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.

A Day in a Dozen: Our First Day at St. Luke's in 12 Photos

Today's "Day in a Dozen" features a new, very exciting partnership with St. Luke's Community House.

Last week we launched a new partnership with St. Luke's Community House in West Nashville, serving 1,330 meals each week for St. Luke's preschool and mobile meals programs. St. Luke's Community House has been meeting the needs of families in The Nations community for more than 100 years. St. Luke's is a United Way Family Resource Center, providing a comprehensive list of programs and services for children and youth, adults, seniors, and families as a whole. As part of this new partnership, The Nashville Food Project has taken over St. Luke's large commercial kitchen, giving TNFP a second kitchen from which we can produce even more meals to feed our city and bring communities together.

We began serving meals at St. Luke's on Monday, March 28. Longtime TNFP volunteer cook Ann Fundis, who is helping to launch the partnership as Kitchen Manager, arrived bright and early at 6:30 AM to begin prepping breakfast for the preschool and getting the kitchen ready for the day ahead.

Here's Ann Fundis checking inventory of a donation of healthy snack packs.

Here are our meal counts for all of our St. Luke's meals.

We're in organizational heaven over here!

By 8:00 AM, Ann was joined by TNFP staffer Sarah Morgan who began serving breakfast in the preschool classrooms. Monday morning's breakfast was sausage biscuits with orange juice. 

At 8:30 AM, the staff, joined by St. Luke's interim cook Mike, began prepping and cooking lunches for St. Luke's mobile meals program and the preschool. At 9:45 AM, volunteers Debbie Willis and Shellye Geske arrived to begin plating mobile meals lunches. The delicious lunch of baked ziti with meatballs, carrot and raisin salad and orange slices fed both the seniors receiving mobile meals and the preschoolers. 

At 10:15 AM, St. Luke's mobile meals volunteers arrived to pack up the lunches and begin deliveries to seniors throughout the community. We loved sharing with these volunteers a bit about TNFP and learning more about why they give their time to this vital program at St. Luke's.

By 10:30 AM, all of the mobile meals were out for delivery, and our volunteers had some time to begin prepping for afternoon snacks for the preschool and other meals later in the week. Here's Shellye and Debbie prepping kale from our gardens for Thursday's meals.

At 11:00 AM, we begin serving lunches to the preschool classrooms. At this point, we've already served 200 meals, and it's not even noon yet!

Here's Sarah loading up a cart to deliver meals to classrooms. 

And here she is setting up lunch in one of the preschool classrooms. There, the teachers will portion the food out and serve the kids this yummy lunch.

Once lunch is served, we clean up before the staff take a much-needed break. Then at 1:00, we begin prep for the last meal of the day - snacks! Today, the preschoolers are getting some of those healthy snack packs of cheese and crackers Ann prepped earlier along with some apples that Sarah slices before serving at 2:00 PM. Once snacks are served, the staff preps meals for the following day before cleaning up and heading home at 3:30 PM.

And that's a wrap! In our first day at St. Luke's we served 260 meals! We are so excited for this new partnership and how it will help us grow our reach in this community. We're honored to partner with an organization with a long history in the city of Nashville, and we can't wait to see all that this partnership will hold for the future of TNFP. For more information on this partnership, please contact us at info@thenashvillefoodproject.org. Be on the lookout for volunteer opportunities to open up shortly!