Fuel for the Job

Five days a week, the office of Project Return, a nonprofit organization situated near a downtown bus line with views of the Nashville skyscape, hums with the purposeful activity of men and women determined to gain employment after returning from incarceration. For three full days, they participate in Project Return’s job readiness program, attending classes on topics such as money management and computer literacy and receiving individualized support on resume building and mock interviews. All the while, Project Return works diligently to support these individuals in securing employment, an often difficult task for those with a felony conviction, but one necessary to building a full and free life after incarceration.

These individuals face seemingly insurmountable barriers. For many returning to society, systemic poverty rears its head in many ways – hunger, unemployment, homelessness, social stigma, transportation, and often isolation. This means that commitment and intention towards gaining employment requires a vast array of simultaneous wraparound services. 

At The Nashville Food Project, we know that hunger is an immediate, and often critical need for many vulnerable residents of Nashville. And we know that it is often only one of the many burdens of poverty our neighbors face. In partnership with Project Return, The Nashville Food Project provides two lunch time meals each week for the job readiness program participants. 

This week, participants in the program will come together around a communal table during the lunch break to share a beef and broccoli stir fry, garden salad with homemade dressings, and fresh fruit, each component of which was thoughtfully and creatively repurposed for these hardworking individuals.

These meals meet an immediate need faced by many in this program – hunger. And more, as Executive Director of Project Return Bettie Kirkland claims, as “we rally our efforts to propelling people into employment, these meals are literally fuel for the job! It's hard to be an effective job seeker if you're hungry and you're worried about where you'll get your next meal. [Knowing] they're going to leave here with a full stomach frees up brain space for the information we're giving to them.”

Further, The Nashville Food Project seeks to alleviate hunger and cultivate community, knowing that food provides nourishment, healing and belonging when shared together. As our food truck pulls up to Project Return each week, we are setting a place at a communal table where all are welcome. 

“Because people stay at [the Project Return] offices during lunch and eat together, it’s common to hear laughter and stories being shared. This builds a sense of community and camaraderie in our office and sitting down for a meal with others is all part of a successful return to society from incarceration. It incentivizes staying in our program, which is a launchpad for building a full and free life.”

— Bettie Kirkland, Project Return Executive Director

In the face of what daily feels like unlimited need, The Nashville Food Project begins each new partnership in our meals program strategically, not only sharing good food, but asking, “how can good food support the work already happening in your community?”  Through our meal partnerships, TNFP uses the food we grow and recover, the power of human labor, and the spirit of collaboration to disrupt cycles of poverty in Nashville.

In addition to Project Return, we work in collaboration with 26 other nonprofit organizations such as The Contributor, Operation Stand Down, GANG (Gentlemen And Not Gangsters), and Begin Anew, among many others. As we share these meals, we believe in the power of these partnerships to alleviate hunger, bring people together, and transform communities. 

How We Shared in 2016

Thanks to the support of our incredible community, in 2016 The Nashville Food Project shared more food than ever before! Through a new partnership with St. Luke’s Community House and the addition of eight new meal partners, we doubled our annual meals production from 50,000 to 16 partners in 2015 to over 114,000 to 23 partners in 2016! 

“Our students have been more open to trying new foods. We see a better attitude, more even energy & well balanced moods on TNFP food days. Our community suppers have helped us unite our families & staff.”

— Preston Taylor Ministries

“[The Nashville Food Project’s meals have] allowed us focus on independent skill-building by treating this as restaurant/learning opportunity. Our clients have had access to new, nutrient dense foods that they have loved.”

— Friends Life Community

In 2016, we increased our food recovery efforts, recovering over 108,000 pounds of food that would otherwise be thrown away. About one quarter of all recovered food was shared with new partner organizations. These partners used the food in their own kitchens and helped stock refrigerators for their residents and clients. This ensured that even more families had reliable access to fresh, healthy food. 

Small Changes with BIG Impact

This week The Nashville Food Project will share more than double the meals we served this week last year! In a "normal" week (we're always figuring out what that means), we’re currently sharing 3,000 delicious, nutritious meals and snacks each week as compared to 1,200 weekly meals only a year ago. This growth is the result of adding a second kitchen to our ranks, increasing meal prep opportunities for volunteers and the smart-working instinct and intellect of our meals team. But it's also due in large part to an intentional transition in the way that many of our meals are shared.

While our volunteers still share many of our meals in parking lots alongside our food trucks, now roughly 2,200 of the meals and snacks we make each week are delivered to and served by our community partners. Of these 2,200 meals, roughly 900 are prepared in our South Hall kitchen by incredible volunteers and then loaded into our food trucks to be delivered to our meal distribution partners by our staff. The nonprofit partner handles the coordination and facilitation of sharing the meal with its clients and in its community.

This change was made in response to the needs expressed by our community partners. Many came to us with the same problem and asked us how we might be of the solution: They knew that offering a meal or some food for their clients and communities would improve participation and engagement in their programs, but lacking the time and know-how, many were spending their precious resources on pizza and fast food. These partners wanted a way to strengthen their programs with food they would be proud to serve. At the same time, we at The Nashville Food Project were actively looking for ways to broaden the impact of our meals, so that they might come alongside some other kinds of work and programming to alleviate the burdens of being poor.

The Contributor is just one of our partners who serve a TNFP meal alongside their programming. This is a lunch served with their weekly new vendor trainings.

A significant change in our meals structure also meant we needed to make a change in our food trucks, and we have longtime corporate partner and enthusiastic supporter Triumph Aerostructures to thank for making that happen! Over the past few months, Triumph modified our food trucks to provide capacity to hold 24 full-size catering pans at temperature on each truck. This means that on a single itinerary we can now share up to 300 meals and snacks in the community! It’s been a small change that has had a BIG impact on how we're working to cultivate community and alleviate hunger in our city.

Driver side & back flap: 3 insulated food carriers installed in each location - maximizes storage capacity & allows all food to be transported with temperature control

Passenger side: space for market-style display of fresh produce or sack lunch items

Sharing Food & Changing Lives With Two New Partners

The food truck is a somewhat iconic image in the history of The Nashville Food Project. Since our earliest days, we’ve been driving these trucks all over the city, delivering meals to those who need them. Before the hot meals, before the gardens, we had the trucks. Nearly every new volunteer or visitor we meet asks us “I’ve seen the food trucks, but where do they go? Who are these meals shared with?”

The way we share our meals truly is what makes The Nashville Food Project “us.” All of our meals are shared in collaboration with community partners that support the various communities we feed, and right now we are working with over 20 organizations to share hot, healthy meals and snacks in our city. As each partner is different, so is each meal service. Just looking at two of our newest partners, you can see the varied ways our meals are shared to support our community:

Preston Taylor Ministries at St. Luke’s Community House

You’ve probably heard that we’ve partnered with St. Luke’s Community House to open a second kitchen and provide daily meals for their preschool and senior mobile meals program, but you may not have heard that we’re also partnering with a St. Luke’s partner at St. Luke’s. 

Preston Taylor Ministries is the newest partner at St. Luke’s, facilitating the United Way Family Resource Center’s after-school and summer programming. As a site for the SPARK program (Sports, Play and Active Recreation for Kids), programming has an enhanced focus on promoting an active lifestyle. Twice each week, we provide healthy snacks for 85 kids. These snacks, along with the SPARK programming, are helping kids develop a healthier lifestyle, which has been shown to improve academic performance and behavior. We will soon begin a once monthly sit-down meals open to all Preston Taylor Ministries families and the surrounding neighborhood to develop stronger community and reduce the isolation so often accompanying poverty.

The Family Center

The Family Center prevents child abuse and neglect by empowering parents to raise happy, healthy children. The Nurturing Home Program serves Families First families in Davidson County with both group and in-home parenting sessions. 

The Nashville Food Project recently began providing a weekly family meal to support a Nurturing Home group session. Each week, a table topic accompanies the meal to introduce the evening’s session. For example, if Nurturing Home is covering Feelings and Building Empathy, the families begin the evening by sharing a meal and introducing themselves to the other group members and stating one feeling they had that day. This meal and discussion is helping to bring together participating children and parents for important support and sharing.  

Here at The Nashville Food Project, we know that nothing brings people together and breaks down walls quite like a good meal. These new partners show just a couple of ways that that is happening every day in our city. Poverty is a cycle that requires more than just food to break, and these partners are helping us do that by providing valuable programming that betters the lives of all those who come together over our meals. 

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!

Unique New Meal with Friends

This February, TNFP began providing lunches to Friend’s Life Community, a nonprofit that empowers adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, their Friends, to live as independently as possible as they age out of other support services. Their mission is to create opportunities for teenagers and adults with disabilities to develop socially, grow personally, and enjoy community as they experience life together.

TNFP’s first question for any new, prospective meal partnership is “how can food support what’s going on in your community?” For Friend’s Life, this question had a unique answer.

 A big part of Friend’s Life programming is to get Friends out in the community to practice daily life skills. When the Friends were going out together to restaurants, the staff saw that ordering food was a big challenge. They had an idea to set up a simulation in their own facility that would allow the Friends to practice social and money math skills.

“We wanted to set up the cafe because we saw some deficits and places that we could grow our social skills and grow our manners. This simulation is giving them the chance to practice that here before we take it back out in the community and see how we learned,” said Jenna Sutter Brown.

 “We’re taking things step by step,” she adds. 

At first, Friends were asked to choose between two entree options for lunch at the cafe they set up in their facility. Now, the Friends are placing their order from a menu with a cashier. Friends line up and order one at a time, and then pick up their food from “the kitchen.” The next learning objective Friend’s Life staff plan to implement is to simulate payment by pre-loading debit cards for Friends to use at the counter. Eventually, they hope to help each Friend develop “go-to” orders for several restaurants in town, even making cards with pictures of food for those Friends with limited verbal skills.

TNFP’s relationship with Friend’s Life began with the Friends volunteering in our gardens. “Not being able to see the reward right away is tough…Now we have the connection between all the work to what actually ends up on their plate. It brings it full circle for them,” Jenna tells us. Much of the produce the Friends help grow in TNFP's gardens end up in their meals. 

Health concerns can be a challenge for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, so encouraging nutrient-dense foods is a priority at Friend’s Life. Staff have long emphasized healthy choices, but since Friends would bring their food from home they weren’t able to introduce new foods.

Jenna explains, “This gives us a little bit of control, knowing that (TNFP) is going to provide us with something that is filled with colorful, rich, vitamin-filled good food. That gives us peace of mind. We’re seeing that if we give them the option, they’re willing to try new things and actually like it.”

The ability to provide a nutritious meal is part of our mission, but knowing that Friends Life takes it further within their community by linking the meal to skill development is immensely gratifying.

Sharing More in Partnership with United Way

Did you know that The Nashville Food Project nearly doubled our meals program last year? Thanks to a new partnership with the United Way’s SPARK we provided 36 youth and families at the Salvation Army and Bethlehem Center with more than 10,000 healthy meals and snacks in 2015!

The mission of the United Way’s SPARK program is to engage youth in consistent, structured physical activity; to promote movement; to advocate basic nutrition through education; and to provide accessible, cost-effective meals and snacks for youth and their families.

In addition to nearly doubling the number of meals we were able to share in our community, this partnership also allowed us to involve even more incredible volunteers in preparing and cooking these 300 delicious, nutritious meals and snacks each week. These meals and snacks were served alongside fun exercise programs and nutrition education, helping children get healthy and fit in a fun way.

We’re excited to announce that this program with further expand in 2016 with the addition of snacks shared with children at the South Nashville Family Resource Center and the St. Luke’s Community House Family Resource Center! Through this expansion, we will share 120 more snacks each week with children in our city, furthering our reach in our efforts to alleviate hunger and cultivate community.

We thank the United Way of Metropolitan Nashville for continuing this vital partnership, and we can’t wait to see how it continues to grow in 2016!  

Trinity Meal Brings Community Together

Outreach intern Noelle Browne arrives at the Trinity United Methodist Community Meal. 

With a personality even bigger than his beard, Nate Paulk leaves just about everyone he meets with a big smile and an “I love you.”

Employed by the United Methodist Church two and half years ago to help bring life into a church with a dwindling congregation, he works to connect people of the community to one another and to the space. He’s helping turn the church back to the people who live in the community through programming -- and food.

Nate and Trinity United Methodist partnered with The Nashville Food Project two years ago for a community meal every Tuesday.  Rather than serving food from The Nashville Food Project trucks, though, this meal goes on tables family-style giving guests an opportunity to slow down and connect.

“There’s so much beauty in the ordinariness of getting together for dinner,” he says.

On a recent Tuesday, TNFP outreach intern Noelle Browne unloaded pans of chicken stir-fry with rice, green salad for our gardens and a berry crisp. Volunteers and community members pitched in to help put food on platters for passing at the table.

The dinner draws anywhere from 30 to 75 people each week. Most attendees are non-church members at Trinity but live nearby in an area that’s considered a food desert. Nate hopes to gather the group with staff from The Nashville Food Project and Community Food Advocates for a special meal on Tuesday, Dec. 15 to discuss ways to improve fresh food access in the area.

“I try to listen to people,” he says.

Leftover food is boxed up for those who pass through after dinner.