 So, as Christopher said, this was a project that really originated in the food summit from last year in the Child Nutrition Breakout Group, and it became a partnership between Christopher and Julie Kennedy from Earth Systems and the Haas Center, and a group of six Earth Systems seniors who were looking for a meaningful project to do for their seminar. So, we spent the entire winter quarter designing the week-long curriculum to take place at this farm, and a lot of thought goes into this curriculum. So, we really had to narrow it down to two very specific goals. They were, one, to increase vegetable intake of the campers, and two, to improve preferences with the thought that by changing preferences, we could change their behaviors. So, we had two methods in the curriculum design for reaching these goals. The first was dietary exposures, which really quite simply is putting vegetables in your mouth, and the second was garden-based education. So, on dietary exposures, we really designed the curriculum to be able to facilitate as many opportunities for putting vegetables in your mouth as we could at the camp. So, we had activities like a blind taste test, where a partner would feed you ten different tastes of a vegetable, or veggie art dippers, where we'd use toothpicks and different-shaped vegetables to make little models and then get to eat them, and they loved it. And the second method was garden-based education, which is really hands-on learning in the garden. So, this garden-based education really focused on four main themes, and they were environment, which could be learning about nutrient cycling and then playing a game, or learning about energy flow and then building a solar oven and cooking something in it. There was the theme of cooking, which really originated in the garden at the harvesting stage, and then learning about cooking skills and cooking vocabulary, and learning these easy and inexpensive recipes that the campers could take home. The third theme was health, to allow the campers to make informed choices. And the last theme that was really important was culture. We really celebrated the cultural importance of food. And each day at lunch, we'd prepare a dish from a different region of the world, and we'd point to it on a map. And we made Mexican black bean tostadas and Ethiopian lentils. Another dish was Indian chana masala, and we made a pasta primavera, and we would really celebrate the different tastes and flavors and ingredients in these foods. So, campers most widely reported that cooking had the biggest impact on them at camp, but designing food preparation into our curriculum didn't come without its own challenges. And we had several goals for the cooking process, which basically were to engage kids in that process. And to this end, we designed a lot of menus that included a wide variety of tasks, whether it was going into the herb garden, picking herbs, or dicing up a tomato, or sautéing onions. We really wanted to have these kids be invested in that cooking process. And another goal we had was to highlight the seasonality of vegetables at Full Circle Farm. And we wanted to create a bridge between garden-based education and dietary exposure. And this gave a lot of ownership to the kids because they were literally able to harvest something from the garden and then clean it and prepare it, cook it, and then eat it. But the biggest goal and challenge that we had was really to design appealing vegetable-focused meals for kids. And as Hannah mentioned, we did a lot of new taste with a lot of ethnic cuisines, but we also did a lot of rebranding. So something like a salad became a kale taco or a lettuce leaf burrito, and a spinach smoothie became a green slime smoothie. We weren't trying to hide the vegetables, but we really wanted to emphasize that this was about cooking and meal preparation. And this is a quote from one of our kids who said, so I didn't like squash, I hated it, and my mom made it with ravioli, she cubed it, and it's, I still hate it, but it was kind of good. And to me, this really emphasizes the power of cooking and the idea that we know that we made an impact in these kids, even if they were a little reluctant to admit it. So an important thing to note about this quote is that the change in preference is initiated at camp, but moves into the home with this camper, as the mother was the one who prepared the squash. So this is the last really important part of our curriculum that we focused on, because we knew that these changes couldn't take place in a vacuum at camp. They really, the lessons that we taught them really needed to follow these campers into the home to have a long-term impact. So we had a couple different methods of taking these lessons home, but I also wanted to mention that the curriculum that we designed last year was not fixed. In fact, it was ever changing, and we implemented the Agents of Change Challenge in the second week of camp. It was an idea that we had to empower the campers to know that they could make change in their own home. So we would allow them to harvest a squash or a bunch of kale at the end of camp, and they take it home with the challenge to do something with it, whether it was share it with a sibling or cook it in some way. And they would come back the next day and report back to us what they did with it so that they could feel empowered and also inspire their fellow campers. So now that we've shared a little bit of the camp's curriculum, we're going to switch to some of the data collection techniques, the research side of the camp. Our primary data collection technique were the pre and post-vegetable surveys from which we learned the campers' preference for a wide variety of vegetables. We also learned the campers' eating behaviors as well as which vegetables they were familiar with and which vegetables they had never tried before. Another data collection technique we had were the adventurous eater cards. The way these worked were each time a camper tried a vegetable, they did a little tally on these cards. These cards challenged the campers to eat as many vegetables as possible and really celebrated vegetables and adventurous eating as part of the camp. This allowed us to integrate data collection into the spirit of the camp and really merge the research and curriculum aspects of the camp. So how did the camp go? We had three one-week sessions of camp, which a total of 40 students attended. 36 of these students were on scholarships and scholarships were determined by whether they were on free or reduced lunch. As we mentioned earlier, the goal of the camp was to increase vegetable consumption. And this was really a multifaceted goal. We wanted to increase vegetable consumption in terms of frequency, variety, and quantity. In terms of frequency, an average camper put a vegetable into their mouth 52 times over the course of the week. That's over 10 exposures a day. In terms of variety, the average camper ate 20 different vegetables over the week. Out of those 20 different vegetables, five of the vegetables were completely new to the campers. They'd never tried them before. In terms of quantity, well, we don't really know. That was something that we struggled to quantify during the camp. We tried weighing the foods. We tried watching them as they ate. But neither of those really seamlessly integrated the data collection into the camp. And this is something, so finding out how many portions of vegetables the camper ate. This is something that we really look forward to solving next year and finding an elegant solution for. So in addition to this quantitative data, we also wanted to get a sense of our impact on a more qualitative level. So due to the nature of community-based participatory research, which Christopher mentioned, that's what we were really attempting in this research project. And the nature of this kind of research is a partnership, and it has a very personal element. So we really wanted to collect some qualitative data to evaluate how we did on that kind of level. So we had four different data sources for our qualitative impact. We did a lot of journaling with the campers. So after lunch, we had them sit down, take a few minutes of self-reflection time, and write about their experiences that day. And we gave them some prompts to think about. So for example, on the day that we learned about biodiversity in a farm ecosystem and ecosystems around the world, one of our journal questions was what does biodiversity mean to you and your community? We also frequently asked them about what tastes from lunch surprised them to try to get them thinking about these themes already. Another source of qualitative data were counselor observations. So we took a lot of notes about behavior patterns. We noticed that the campers were demonstrating and camper quotes, different things that caught our attention. We conducted focus groups on the Fridays at the end of camp, which were similar periods of self-reflection for the campers, and also opportunities to give us some feedback. And as Hannah mentioned before, we also used our Agents of Change cards as qualitative data. So here are two pieces of raw qualitative data. The first quote is, I want to plant something here. So if I come here next year, I can say, I planted that, and that would make me happy. And the second quote is, when I go to the grocery store with my mom, instead of like putting cookies in the cart, like I want to put vegetables in. And so our process for qualitative data analysis was to first extract themes from these pieces of raw data. So for example, from the first quote, we would extract the theme of ownership of farming processes and a sense of satisfaction that that brought. And from the second quote, we would probably, or we extracted the theme of empowerment in healthy eating choices. And as Hannah was describing earlier, the theme of bringing something home and taking that into your own community. So we decided to visualize this kind of analysis in what is called a word cloud. So here's our word cloud. We reorganized our list of themes into three main subgroups. We have, oh, it's cut off. I'm so sorry about that. At the top, it says empowerment. So the green subgroup is empowerment. And then we have negative feedback. And in the blue, we have revelations. And font size indicates the number of reoccurrences for each theme. So you can see that positive response to new tastes was one of our most reoccurring themes with over 120 hits within our qualitative data pool. And similarly, as Tim mentioned, ownership of food preparation was also really impactful. So as Hannah mentioned earlier, summer camp at Full Circle Farm was a continuously evolving process. And the four of us wanted to leave the new generation of counselors something tangible that they could work with. So we developed a 70-page manual of procedures, which essentially included every activity that we did at camp, how we ran that activity, and why we designed it the way we did. But we actually realized that this wasn't even enough. So we're proposing a student-initiated course for the spring, taught by the four of us, where we'll have the opportunity to go over more upstream factors in the theoretical basis for our research. We'll have the opportunity to go over more abstract concepts like health and equities. But it'll also be a time for us to go over practical skills useful for running camp. So we'll talk about data collection and analysis and really the logistics of how to supervise 20, 11 to 14-year-olds. And this is also a good point of transfer to the new generation of counselors. And it'll give them a sense of ownership because we're going to have them also design new parts of the camp and then implement them in the summer. And one goal that we really have for this course is to emphasize tenets of good community-based participatory research. This really was a collaboration with Full Circle Farm. And it was a mutually beneficial relationship. And our goal is to really create a sustained partnership so that summer camp at Full Circle Farm can continue to improve and serve the community for many years to come. And lastly, there were just so many people who were involved in the design and implementation of this camp. So we wanted to recognize all of them, especially Ashley and Gina, who are in this room, our fellow counselors and educators from the camp. But just thank you to all of you for your efforts and support. OK, can we have all the panelists come up, please? OK, what did you think? I didn't do that at all. I just signed them up. And they just did all that. They worked with Julie and Ira and Ashley and Gina and Daniel and Wolfram and whoo. They worked for 10, 12-hour days sometimes, 100-degree weather sometime in the summer. I would come stop by the farm and they'd say, thank you for the best summer job I ever had. And I looked at them like they had sunstroke or something because they had been working so many hours. OK, now we're missing one guest who's going to join us soon. It's my chair, so I don't really need that. What did I just do? Oh, that's some kind of lab layer. All right, so what I'd like to do is talk about full circle farm. I can't remember what slides I did here. OK, yeah, here's our panelists. So let me do a quick intro for each one of you. I'm going to have Julie start this off. She's not on the top of my list. Just to make sure. Well, I know she's in earth systems and I get this so confused, so there's earth and environmental science systems. Yeah, is that part right? OK, and the School of Earth Sciences, but she does earth systems. Did I do that part right? OK, and she's the faculty director, co-director of the Haas Center, which provided one of the grants for John Proctor to work there over the course of the summer. And she led the course of the six students. Hannah was one of the six who put together that curriculum. It'd be kind of fun to start with you to hear what you think, what you thought when they showed up and said, hey, can we do this for a senior project? You know, it's an interesting question because when I run a class that is a capstone for seniors in a major of the earth systems program that's a very interdisciplinary environmental science major in which they also have to take into account economics, humanist perspectives, culture. They cannot avoid in thinking about environmental problems, social science and humanist component pieces of those problems while largely earning a science degree. And in this capstone class, I want them to bring the best of what they've learned through the major to work in a small group setting on a project, usually a local project. And I give them two choices, that you can do something that is sort of a straight up research kind of question that must be interdisciplinary, but it can be very much research focused or it can have a very strong service learning component piece. Service learning for those of you who are not familiar with the lingo of community based research and such, service learning is running a class in which you are trying to form a very active partnership with a community member where the faculty member has a goal for student learning. That goal is intimately connected to the goal that a community partner might have for a problem to investigate and possible solutions to some challenge in front of us. And the goal for student learning. And every time that I teach this class that I put out that service learning goal, every group here to four has wanted to focus on local food issues, which I find absolutely fascinating. And so I wasn't surprised that one group strongly led by Hannah said, you know, I have this great opportunity and we could do this. Students from across our track areas, the six students who came together to work on this represented those who had deep focus in energy, in thinking about the biosphere, in thinking about land systems and land management, thinking about oceans and ocean health. They really represented the depth and breadth of what it means to study the environment. When they came and told me two important pieces of information, Christopher, that they would be working with you, which was a really good sign, but that the focus was very much more what I would think of as the purview of our fabulous human biology program here. Yes, it is great, human health, nutrition. And so we had to do a lot of exploration of what is gonna be, what are my learning goals for you and can we meet that in the course of you focusing on this direction? What are the learning goals for you and for Full Circle Farm as our community partners? What will the students get out of this? And I think, and then this class creates, which is also intimately connected to service learning and opportunity for reflection, for the students afterwards. They gave an absolutely fantastic superb presentation at the end of the quarter on the curriculum that Hannah then went on with her colleagues to teach so beautifully. So the solution that we came to throughout the course of the quarter, the two of us meeting periodically, meeting with the whole group, me meeting with the group every week, was that along with thinking about human health, you really can't be separating that from thinking about the biophysical system that is creating the food that leads to a healthy lifestyle. You must be thinking about soils. You must be thinking about the very cool bugs that are doing the pollination and the degradation for us and turning compost into soil. You really, it's a neat system. It is a fun system. It is a system that's wonderful to know at a fairly advanced level when you are thinking of it from the point of view of a biogeochemist. It is maybe even more fun and wondrous from the point of view of a kid to think that, you know, geez, worms did this for me. That's really cool. And so to build the best of that sense of fun and playfulness and exploration in with their deep understanding of, you know, whether it is thinking about pollinators, whether it is thinking about energy or if you eat in an extra local food shed, what's the carbon cost of that? And can you actually help students, little kids to calculate that carbon cost? They did that. They figured out how to integrate all of that in a way that was seamless. And I just thought it was a very elegant product. So I was very proud of them. Nice job. And you seem to wear the two perfect hats for this, being from Haas and Earth systems. So is this just chance that they ended up in your class or is this all because of you? Ask Anna. Anna, how did that happen? I think we just have a lot of students at Stanford. Earth systems certainly represents a community of them, but there are many such as human biology, which has got what Catherine 400 or more students in it. A lot of students who love, they can't help themselves. They need to think about complex problems in a very integrative way. They're not the single discipline burrow in. They must see a problem in a very whole three-dimensional kind of way and find multiple paths toward analysis of problems in that field area. And applied. So you mentioned when we talked earlier that one group did a project with Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco and collective roots in East Palo Alto and food was so practical for being applied. The Glide project was wonderful. Working with the woman who runs their rooftop gardens program, the question that she posed since she basically runs the program by herself was like, what can I do? Yes, we'd love to expand this. There's a nearby lot that's been behind fences by the city forever. It's a blighted lot, but it is privately owned. And so my students took on working with her as their community partner creating a prescription, if you will, for the different ways legally or somewhat creatively that Glide might use, that there are other examples of in San Francisco for acquiring these lands. Whether this would be through going through the city through imminent domain, whether this would be on the other end of the spectrum through guerrilla gardening. Go ahead and take it and do it and then ask permission later. Whether there were opportunities in there to work with the owners of the land and have them either lease it from them or have them donate the land and take it off taxes. So they really did a thorough investigation on all of those. And then from the starting point of having acquired the land, they did an analysis of the different economic and business models that Glide might use depending on what their ultimate goal was. So to think about that goal, is the goal to feed local people? Is the goal to train people how to grow food on this land? Is the goal to raise money on this land? So should you intercrop in a really creative way and go for maximum yield to feed people from this land? Should you maybe grow a lot of specialty crops that you could sell at a farmer's market or through a CSA and therefore earn even more money that could go back to feed more people? Do you want to use it for education? And so not favoring any of those but laying on a lot of models. So they could give to Glide. You may not be able to act on this right away but when you are, here is a nice prescription for how to move forward. And similarly, the collective roots work was focused on a similar conjunction with the business model. Why aren't there more sort of high tech, green tech jobs that speak to agriculture? There's a lot of ways out there that we could be training people that aren't just sort of back breaking labor that speak to creative business models. The partnerships that people have with growing mushrooms and sprouts that move straight from a small plot of land to specially restaurants nearby and the idea there being that there's a lot of money that is generated. So what does some of those different models look like? How might collective roots start to engage in some of those models to earn more money and do more green job training in the ag sector? So really fun stuff. That's great. And these places aren't automatically successful. All these places need some help with impact assessment or improvement. And interestingly, so you get your earth systems had and as a host director and Jeff Hawthorne's in the audience. What I heard from Virginia, who has moved on now I'm blanking on her last name was that a really common theme in the house has been food for these summer internships. I mean, you send people across the country. I can't remember what states, but they left town, they left campus and it was food. Food was really practical and really energizing. Okay, thanks very much. I'm gonna keep moving along in our panel here. I'm gonna call on Ira next because Ira was a speaker last year. Did this phenomenal talk from the School of Education. He's the Associate Director of the Step Elementary Program and I had the honor of going to Jesse Kool's house. I missed you that day. You didn't come that one day that I finally showed up. But you've got some students getting their master's degree and you've incorporated a garden curriculum into it and that's kind of how I first met you. Can you start out telling me how food ended up in that step curriculum? Sure. First, I wanna thank you for this particular setup. I think having the faculty speak after the students is appropriately humbling, puts us properly in our place and I wanna acknowledge the accomplishments that the students have made. If we think back a year ago when the meeting that they were discussing, the two of us were essentially leading what could only be described as a fairly disorganized conversation and from that the students managed to accomplish an incredible amount over a course of 12 months, really less than 12 months because they finished their accomplishments over the summer. Makes me wonder what it is that I did over that nine month period. Anyway, I really wanted to acknowledge the hard work I was able to spend time, a little bit of time with the students over the year and the audaciousness of their vision. Really what they wanted to do was to build a school and in an alternative school outside of a regular context in a garden and bring to life a part of the curriculum that's very well underserved and underutilized by our typical traditional school model is incredibly bold. The kind of thing that mid-career faculty member would likely not undertake for a variety of reasons and maybe partly because you didn't realize how challenging it would be. You managed to find the resources that you needed and accomplish really more than I think most of us would have imagined you could do in that short period of time. So I really wanted, my hat goes off to you and I think that the work is tremendous. So I think your question is kind of, who am I and why am I here? So I really want to acknowledge that what brought me here to this particular piece of work are several colleagues who I think were visionary in a lot of ways. So my colleague Ruth Ann Costanzo who is the director of clinical work for Stanford's teacher education program and my friend and colleague Jesse Kuhl, chef and food enthusiast extraordinaire had a vision seven years ago when we were developing an elementary teacher education program in school of education and they had the notion that we should be thinking about the curriculum we design and build into our program very broadly so that ideally as a demonstration program we would be reflecting that broad curriculum to the wider world. Jesse was kind enough to let us explore opportunities to utilize her local garden that she's developed in her backyard to open her house and her kitchen to our students and over the course of a seven year period we have put together what I modestly would say is a really thoughtful integrated engaged curriculum where we expose our teacher candidates to the notion of how to work with their own young children to think about health, food, nutrition from seed to table and we really explore all those elements right in Jesse's backyard. So every quarter we go and we explore what's happening in the garden. We work with Drew Harwell, a local gardener, master gardener and he talks to us about how food grows, what it is that we need to know and how we make those translations to elementary school curriculum. We harvest food out of the garden, we take it to Jesse's kitchen and we prepare it and again with the mindset of how can we do the same thing with elementary school children so we have very simple recipe curriculum that Jesse has put together over the course of years. Then we also work to think about the ways that we make connections to the state and national curriculum standards and frameworks so that this kind of work can find a suitable home in the traditional schools as they currently exist. And then really the highlight for us is the work that our students and then the graduates do in their own classrooms with their own students. So that's kind of the cycle of the work that we do together and really it's it's a product of the vision that Jesse and Ruthanne had seven years ago and as I like to say they're the seeds and the flower and I get to be the compost. Excellent. And we may take advantage of some of those students. So we worked Ashley to the bone in adding our program on top of what she already had before and at the end of the camp this summer Ashley had a great suggestion and said, you know, maybe we could have an education director just for the summer camp next year. So we've actually approached Ira, written a job description, well from welcome, sorry about traffic. And so we're gonna try to advertise in your group for a teacher who wants a summer income, right? To potentially be, so what do you think about that as an opportunity? You think we'll have any trouble filling that role among all the students you have go through your program? Well two thoughts, one is in spite of the incredible accomplishments of this really talented group of undergraduates and even just the fact that they're thinking about designing a course to make this project more sustainable is tremendous. At the same time, running a school on a regular basis is not an easy task. And so what they were tasked to do was to really think about the regular project management, how do you enroll students and get them there on a regular daily basis? How do you raise the funds and resources to run the program? How do you design and manipulate the curriculum over time? How do you build sustainability for the students who are running the program on a daily basis? I think that's part where we may have to work on a little bit because the days were probably 18 plus hour days for all of you. So I think providing some support, logistical support, intellectual support from a well-trained and experienced educator would be a great benefit and probably make the project all the more sustainable. And as I mentioned, I think again, do in part to the natural proclivities of the teachers that we work with but also the work that we've done with them prior. We would probably have no shortage of folks who would be really enthusiastic about bringing what they know about running schools and designing curriculum and effective management and instructional strategies and incorporating that in sort of non-traditional educational opportunities. I think we would have a wealth of resources to draw from and hopefully that would prove to be an enhancement to the project. Great, and I know that you have about 35 PhD students and maybe 10 times that many master students, right? So we're also thinking in terms of a longer vision if this program continues, there may be some theses, some dissertations involved with incorporating that garden curriculum. Down the road, I know that Hannah got approached by a teacher asking for help with a curriculum when they come out to the Full Circle Farm Garden. Although Ashley already does lots of that so I'm not sure why they called you but you could probably turn them to Ashley first but it would be exciting for you to work on something like that, right? So it looks like for your graduate students, this relationship, a long-term relationship could provide multiple opportunities in the future. I think we're always looking for bright and talented students with creative ideas. I think there's a small but maybe powerful number of us in the School of Education who are interested in the range of issues that would potentially be addressed through this piece of work and we're always excited about that. That's great. Okay, now I wanna pass the baton to Ashley because we approached you and said, hey, you've got this summer camp. Last year you had two weeks, you had chirping chickadees and high-flying hawks and they were younger age categories and we approached you and said, you know, what kind of gap is there as another group you'd like to address and don't let me put words in your mouth but I think you said, sure, let's try 11 to 14 year olds and see what that could be and did you ever imagine it would be either that much work or that much success or how about your feedback on how this was when these four students started showing up on a daily basis? So it was, we were expecting to have at least two weeks of camp and we ended up having five weeks of camp with the addition of the three weeks that we had with our 11 to 14 year olds and it was phenomenal. We got to add another portion to it that the little kids are now able to because the chirping chickadees are five to seven year olds and the high flying hawks are eight to 10 year olds and now they have something else they can look forward to because we don't have cooking in the first two camps and we had so much cooking in the last one that a lot of the kids were aspiring to come back just so they could participate and actually do the cooking, which is pretty exciting to actually get that next level of being involved with the food not just eating it raw and creating salads and things that were only raw but actually getting to prepare and do a lot more preparation with it and have that empowerment that the students were talking about where they get to actually prepare so that was really exciting to add that portion onto it. So the really exciting part about this next year too is to be able to be influenced so we only have one week of each and the camp that they did was the same camp three times in a row so we could collect data for it and what we're hoping for is this next year we could actually create two weeks for all of the camps so that if kids wanna come for more than one week it will be building and they'll actually be adding more and then we can also do more data collection with the younger kids as well as the older kids so there's a lot that we can add to those summer camps with just by looking at what we did this last year and really growing on it so there's a lot of potential, so it's exciting. Okay maybe so I don't wanna paint too rosy a picture here there's some challenges too and in fact I wanna own up to one of my own issues so you just seen last year when Ira attended this yes disorganized meeting that I led in January after food summit one we said who wants to show up for child nutrition and we'll try to come up with the next round of ideas and I invited all these people about doing community-based participatory research and two days before we held the meeting I thought oh I didn't invite Full Circle Farm oh no and I called them up and Ashley and Wolfram and I can't remember somebody else showed up two or three of you anyway I'm a horrible CBPR or so far okay but I'm trying to learn my lesson but we descended on you did we weren't there times when it was a burden and it was an extra challenge and these four students were coming up and you had your harvest festival to run and right it's not all easy I think the whole process was learning for everyone so it was a very educational experience for everyone cause they were trying to figure out not only collect data, manage kids, run a program I was figuring out how much support they needed how much I should be involved how much my staff should be involved and also trying to run the other programs that we were doing and so trying to figure out that balance we had the campers and we were trying to figure out exactly what we wanted to get into their little brains and also for them to get out of it and to be able to continue on with when they went home so every piece of it was a learning experience which learning is always challenging as well as rewarding now let me put you on the spot here cause if I had shown up the first day of camp and said hi education director Ashley Pfeffer I have brought my own education director provided by Ira Lit and we're running a program you would have been upset I would imagine and yet the first thing you asked for at the end of camp was could you get Ira here and could we talk about having an added education director next year right Amina in the beginning did you think we needed one? For us part of our program a health core and similar to Peace Corps but not here in America and we have I had two full-time AmeriCorps students that were or members that were working with me and one of their jobs or projects was actually working on this summer camp for the younger kids for the five to seven and the eight to 10 year olds so when we first started on this embarkment of creating more summer camps I definitely didn't want to take a project away from one of my AmeriCorps staff instead I really wanted to be able to add to it and allow the stand for students to run with it but at the same time really cultivate and allow the AmeriCorps staff that I had already to be able to to work with what she had already created not throw it away or so but then Gina used up all her hours and the last couple weeks of camp were a little bit of a struggle as the students realized oh my gosh I think we're on mostly our own right and Daniel got hurt he had this huge gash on his leg and he had to leave camp a couple of times anyway it worked out next year we'll get some help okay to move from the education director to the executive director so Wolfram Alderson has been doing this for 30 years he was at collective roots prior to being a full circle farm and he's now the fourth director of full circle farm and it's been there for four years which reflects pretty high turnover because this is a challenging place to be to run an 11 acre organic farm on the grounds of a middle school if we haven't said that before it's on the grounds of Peterson Middle School and I find what's most interesting is this an education and production farm and a term that you used is this is hyper intensive urban agriculture woo can you let me know what that is and put this in perspective and then Juan you're gonna I mean you're getting ready okay sorry I'm sorry to save you to the last there sure well urban agriculture is fundamentally different than rural agriculture most of us when we think about farming we think about maybe archetypal image of somebody riding around on a tractor somewhere in Iowa and big open fields and we have a very different scenario in Silicon Valley we're sitting on a piece of land that's worth probably $26 million somewhere in that area which would be about a thousand times more expensive per acre than the typical piece of farmland in California which is about $2,600 an acre so we do have a responsibility to use systems on that land that maximize its potential not only in terms of productivity but what we're offering to the surrounding community and the student population the land is owned by the Santa Clara Unified School District and so hyper intensive urban agriculture is a set of approaches that are really very different than in rural areas for example we have to rely on different sources of fertility we use wood chips which we have access to in large quantities we don't have access to manure or other sources of fertility that farmers might have in rural areas so we have to be innovative and look at how we can maximize the impact of our work our productivity as well as the education side through developing practices that are very intensive but also friendly to the land and sustainable and so that's a special challenge because often times people talk about intensive agriculture they're talking about lots of machinery and chemical fertilizers and so on whereas we rely mostly on human power and biology to drive our farm so I've heard from your predecessor Rebecca that at times full circle farm is only solvent until the next donation comes in so these four years trying to run an 11 acre organic farm and staff it so you've got CSA members we have a variety of sources of income we have a CSA which supports up to 100 members any particular season we have a farm stand and a growing slice of revenue coming from selling to local restaurants but the reality is that there is no established funding stream for this area of work whether it's garden based learning or urban agriculture and so we're constantly looking in different directions to find those funding streams and at the same time focusing on how to boost our capacity as an urban farm so we're fortunate recently we received a large capacity building infrastructure grant from NVIDIA Corporation which will help us invest in various components of the farm which will boost our productivity and ultimately get our earned income from farm sales up over 50% which is one of our medium range goals and so just to blow their horn a little bit they gave you a quarter of a million dollars and in December as I understand it a thousand employees will descend on the farm where a bunch of supervisors will be prepared to build an outdoor kitchen a vegetable processing area the current farm stand of tent pulls and tarps will be replaced with a real farm stand there'll be a better storage capacity did I get all that right? Yes and this is really even though this is a very special moment for us the farm has essentially been built very much in this style various corporate and community groups coming forward and sponsoring pieces of the farm everything you see on the farm which was essentially an athletic field four years ago was built through community efforts and oftentimes corporate groups come in not only with being able to write a check but being able to contribute volunteers and engage and so I think one of the themes that you've been emphasizing is long-term relationships and that's something that we're essentially built on at the farm even though we're only four years old we're all about building those relationships most of our corporate partners come back over and over again and employees are literally dying for opportunities to get away from their computers and get involved in the food system and do some great work on the farm so it could be a tipping point here this is a big deal, this latest grant Yeah, I like to think the tip of the iceberg Okay because this is long-term work in my briefcase I have a first edition of Food First that I picked up 30 something years ago and at the time I was standing on the shoulders of giants and Full Circle Farm is the same scenario it is heavy lifting and we have had a few directors and many staff but it's a community effort I think the whole point is it takes a lot of us working together to change the food system and it's not just gonna this change isn't just gonna be handed to us on a silver platter we really have to work for it at the end of a hoe and writing grants and all different kinds of ways All right, thanks and now I'm gonna make it a little more provocative so Full Circle Farm is there by the grace of the Santa Clara Unified School District it is on the grounds of Peterson Middle School and you're producing I don't know what the number is 100,000 pounds a year yet of organic produce or that's the goal Okay, so the next speaker is Juan Cordon he's the food service director of the entire Santa Clara Unified School District and you would think with the food right there on the middle school grounds what a mecca this would be for those middle school students and from an educational perspective it absolutely is the sixth and seventh grade teachers bring their kids out there and maybe the eighth are we up to the eighth grade yet? Not quite to the eighth So when Juan found out about the farm he was told, yeah, you know they're gonna give you some great produce and it's gonna be local and sustainable and 100,000 pounds of organic produce most of which is grown in the summer when school's out and so if you divided that whatever's remaining in the fall and the spring among your how many thousand students Juan? 17,000 17,000 who have to eat for 180 days so I'm gonna throw a little I'm gonna provoke this a little and throw something into the mix here how hard is it to have a farm on the grounds? You know, I think it's great I mean it sounds good in theory at least from my perspective which is only the food service side on what we feed the kids for breakfast and lunch so far it hasn't worked as well as we would have liked it to work about five years ago when the idea was presented to me they said, okay in a couple of years or at some point you'll be able to use 50% of the production coming from the farms and then what we'll do is we'll serve it throughout our school districts kids will come to the farm they'll see what we grow then you'll serve it to them in different ways and so it was really neat it sounded like a great idea and we did have a couple months of success but not any long term success and I know there was a lot of turnover at the farm and probably there was those couple months where I was rather difficult and it's like well we can't use what you're giving us I don't know the stuff you're giving me is too ripe what are we gonna do with it and so those are the struggles we have all the time but I know the long term goal or the immediate goal of the school district is to continue to somehow try to work with the farm so that we can get these fresh fruits and produce to the school to the child's plate during lunch we do have chefs on staff we have two chefs on staff in our district so at some point at least I'm not a chef so when you were gonna give me a Swiss Chard or Kale what am I gonna do with it how am I gonna serve it to kids well we brought in people who were trained to do those things and at some point they did implement it into our salad bars and it was neat the kids were eating it some kids chose it some kids didn't but we didn't have it on a consistent basis where we were able to possibly change the eating habits of the kids and so when I hear all the success stories that we're having with these summer camps it's really neat hopefully we can be part of it on a daily basis during the school year well and part of the reason I invited Juan is he was here last year for the food summit and he sat in at the child nutrition group and what I love about Juan is what a straight shooter is we came up with some idealistic ideas last year and we'd look over at him and he'd say not in my neighborhood yeah that's not gonna work I gotta feed these students I gotta know where the source is it's gotta be reliable I'm working with 20 different farms you know that's not gonna work for me okay what's next very open-minded very positive and progressive but you have to feed 17,000 kids a day for 180 days I mean so how many full circle farms would it take you to get all the produce that you need you know it's not how many would it take we'll take whatever they give us and that's where we were probably about a year and a half I'm like what do you have and they'd say we have this, this and this will you take it yeah we'll take all of it and we were doing that for probably about four straight months and whatever they had we'd say we'll take whatever what are you gonna make with it I don't know we're gonna ask the chef and he'll come up with something and so that's we got to that point and then it kinda just faded out and we had some transition and it hasn't really come back and so my hope is is that we can hopefully start this sooner than later I think another problem that came to it were the economics of it it was never determined really what the price we're gonna sell the produce to us at people assumed they were gonna give it to us and well we had to buy it and a lot of times they were offering me the produce and it was more expensive than what I can go to the market and buy it at and so that became a challenge because I had at one point I had the school board saying we want you to buy it from the farm I know what's gonna cost me more than if I go buy it from the produce company what would you like me to do and you hate to say but when we talk about child nutrition there are the economics of it it's just you know we're asking to do more with less and so that has to be part of the equation and you know but I guess if you look at one benefit they weren't offering us that many cases so it didn't have that kinda financial impact but I think once they get into full production we are gonna have to decide what is a fair price for it and what can the school district afford? But Wilfrum if you had to offer this food under cost or free half of what you produced and run an education component boy you're stuck with a lot of donations then to make up for that income Exactly I mean we are working in a paradox if you will I mean in order for a non-profit community farm to survive we have to look for the highest return on our produce and often times that our CSA members are paying a premium price farm stand restaurant sales in particular looking for kind of gourmet produce items and then school districts are looking for food sort of at that minimum cost and we essentially lose money when we sell it you know the lowest wholesale rate so there is a challenge there and it's definitely something that we haven't figured out we're trying to figure it out as we go along You know in fact we wrote a grant with Jay Bhattacharya to apply to USDA in fact it's gonna be scored this month we'll see if we get it or not but he did some economic projections and as I watched him put all his little Greek letters together he said okay well to make this thing work and to give food to the school you're gonna have to factor in the donations that you get and the volunteer work then you get and without that it wouldn't fly at all but that's a part of full circle farm is the volunteer work the community outreach and our farm bears the cost of providing education I mean people like Ashley come at a price and we think that that's part of our formula for how we build a community farm education is a key component but other farmers don't have to worry about that that's not a cost for them we host you know every week sometimes every day we have visitors, tour groups presentations, workshops special programs that we create and that takes a lot of staff time and investment and we think that's part of the formula part of being a part of the school district so I think when we do the equations about produce sales I think we have to look at the larger picture which is we're not just about producing fruits and vegetables we're about producing bright minds producing educational experiences engage in the general public so there's a few other bottom lines that we're looking at at the farm besides just produce sales okay I'd love to open this up to the audience this seems incredibly unique an 11 acre organic education and production farm on the grounds of a middle school in the middle of Silicon Valley do any of you have some questions of this fascinating interdisciplinary panel I thought that we had stands with microphones but we don't so do we have a microphone that we're gonna walk around or does anybody, oh Antonella if you got a question Antonella's got a mic right there Antonella there's somebody behind you that way yeah oh good you got two so hand out one in advance can you please state your name what organization you're with and then your question thanks Carol Pethler retired faculty member from the College of Education San Jose State I placed student teachers at Peterson Middle School because it was such a special place and I learned from the founder of that garden that it was very difficult to maintain that property all of those years I wonder how it could be possible for any other school to do such a thing well I'll take a try everything we do at Full Circle Farm is scalable and replicable as they say in Silicon Valley we operate at a scale of 11 acres but every component we have at the farm whether it's a community orchard a community garden, an education garden production fields, greenhouse structure, farm stand all of those can be scaled and have been I mean there really isn't an original idea at Full Circle Farm I think what's unique about it is that we have so many great ideas in one place and I've worked for a number of years in the field of garden based learning and implementing garden projects in schools so this is very much something that can be replicated in other school districts but it does require buy-in really at the school district level certainly at the leadership level at the local schools and it takes a community to raise a farm urban agriculture for the most part is illegal in most cities and so it takes the whole community to focus on this as a priority just like we think it's necessary to have parks and play fields for children we have to make a decision as a society that this is something that we wanna have as a part of our community landscape Any other panelists wanna jump in? I just wanna add one other thought which is that I think we can think in a wide range of scales so our student teachers and our graduates are in a wide range of school settings and many of those settings have at least the start of a productive school garden and that can be from a multi-acre plot a quarter acre plot or one pot and part of what I think is important is that we're providing young children with an opportunity to think deeply and carefully about where they get their food, where it comes from, how it's produced what that means for them the connection between food and health exposing them to opportunities to prepare and eat high quality nutrient rich food and that can happen whether your plot is 11 acres or really 11 small canisters in your classroom or even one where you're growing something so they can see the production side and then you can supplement it by purchasing food from a CSA or from a local farmers market so there's a wide range of ways to think about schools opportunities to do this kind of work with young children Let me add just two quickies I know that when I first became introduced to it I said how did this come about and the community actually had up for grabs for a vote soccer complex, condominiums or 11 acre organic farm and the community voted for the 11 acre organic farm and when we submitted our USDA grant wondering if this could be replicated anywhere else Peterson Middle School was a high school that got downsized to a middle school which is why they had all those underutilized athletic fields and Antonella called 30 school districts or something like that before we submitted our grant and a quarter of them within the district had a high school that had been downsized to a middle school that had those underutilized fields Another question Yeah, my name is Judy and I'm from Gilray we started a Gilray demonstration garden last year and the goal is to have it be an education piece for the schools and to have a garden in every school and I guess my question too is the support that you have from your school district is there any funding through a school district or are you out always trying to find grants because it's kind of hard to do the we only have three quarters of an acre and we have some school tours that come to our garden but our desire is to have a garden in each of these schools and also to have the food go to the kids in the schools but it's kind of hard you're trying to run the garden at the same time trying to find the funding and kind of how do you do it? I'm happy to take a stab at that one too. Yes, I mean it's extremely difficult to ask school districts right now for funding and it has been for many years. One thing I'll say is I'm extremely grateful to Delaine Easton who when she was state superintendent of our school system stated that we need to have a garden in every school. That came with very few dollars from the state or through other education systems but at least it was placed as a priority within the school systems. We look for our funding from so many different sources and we're really at Full Circle Farm adopting an entrepreneurial model in some ways trying to act like many of our associates on the for-profit side in Silicon Valley and looking at how we can be entrepreneurial in terms of the products that we grow on the farm and there are some great examples of this around the country. Southern California have food from the hood, high school, Crenshaw High School developed their own salad dressing product and so we're looking at ways to increase our revenue significantly from earned income, from products and services and then we're constantly looking for grants that are in alignment with our mission and there's many challenges there which I'd be happy to talk to you about afterwards but it does require a lot of creativity and a lot of support from different directions. A huge slice of our support is in-kind which doesn't really show up on the bottom line of our budget but literally tens of thousands of dollars a year come in through projects and pieces of the farm that are sponsored by local corporations and community groups so what I'm saying is it takes really a shotgun approach to getting funding meaning looking in all directions and sometimes holding a shotgun because we are constantly looking for the funds and it is very much a challenge. Our partnerships, I think if there is a kind of a big picture strategy for looking for resources, it's partnership and collaboration and this long-term relationship with Stanford, this is not a new thing with the Food Summit. Stanford's been supporting work in East Palo Alto with collective roots and I'm sure with other groups as well and so these kinds of relationships are essential to keep us going and we just need to keep looking in all directions. There's quite a few different schools that we've been working with even though Scottus School District has it on a district level that have been wanting that for their district as well and their schools and they've been doing a lot of the same brainstorm in that you sound like you've been doing trying to figure out where those resources are and making sure that they're getting buy-in from the people as far up as possible so that they're getting any little tidbits of support and finances and funding. So it's happening everywhere but the cool thing is that because it's happening and because it's kind of on the forefront there is money out there and there are potentials. It's just a matter of finding it and really accessing it for more than just one year. Does somebody else have the next mic? We've got pride, yep, please stand up. Whoever has the next one? I see somebody with a mic. Hi, my name's Janie Heinrich and I'm a nutrition counselor and I was just gonna say that it's beautiful what you guys are doing. I'm wondering, do you have a cooking class that you offer to the students so maybe three of the classes can be cooking and pickling and doing things that they can sell to the community? Maybe not all the students can partake in it in the foods of the farm but at least they can partake in the dirt and the seeds and the growing and that energy. So currently what we do is we have classes with all of the sixth grade. They come regularly to the farm throughout the whole year so they actually have a plot that they get to garden in and they learn about food systems and nutrition and so they get the whole gamut as a sixth grader and then seventh grade classes are a lot more focused on their science curriculum so we go directly with the science teachers and their standard based curriculum so that's a lot more like chromatography a little bit broader than just nutrition and food systems because that's what we have to do with the schools and then what we're hoping to do more with is Peterson actually has an amazing program with culinary arts and they're creating, they're building a new kitchen actually on their campus which is phenomenal and for their classes, for their culinary arts classes and so they're able to do a lot of that stuff and we're hoping to bring them out and I've been working with that teacher a little bit to create those classes more with the seventh and eighth grade students that are part of that culinary arts class and we are with the NVIDIA grant we're starting to build out our kitchen on the farm, our outdoor kitchen so Stanford students when they came for that summer camp they were able to provide a lot of resources and to start that outdoor kitchen which looked like tables and cutting boards and knives which we didn't have any of that stuff before they came this summer so we have already started some of that kitchen and then when NVIDIA comes in December we'll actually have some walls and maybe even a stove so it's a progression but right now what we try to do is in the future what we're hoping as we build on our capacity and what we have available to be able to teach these classes we're hoping to be able to offer more cooking classes to adults and also to the students so whether it be summer camp or just a cooking class weekly like an after school program there's a lot of different opportunities for that. I'll just chime in on that we built the cornerstone for our kitchen which is a cob oven and that was built with funds from Kaiser Permanente we have a Kaiser pediatrician on our board and we have classes coming over from Kaiser that are dealing with obesity and so that's already a huge success it's just the oven piece has become tremendously popular and produces great food and we can really see the potential and we're getting very excited about building our full scale kitchen in December. Ira. I just want to continue to underscore maybe the theme of simplicity so I mean all of these resources and opportunities are terrific if you can have access to them but part of the work that we do with our teacher candidates we do have the great luxury of getting to cook in Jesse's kitchen with them several times a year but really the focus of the work is having them think about translating the work that we do with one pot, a hot plate and a wooden spoon and 10 simple ingredients and everything that we prepare even though we get to do it with the beautiful surround and with the love of Jesse's kitchen all of that can be done with one pot and a hot plate and an electrical outlet so and if you didn't even have that you could do some of the preparations and cook your pasta at home and bring it into the school so it's quite possible to cook with a large number of students in a wide range of places without all of the complicated tools and equipment and surroundings and I think that's really an important message because otherwise it makes it seem unachievable. Julia something. Just a quick plug for the educators in the room also or those who are looking for partnerships that I think this is where as for example I know Matt has sent a couple of students to me, Matt Roth who had this idea about moving all the way from seed to farm to production to cooking and working with students on that and a couple of really energetic students are gonna take this on as yet another student initiated course this year, there's a lot of opportunity driven by students at the university level at a lot of universities in the area. There's fuel out there for thinking about creative ways to add to partnerships and to grow that circle of concern to grow the number of people who are engaged in this process who wanna volunteer who wanna lead that next class so whether it is through the School of Education or whether it is through community-based research service learning classes that interest that enthusiasm is out there I think a lot of it is just finding the right partners and building those partners and whether it is pickling programs and finding ways to connect that in a fun way with nutrition or something else. There are opportunities out there it's just linking them together. That's a perfect way for me to end except Willie has a microphone and I can't deny Willie William Reed the chance to ask his question but this will be the last question before our break. Thank you. I'm a farmer. I've been for over 25 years organic farmer and I would like to just ask if there's a garden in every school there needs to be a farmer in every garden. So what are you guys doing in your programs to increase the number of farmers with less than 2% of our population currently farming and the average age of the farmer 56 years old. This seems like a really great opportunity to couple the farmer with the educators and the younger people. So that's my question. Julie wants it. Maybe we should just go down the line on that one. So I'll say from a Stanford point of view I'm gonna do a shout out to Patrick Archie and the School of Earth Sciences. The farm, Stanford farm is a farm. We do have a farm on campus. We have plenty of students who run through classes that our farm educator runs back there so at Stanford we have the ability to think either at the scale of food production and very local food as well as what Christopher mentioned to think across scales of agriculture internationally and the connections between environment, climate change, poverty, hunger, et cetera. But a key piece of this is developing I hope even a larger farm into the future on Stanford lands and Patrick will sit at the center of that. So those of you who are interested in issues of food production right here on campus you'll want to talk to Matt because he's dealing with it on the food end and you'll definitely want to talk with Patrick who's way in the back because he's worked with some of these AmeriCorps programs, started AmeriCorps programs. We very gracefully stole him away from Santa Clara and I'm really delighted to have him. Okay quick answers for anybody else. I'm abusing my time here. Well we start with the littler ones and middle school just being able to raise them up and teach them what it is to grow. So just starting to spark that fire of what it is to be a farmer and then also cultivating our AmeriCorps who are a lot of them wanting to be farmers or are in the beginning stages of being farmers whether they're educators or are more on the farming side. I'll jump in and say I think a big part of it is creating context. It's just so important that young people have the experience of going to a farm and participating in farming and gardening activities. The farm here at Stanford at the sort of the college level, the literally hundreds of garden-based programs throughout the Bay Area and around the country. You just have to be at the farm to kind of get what that is about and see groups of preschoolers coming in for the first time seeing real live chickens and understanding that's where eggs come from to the farm camp and seeing kids when they talk about making lunch that they turn around and go out into the garden and actually harvest that food and bring it from the garden to the table. That context is so impactful. And so I think that's where becoming a farmer begins is having some sort of impactful experience early in life and we've just got to carve that out in our community landscape, in our schools and all the way up to our colleges and that's what it's about. All right, thanks. I'm just gonna finish with a couple slides. I hope my co-collaborators aren't mad at me for going over time here. So if I can have my slides back up. One person we didn't have on the panel was Jay Mitchell who's from the law school, who's been working with this group. I think what that really gets at is here's Ashley and Wolfram from the School of Medicine. Tim and Hannah came from Humanities and Sciences, Iris Education, Julie's Earth Sciences, Jay is law school. I just put an ad out to engineering. Dan Haifman wants a chipper. So I've got some money for an engineer to design a mid-range chipper for them and Michelle, if you're here, I think they need some help with their business plans so if we could get the business school to chime in and for the Haas Center, thank you very much for donating that summer scholarship. And it's incredible. So these folks have touched on or potentially will all seven schools of campus and thank you very much for all of you including Wanda to mix it up a little for us tonight. Thanks everybody. Thank you. The preceding program is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Please visit us at med.stanford.edu.