WSDA Farm-to-School Toolkit Launch
Hello Farm-to-School friends and colleagues!
We are thrilled to share with you the new Washington State Department of Agriculture Farm-to-School Toolkit!
A main feature of the toolkit is a WA Grown Food Kit for school food service, which features crops available from Washington growers, along with supporting recipes, menu plans and nutrition facts. This Food Kit will expand over time, with more food items, menus and recipes. Additionally, we’ll be adding recipes for child care and senior meal programs, with their nutrition needs and serving sizes in mind, as well as more educational and promotional materials for the different foods.
The WSDA Farm-to-School Toolkit also gathers information from great sources in Washington and around the country. The toolkit highlights farm-to-school and school garden projects around Washington; features a news digest to capture stories that feature or inform Washington farm-to-school work; and provides resources for diverse stakeholders in farm-to-school, including farmers and foodservice directors, garden coordinators and grantwriters, parents, students, and community members.
Thank you for your farm-to-school work, and to so many of you for sharing photos, stories and resources with us as we have developed this toolkit. The toolkit is designed to be very dynamic, so if you have more photos, projects and resources that you think would be valuable on the site, please send them our way. Please let us know too, whether you are able to find resources easily, and if you’ve got suggestions generally about the site’s usability.
You can continue to access our program information and WSDA’s agency resources at www.agr.wa.gov/marketing/farmtoschool. The agency site regularly links to the toolkit and the toolkit links back to the agency site keeping all the historic resources at your fingertips.
The toolkit development was funded through the USDA Specialty Crop Block Grant program, and we have had essential and generous support from our partners at the Minnesota Farm-to-School program, on which we modeled our WA Grown Food Kit, including recipes, nutrition facts and sample menus for foods grown in both our regions. The toolkit website and the WA Grown Food Kit were developed by Heycats! Web Solutions, Inc. in Spokane, WA.
Special thanks to our own Becky Elias, who has overseen the project from the outset, and brought her passion and creativity to it at every step.
Please do share this with your farm-to-school networks and colleagues. We look forward to your feedback, and thank you again!
Tricia, Sue, Becky & Shoko
