Providing Food and Workshops in Arlington
We will provide people in our area with prepared food to take home and education about buying and preparing healthy foods for their family.
Leader
Kelsi Depew
Location
900 W Main Arlington, KS 67514
About the project
Our goal is to bring healthy food to the people in our area that need it the most. We realize that the culture of cooking and budgeting for economic and healthy food has diminished, and there is a need to bring back some of those skills. In order to provide both food and skills, we will hold workshops in the community that offer both. By giving food, we are ensuring that people will have something to eat and will be able to focus on developing new skills. We know that meeting basic needs makes it easier for them to learn. The skills training will give people the ability to use any food resource to their advantage, as well as budget and plan their own shopping and menu. Often, when people are given food or money for ingredients, they are unsure about how to prepare it. The workshops will provide a skill set that will benefit families for a long time after the project is over.
The basic format for the workshops is to bring in a volunteer instructor to teach about an economic and/or health-related food skill. At each workshop, participants will also help prepare meals to be packaged and brought home. Ingredients, packaging, and instructions will be provided for each participant and the instructor will be available to guide the food preparation. There will also be a project facilitator. This person will be responsible for organizing the volunteer instructors, scheduling the workshops, outreach for participants, and purchasing groceries and supplies.
The Steps
The facilitator will meet with a group of interested instructors as well as the Arlington Community Center Planning Committee to schedule the workshops. Once topics and dates are set, the facilitator will begin marketing and outreach for participants. After that, we will host the workshops, giving away food, providing skills training, and gathering feedback from the community. If we reach our goal, we plan to host 12 trainings on a trial basis and then use the feedback from the community to decide whether to continue the program.
Why we‘re doing it
We started work in our community discussing food for two main reasons: 1) the UDSA has defined our area as a Food Desert; 2) a local resident has been involved with local food producers and has a passion for supporting local businesses. Over the past several months, we have spoken to dozens of people from the community, and it became clear that simply having food available to purchase in Arlington was not going to address some of our biggest challenges. There are many people in our community with a low or fixed income. It is not only difficult to go all the way to one of the larger towns to buy food, it is also difficult to be able to buy healthy food once you are there. Rural communities have traditionally had a culture of growing, preserving, and cooking their own food, but the number of people handing down those skills is diminishing. Many families do not feel they have the time to cook foods from scratch or the funds to buy in bulk for greater economy. This project is a way for us to experiment with solutions that may work. By offering both prepared meals to take home and skills training, we hope to help a family move past some of those challenges and make a healthy change in their lives.