Kids in The Kitchen Updates!

Kids In The Kitchen is back for the 2016-2017 year!  The committee is excited to continue with impacting local youth and families to adopt healthy eating habits.  We will continue with our nutritional lessons at the Boys and Girls Club in Guadalupe and we are excited to announce we will be adding an additional club in Chandler!

The lessons address portion sizes, well-rounded meals, reading nutrition labels, choosing healthy snacks… it’s amazing how much the kids learn and retain by the end of the year at the Little Chef celebration!

This year with the addition of branches, more families will be able to participate at the Little Chef event with putting together healthy, affordable pre-made meals to take home and save for later (last year we also gave away goody bags including a crockpot!).

Members: keep an eye out on the member calendar for volunteer shifts so you can join in on the fun!

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The Junior League of Phoenix is a network of empowered female civic leaders working with community partners to address and solve pressing issues like food insecurity/food access and with programs addressing nutrition and obesity. We’re part of an international network of 291 Leagues comprised of over 150,000 women, in Canada, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S., engaged in similar work in their own communities. This provides us with a unique and powerful depth of knowledge and resourcefulness to bring about the changes we strive to accomplish.

Who Feeds Hungry Kids in Summer?

It’s a good question. According to the USDA, more than 22 million schoolchildren are eligible for free or reduced-price meals during the year through the National School Lunch Program, but during the summer, only 1 in 6 of those kids participate in the Summer Food Service Program. (The federal government is seeking to address that shortfall with the Seamless Summer Option, which offers local school districts a streamlined approach to feeding hungry children.)

Of course, the question of hungry kids in summer is part of a larger problem – hunger in American homes generally. A widely quoted statistic, from the Food Research & Action Center, a national advocacy group working to improve public policies and public-private partnerships to eradicate hunger and undernutrition in the U.S., says that 1 in 6 families suffer from food insecurity.

Many nonprofits and advocacy groups are working to address that imbalance, in a wide range of ways.

Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign connects kids in need with nutritious food and teaches their families how to cook healthy, affordable meals.

Feed the Children connects donors, experts, partners, leaders and communities to attack the hunger problem from all angles.

Feeding America is the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, with a powerful and efficient network of 200 food banks across the country.

Food and nutrition have long been issues of concerns for many Junior Leagues.

In fact, action by the Junior League of Brooklyn in successfully petitioning the New York City Board of Education led to free lunches in schools there, a program that later became the model for the National School Lunch Program.

Many other Leagues are still creating innovative ways to deal with hunger insecurity and children in their communities.

And then there’s AJLI’s Junior Leagues’ Kids in the Kitchen program, now in its 10^th year, and adopted by more than 200 Junior Leagues in four countries.

By the way, if you’re looking for some healthy and nutritious kid snacks and meals from the KITK cookbook, try these!

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*This article was originally published in The Civic Lede, an official publication of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc., and has been reprinted with permission.  The Civic Lede spotlights notable developments in philanthropy, not-for-profits, women’s interests, voluntarism and leadership, and offers commentary on the issues on which The Junior League has been active for many years.

Let’s Eat!

As the school year comes to a close, many educators, families, and students are looking forward to summer days. However, it’s important to remember that the close of school also often means the end of nutritious breakfasts and lunches provided in schools and classrooms across the country.

Unfortunately, for many of our nation’s children, no school = no lunch.

To help prevent summer hunger, nutrition programs have invested energy and resources to help increase participation, raise awareness and help more people find Summer Meals near them.

Help spread the word. Share this with your friends on social media to help more people find Summer Meal locations in their community.

Share in ENGLISH        Share in SPANISH

During the school year, more than 21 million children receive free and reduced-price meals, but only about 1 in 6 of those students participate in the summer meals programs. That is the critical gap that the summer meals programs work to fill. For many students, school meals provide for over half of their daily calories during the academic year, which means that ensuring these children have access to healthy food—including over the summer—is a big priority for their growth and development.

Research confirms that food insecurity can impact young children’s cognitive health and can contribute to poorer school performance, a greater likelihood of illness, and higher healthcare costs. This program makes it possible for any child under the age of 18 to visit a designated summer meal site and eat for free.

After sharing with your friends on social media, take a moment to forward this information to friends, peers, schools or organizations who can also help promote summer meals. Visit http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/summer-food-summer-moves to find additional helpful resources. 

Families can also identify nearby sites by calling 1-866-348-6479 (English) or1-877-842-6273(Spanish) or using a text service operated by a USDA partner by texting FOOD (English) or COMIDA (Spanish) to 877-877.

By working together with families, local schools, and private organizations, we are helping to make sure that children can easily get the nutritious meals they need to be healthy and ready to learn all year long.

Thank you for your help in keeping our communities healthy and happy this summer. 

Fresh Express: Educating the community on healthy habits at Touch-A-Truck

It’s one thing to practice healthy habits, but it’s another to be able to educate the community on what healthy means. The Junior League of Phoenix Fresh Express committee is able to experience this liberating feeling on a routine basis. The latest of their education tour was at the annual Touch-A-Truck event held at Paradise Valley Mall on Nov. 7.

Throughout the day families made fresh produce purchases while the children stopped by the Fresh Express education table. Children’s activities included crafting a colorful stamped-clad rainbow made with fruits and vegetables. Mushrooms, pepper, grapes, apple, cherries, and a banana are just a few of the stamps that could have been found at the table. As the children built their rainbows the Phoenix League Volunteers explained the importance of eating the “colors of the rainbow.”

“Today I ate a rainbow.” Perhaps you have heard this phrase used as more and more health experts tell us we should “eat the rainbow,” and no, they don’t mean eat more candy.  Volunteers taught the children that this means that we should eat a colorful variety of fruits and vegetables to get all the nutrients we need for optimal health. Here is a very basic run down on each color group and how it helps our bodies:

Red: Very heart healthy and gives strength support to our joints!

Orange: A great source of Vitamin C. The orange group helps keep our eyes healthy!

Yellow: This group is good for our skin and helps our digestive system!

Green: Helps our entire body and strengthens our immune systems which mean fewer colds!

Purple: Purple/blue foods are excellent for our brains! They help us with our memory and also help keep some cancers away! (Source: todayiatearainbow.com)

“Many parts of the Valley struggle with eating healthily and access to good nutrition – and not by choice. The volunteers of the Junior League of Phoenix Fresh Express program have a great opportunity to get on the right side of this battle by educating the community to think differently about the way they eat and by providing easy access to healthy produce,” says Cassie Cooper, Fresh Express volunteer. “Being able to directly impact the community in a healthy, positive way makes me proud to be involved in this program,” continued Cooper.

The Fresh Express bus and activity station remained busy throughout the day with record sales of $400 in the short 4 hours they were in business – that’s equivalent to $100 of produce sales every hour. To place some perspective on this, one apple costs .30 cents. Amazing!

About Fresh Express: A mobile produce market bringing fresh, affordable fruits and vegetables and providing community health resources to less fortune areas of the Valley.

Learn more and view the Fresh Express schedule at www.discoverytriangle.org/fresh-express.

Spotlight: Food Insecurity

It’s a crisis that goes by many different names…pervasive hunger…food access…food deprivation…and food poverty. Maybe the best way to describe it, however, is food insecurity.

Food insecurity is a term defined by the United States Department of Agriculture that indicates that the availability of nutritionally adequate and safe food, or the ability to acquire such food, is limited or uncertain for a household. The USDA also reports on “very low food security,” which occurs when one or more people in the household were hungry over the course of the year because they couldn’t afford enough food.

Many are starting to talk about food insecurity as a symptom of a wider, systemic problem, however. This is how the Fair Food Network, a U.S.-focused advocacy group dedicated to building a more just and sustainable food system, describes the issue: “We are faced with a broken food system that limits access to healthy, fresh, and sustainably grown food to many low-income families and under-served communities. We also see the brokenness of this system through the prevalence of diet-related illnesses and the steady increase of obesity in these communities, and the number of people who now rely on government food assistance.”

In low-income neighborhoods, which often lack full-service grocery stores or farmers’ markets, residents are limited to shopping in smaller convenience stores where the availability of healthy foods is limited, at best. Studies have shown that even when available, healthy foods are more expensive there, and households with limited food budgets are often forced to purchase cheaper, energy-dense foods in an effort to maximize their calories per dollar. Less-expensive foods not only provide lower nutritional quality but are directly linked to obesity.

These are themes that resonate with members of the many Junior Leagues focused on addressing both childhood obesity and the presence of food deserts in their communities. A useful resource for Leagues and other community groups focused on food insecurity is the Healthy Food Access Portal, funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation.

*This article was originally published in connected, an official publication of The Association of Junior Leagues International, Inc., and has been reprinted with permission.