John Glenn until the next week. We left with handshakes, hugs, smiles, and “come back soon.” 

We’ve joined this community as more than a meal partner. We feel a part of a family that welcomes us to the cookout every Thursday afternoon. Thank you for welcoming us, folks! 

New Meal Partnership Supports Immigrant Families

Evidence has shown that the more parents get involved in their children’s’ lives, the better the children learn, behave and develop. The Nashville Food Project’s newest meal partnership supports programming that invites immigrant families into schools to feel at home in these spaces, in order to connect and engage with their children’s education.

Earlier this year The Nashville Food Project began a new partnership with Alignment Nashville, an initiative to improve the education and health of Nashville’s youth by providing tools that bring the community together for more effective results than we could each accomplish alone. One example is a weekly community night with the goal of Linking, Empowering and Advancing Families - LEAF. Held each Wednesday at Wright Middle School, these LEAF Community Nights allow families to meet over dinner - prepared by The Nashville Food Project - and get connected with community resources. Adults can attend community workshops and ESL classes, while their children receive other enrichment opportunities. 

Through this partnership, The Nashville Food Project is sharing a weekly meal that brings immigrant families together to build a community around their children, one that is welcoming and supports youth in their education and development.

This meal has also been an opportunity to connect two of our partners with similar missions. Similar to the LEAF Community Nights, the Oasis Center’s International Teen Outreach Program (ITOP) supports immigrant, refugee and first generation American teens, providing a safe setting for these youth to explore and engage American culture. One aspect of ITOP is building community connection through volunteerism. 

For more than six years, ITOP participants have volunteered with The Nashville Food Project monthly, sharing a meal from our food trucks or volunteering in our gardens, and now they share this meal with families who are not so different from their own.

Working with our partners at Alignment Nashville and the Oasis Center has provided an opportunity to bring immigrant children, teens and families together to have a real impact on the lives of each of these partners and our community. The Nashville Food Project believes that when we all come together in community, transformational change can happen, and we look forward to seeing how this new partnership transforms our community for the better!