Healthy Food Passport — Connecting Students to Food & Culture
Collab Lab 17 was a chance to further develop an idea that came out of our December session. One of the three projects proposed would engage students in real world issues around obesity and nutrition– the Healthy Food Passport. Participants in our December Lab noted that the specifics of the program would vary by age group, but the goal is to have students research a culture or cuisine and then craft a healthy version of the selected dish. Even better would be to have the students grow the ingredients. Inspired by the notion that “Food is how culture talks”, the team envisions a food fair where families are invited to sample the dishes, and stories about the dish may be shared.
Through the project, the team aims for students to gain an understanding the food production process (e.g. where food comes from), help build family connections to the school and increase exposure to different fruits and vegetables.
At this session, we used a version of the Lean Startup Canvas to guide our thinking and capture our assumptions about the goals for the project, and how it might be structured. We started the process with a discussion of the problems we are trying to address through the project, and then stepped through the remaining sections of the canvas. We closed with a discussion around the importance of starting with validation of the key assumption– that the problems we identified matter to the students engaged in the project. The end result is available here:
Thanks again to The Commons for providing the space, and to our featured participants for the experience and insight they brought to the discussion:
Shelley Jurewicz, Executive Director of FaB (Food and Beverage) Wisconsin
Marisa Wall Riepenhoff, Vice President of Education SHARP Literacy
For an overview of the Learn Startup Canvas, visit https://medium.com/@steve_mullen/an-introduction-to-lean-canvas-5c17c469d3e0
