Fresh Take Blog

During the FoodPrints summer program at Burroughs Elementary, students connected to the garden space, cultivated a sense of ownership over their school garden, and gained confidence in their gardening skills. Students built community by taking care of the garden with their peers and teachers.

Through customized wholesale purchasing and responsive training, FRESHFARM brings together food access and food education for Early Childhood Education centers.

FRESHFARM partners with CentroNía’s Food & Wellness department to provide healthy meals for Early Childhood Education centers and encourage children, parents, and staff to adopt healthy lifestyles by making informed food choices.

FRESHFARM's Market Tracker, a Google-based data collection tool that helps farmers markets and food access organizations track, measure, and evaluate their data, helps make market operations more streamlined and successful. It has also enabled FRESHFARM to expand the Fresh Match program in the region with partner farmers markets.

FRESHFARM FoodPrints is blazing the path of food education forward through our experiential food education curriculum, which is now available online and free to support educators, schools, and organizations. Developed, tested, and refined over 10 years with thousands of DC students, the innovative FoodPrints Curriculum weaves together academic learning, health and nutrition, and social emotional learning.

We are here as an established partner organization that can be a key part of the pandemic recovery puzzle - with programming that helps students heal, increase their social connections, and participate in hands-on learning that reinforces academic content. Our model provides a feasible, evidence-based approach to addressing achievement and opportunity gaps that were only exacerbated by the pandemic. 

One investment the Nutrition Equity Amendment Act proposes to make is $3.5 million per year to support access to experiential food education for elementary school students through OSSE. We endorse this priority of the amendment but offer feedback on the funding distribution model.

We’ve all faced our fair share of challenges over the past year. For FRESHFARM Executive Director Hugo Mogollon, that meant not only leading FRESHFARM through a merger and a global pandemic at the same time, but also responding to public outcry last summer over lack of representation and diversity at our farmers markets. Read Hugo's lessons learned over the past year, and how he's working to advance racial equity at FRESHFARM.