Thanks to generous funding from the John James Foundation, 75 students from Caroline Chisholm School (ACT), took part in OzHarvest’s education program FEAST (Food Education and Sustainability Training).
The curriculum-aligned program inspires students to eat healthy food, waste less and become future-change makers in their community. Ms Karon Campbell, Environmental and Science Teacher said FEAST had a huge impact on her students. “They felt really special learning about the environment and sustainability and realising how they can make a difference.”
“The program usually runs over 10 weeks, but due to disruptions in the school calendar, we only had 5 weeks! But, we managed to do it with 30 minutes of food waste education followed by 60 minutes of cooking.”
Due to time constraints, producing a school Cookbook was replaced with a collection of tips and tricks on how to stop food from going to waste at home, which was shared with parents and the school community. “One parent emailed me to say how FEAST had made such a huge impact on her daughter and she was so proud of the tips and tricks that they should do at home!”. Have a read at this awesome Tips n’ Tricks document here. Warning: it contains some really good ideas!
When you cook with the students, they realise their own abilities. My biggest joy was seeing their confidence grow during the cooking sessions, plus the food waste and sustainability education – it was a dream for me to teach!” said Ms Campbell.
The John James Foundation funding meant that OzHarvest was able to provide FEAST to this school at no cost, covering all the resources, recipes and brand-new cooking equipment. The funding has supported eight schools in the ACT to implement FEAST.
OzHarvest has more funding available for ACT schools to sign up to FEAST at no cost and empower their students like Caroline Chisholm School did.
