FoodCorps California

FoodCorps is a nationwide team of AmeriCorps leaders who connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy.

Serving alongside educators and community leaders, FoodCorps members partner with schools to put in place a three-ingredient recipe for healthy kids, creating a nourishing environment for all students. Our service members provide:

• Knowledge: food and nutrition education that gives kids the information they need to make smart choices
• Engagement: hands-on activities like gardening and cooking that foster skills and pride around healthy food
• Access: lunch trays filled with nutritious meals from local farms

Our Mission: Together with communities, FoodCorps serves to connect kids to healthy food in school.

Our Vision: We are creating a future in which all our nation’s children––regardless of class, race, or geography––knowwhat healthy food is, care where it comes from, and eat it every day. Through our work, future generations will grow up to lead healthier and more productive lives.

Our Values:

• We believe big things are possible. We are committed to building a solution that matches the vast scale of the problem, and to approaching and evaluating our work with a rigor that makes our ambitious vision a reality.
• We believe everyone should be welcome at the table. Ensuring that all our nation’s children have the chance to eat healthy food requires us to embrace working across individual, cultural and political differences.
• We believe leaders fuel change. We invest in people who model practical and humble leadership, give them exceptional training and experiences, and connect them to each other, cultivating social capital at every level.
• We believe healthy food has healthy roots. So the food we serve is truly nourishing, we strive for it to be good for the people who grow, harvest, prepare and eat it, and for the lands and waters where it is produced.
• We believe in trying new things. We celebrate curiosity and innovation, and seek to improve, adapt and evolve our approach in order to hone our program, strengthen our impact, and build a better FoodCorps.
• We believe it takes a more just organization to create a more just world. To achieve our mission, we must foster diversity and set patterns of equity in both our end goal and the road we take to get there.

FoodCorps California: Hosted by Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) and Life Lab, FoodCorps CA collaborates with 13 non-profit organizations, school districts and UCCE to host 18 service members across the state. Following FoodCorps' mission, vision and values, our service members are placed in 1-3 school sites each with schools that have 50%+ free or reduced lunch rates. Unlike many other of our state affiliates, FoodCorps CA is unique in that we have the highest number of service members placed at school districts from San Diego to Pittsburg -- see our other sites here. Many of our service members placed in school districts have a wider range of reaching students and also creating or supporting long-term, sustainable farm to school programs.