Pilot Light's Beneficial Pandemic Pivots
How the food education nonprofit built new virtual avenues for teaching
In This Issue
• Pilot Light: Pandemic Pivots Expand Food Learning
• Illinois Stewardship Alliance + Urban Growers Collective = Shindig on Saturday
Pilot Light: Pandemic Pivots Expand Food Learning
Pilot Light is the chef-driven Chicago nonprofit that works with schools to integrate food education into their learning plans, and Local Food Forum is pleased to have this great organization as a publishing partner.
Two weeks ago, Executive Director Alex DeSorbo-Quinn provided an article with an overview of the organization’s game-changing approach to bringing food education to students nationwide through partnerships with classroom teachers. Today, Alex shares how the events of 2020 — related to racial equity and the pandemic —shaped Pilot Light’s trajectory.
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I look back on the past year and a half, and I am proud of our entire team at Pilot Light. I am honored to work alongside such a creative, dedicated and resilient group of people.
We tried to frame our “pandemic pivot” to meet and support our many different partners in an asset-based way — by building on the expertise and strengths of communities — while maintaining our mission, focusing on our unique strengths as an organization based on food education. While we changed the way we do some of our programs, Pilot Light is stronger for it.
First, we created a palette of educational resources to support our partners throughout the pandemic! For example, in March 2020, we launched a new curriculum called “Family Meal” to support out-of-work food and hospitality workers, teachers and families. Family Meal was a series of 46 videos, tied to Common Core lessons, that chefs, food workers and hospitality workers created from their homes.
Thanks to a kind donor, the program provided displaced food industry workers with a bit of financial support, as well as an outlet to channel their passion for food. And we provided the videos to families and teachers to use as they pleased: They could be an engaging activity for families to do together at home, or a tool to support at-home learning.
We launched our second new curriculum — Pilot Light Anywhere — in fall 2020. This curriculum, for pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade students, was designed for e-learning or classrooms. It was created in response to feedback we received from teachers, who told us that they were hungry for food education resources that were plug-and-play and standards-aligned.
It quickly became our most popular resource on our Food Education Center because it makes food education easy and accessible. You don’t necessarily even need to have food in the classroom to try it.
Second, as a team we have had many discussions around equity, access and the role of food education. As a result, we invested more resources into connecting food education to actual food, in order to support families and students in our program. We knew that we weren’t the experts in this work so we began to pilot partnerships that paired community-based organizations with teachers to provide food that ties to classroom lessons.
Some of our incredible community partners, such as Wellness with Bella, Grocery Run Club and The Roof Crop, worked closely with teachers to coordinate the food and delivery channels. With the Urban School Food Alliance, our national partner, we created curriculum and channels for teachers to connect classroom lessons to school food.
Finally, we continued our Food Education Fellowship — our leadership program for PreK-12 teachers — with virtual programming that included monthly professional development and coaching. We soon realized that the model actually worked better: It made it easier and more accessible for teachers (even locally) to participate and allowed us to recruit teachers nationwide.
This transition also made the program more efficient, which has allowed us to recruit more teachers for the 2021-22 school year, more than doubling the number of students we will reach through the program this fall. We also continued chef demonstrations virtually so we were able to provide students with these very special experiences to inspire career pathways.
These adjustments to our work at Pilot Light have led us to quadruple the number of resources offered on our Food Education Center, develop stronger partnerships to complement our mission, and grow our Food Education Fellowship to reach more students and teachers, now nationwide. In my next update, I look forward to sharing about our plans for the new school year!
ISA+Urban Growers Collective= Saturday Shindig!
There’s a farm party for you to attend this Saturday (August 28) right here in Chicago! Click the button below to learn about the Illinois Stewardship Alliance (ISA) Summer Shindig that will take place at Urban Growers Collective’s South Chicago Farm (9000 S. Mackinaw Ave.) from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Click the button below for more information and to get your tickets.
Illinois Stewardship Alliance is the state’s leading public policy advocate for our local farmers and producers. Urban Growers Collective is a woman- and minority-owned nonprofit that does incredible work promoting urban farming, job training, food access and sustainability (we wrote about their South Chicago farm in the July 8 issue of Local Food Forum and about their Art on the Farm installation in downtown’s Grant Park on August 6).
Here’s what you can expect on Saturday, as per ISA:
Fellowship with farmers, food lovers and Alliance members from across the region
A top-notch locally sourced and pre-packaged meal
A short program to celebrate our victories with remarks from lawmakers
Yard games and entertainment
Your support is building power and changing laws to grow local food and sustainable agriculture, and we want to show our appreciation. Let's celebrate together!
ISA follows CDC guidelines to protect attendees’ health during the pandemic, and registration is capped… so get your tickets now!