Food Security & Farm-based Learning with YouTube

Tom Brenneman ’87 of Harrisonburg, VA (who you may remember from The Bridge) is in a new supporting role at Project Grows working with pre K-12 educators who are taking public health, food access and farm-based immersion learning online.

Tom says, “Much has changed for the whole world the past 3 weeks. For us, our modest work to support pre K-12 school-based learning in foods and nutrition and community work in food access advocacy has now become work in meal delivery with our public schools to hundreds of families multiple times weekly.”

He went on to say, “Like Hillcrest we’ve had to quickly rethink and realign our approach to our goals. As a food access, education and advocacy organization many of our approaches have now shifted to moving the foods we grow at scale to schools for homebound delivery to students and to families in direct need. We too are shifting our 4 acre farm to a year around focus for production to source food pantries and food banks year around. The horizon of this pandemic looks to be more in terms of months and years rather than weeks so that’s informing our shift to be more available to foods and healthy calories year around. Food security.”

But that’s not all. Tom also talked about how they are adapting to continue educating the thousand youth they anticipate this spring for farm-based immersion learning through becoming an online outreach through YouTube. Kid friendly for sure.

Check out their website projectgrows.org to view the blog and news sections which have links to our newly developed online educational platform via YouTube. And subscribe, like and share if you wish. #hillcrestunited