Our Farm to School (FTS) program supports over 30 schools to increase local food purchasing, school meal participation, and food, farm, and nutrition education.
Every year, we rely on our FTS program sponsors to help us bring FTS services to the communities we serve. Coaching and facilitation of school-based FTS teams, including professional development training on school food, Farm to School, student engagement, trauma-informed practices, food justice, and climate and social justice. The FTS team provides technical assistance in implementing nutrition education, cooking carts, taste tests, and school gardens.
Whether it’s helping schools start and maintain school gardens, providing seed kits for learning, or offering trauma and nutrition workshops for teachers, our sponsors provide almost 40% of our overall program funding. We’re grateful for their support!
Why It Matters
The local food system in Vermont is vibrant, but it’s leaving many people behind. In Windham County, where Food Connects is headquartered, 1 in 6 children are food insecure.
Sixty-thousand children in Vermont eat school food five days a week, getting more than half their calories from school lunch, school breakfast, and school snack. What we feed our kids in schools and what we teach them about food matters. It affects how they grow, how they learn, what they will feed their own families, and how long they will live. School is where it all begins.
Moreover, FTS improves students’ wellbeing. Spending 120 minutes a week outdoors greatly increases a sense of wellbeing.
The FTS program helps Improve access to healthy foods and stronger School Nutrition Programs through procurement support, grant writing, marketing training, and increasing school meal participation.
In 2022, Food Connects provided over $250,000 local food to schools.
Because of our sponsors, we provided:
1100 loaves of bread
2100 lbs of potatoes
6,000 apples
180 bunches of kale
600 bags of frozen blueberries
852 quarts of yogurt
1416 pounds of carrots
300 tubs of hummus
400 blocks of cheese
Our FTS team also helped secure $25,000 in grant funding to schools and helped maintain 13 school gardens in the 2021-22 school year.
Food Connects facilitates a culture of curiosity around new foods, building lifelong healthy eating habits. Through our Farm To School initiatives, young eaters will build stronger regional, source-identified food economies and create an accessible and sustaining food culture.