Spotlighting Programs: A Panel Discussion on Exceptional Nutrition Service Delivery

Spotlighting Programs: A Panel Discussion on Exceptional Nutrition Service Delivery

Glenna Davis: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the webcast, where we will be spotlighting programs, a panel discussion for exceptional nutrition service delivery. Now, it is my pleasure to turn the floor over to our deputy assistant secretary for Early Childhood Development at the Administration for Children and Families, Dr. Laurie: Todd-Smith. Dr. Laurie, the floor is yours.

Dr. Laurie Todd-Smith: Wonderful. Hello, and thank you so much for inviting me to join your call today about nutrition service delivery. My name is Laurie Todd-Smith, and I am 44 days officially into my new role here at the Administration for Children and Families. I really have been loving the work, and I could not be more proud to be part of the important work you're doing within Head Start in all of your states right now.

My journey in education started long ago. I was a preschool teacher, an elementary school teacher in New Mexico, Arizona and Mississippi. I've also been a director of a preschool that was a partner with the Head Start much earlier in my career in Mississippi as well. I served eight years as a governor's education advisor in Mississippi, where we saw tremendous gains in children's reading scores over that time. I've also been the director of the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor previously. I've been in this work and this lane of caring about children and families for a very long time, and I'm very passionate about my new role here at Administration for Children and Families.

I'm super excited today to hear from our experts on the call from Kentucky, Utah and New York. Interestingly, in my new job in this office, I came across some I just learned are called the Rainbow Series Books. I hope you can see that. I found that there were seven of them specific towards nutrition, and I've been reading through those this morning from 1965 and what we were talking to you all about nutrition at that point in time versus what we're talking about today, and it's actually not all that different.

One of the quotes about nutrition that I found said, "When Head Start was first visualized, it was recognized that the overriding need was to create an environment in which every child had an opportunity to realize his full potential in physical health, mental and social development. A center can make its maximum contribution only if it offers an excellent and well-integrated food program." Perfect timing for our conversation today. It's just so interesting.

In 1965, they had it dwindled down to a seven-page pamphlet, and now we have a webinar with hundreds of people able to join all at one time through the use of technology. It is pretty fascinating. I think you probably already know how important adequate nutrition is, that children under the age of 5 who receive sufficient protein, iron, vitamin A and D show improved cognitive outcomes and development for school readiness.

We know that studies indicate that malnutrition in the early years can actually reduce IQ in young children up to 15 points. What we're talking about today is just so very important for these youngest learners in our classrooms. We know that 13 percent of U.S. households with young children under the age of 5 face food insecurity and rising risks of obesity and developmental delays, so the work you do in Head Start, again, can just be so impactful.

Our new Secretary, Robert Kennedy, recently visited a Head Start center in Virginia last month. Not sure if you all had heard that or not. He's been very complimentary of what he was able to see and witness in teachers teaching children how in their care about the importance of eating healthy during his visit. Super excited to be here today.

I'm really looking forward to learning about these programs you're going to hear about as well, but I wanted to take just a minute to thank you and all you are doing on behalf of children and families and helping them in getting the tools they need to have healthy and thriving lives. With that, I'm going to turn it over now to Captain Tala Hooban, who is our acting director in the Office of Head Start. Tala, turning it over to you.

Captain Tala Hooban: Thank you, Laurie. It is so great for the community to meet you, I'm really, really glad this was the first time I got to meet you. Thank you all. Good morning. Good afternoon. Thank you all so much for joining us today. I always love opportunities to chat, especially about your program. I'm incredibly excited about our panelists today, and you get to hear less from me, which is always fun. Again, thank you to Laurie. Your impressive background and your experience and your lovely words today will really kick us off in this webinar, and I'm really glad you could join.

We’re here today to celebrate the success of some of our own Head Start programs. We know that you all are doing exciting and innovative things to make sure that you're responsive to your communities and to make sure that your communities and children and families actually have comprehensive nutrition programming.

In this case, we really didn't want to speak at you, and we wanted to make sure that you guys got to showcase some of those positive, actionable items. As Laurie mentioned, nutrition is a pillar of Head Start, and with that in mind, we'll be taking a deep dive today into actionable strategies that hopefully will help you with your programs if you are struggling to figure out how to start up. Up on the screen today is a list of presenters.

You've already heard from Dr. Laurie Todd-Smith. Again, she's the deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Early Childhood Development at ACF. My name is Tala Hooban. I'm the acting director for the Office of Head Start. I'm also joined today by Ms. Jessica Bialecki, goes by Jess, director of Policy and Planning. Ms. Sharon Yandian, our Health and Family Engagement branch chief ... or sorry, my bad ... our Comprehensive Services Training and Technical Assistance division director. I was trying to use acronyms and failed.

Then I'm incredibly excited to showcase our three Head Start Program panelists. We have with us today ... We have Ms. Joquene Hall-Ramirez of Family Services of Westchester in New York. We have Ms. Jessica Coffie of Rural Utah Child Development. Nope, I lied. I'm struggling to read today, guys. We have Ms. Jessica Coffie of Community Action Council in Kentucky, and we have Ms. Keri Newman-Allred of Rural Utah Child Development.

These three programs are excelling in their commitment to providing comprehensive and responsive school and family nutrition services so just wanted to make sure we highlight them. Next slide. Up on the screen today is the agenda. We will quickly do a review of the recent Nutrition Information Memorandum on Promoting Healthy Eating and Nutrition for Head Start Children and Families, which we published in March.

Then our esteemed program leaders will individually introduce their programs and give a brief overview of some of their nutrition services that they provide. Then we will spend the majority of our time in a moderated panel discussion with the Head Start leadership team that I introduced earlier and our program leaders. I can't wait for us to get started. You know me. I don't love talking when we have experts on the phone. With that, I'm going to pass it on to our Policy and Planning Division Director, Ms. Jessica Bialecki. Next slide.

Jessica Bialecki: Thanks so much, Tala, and good afternoon or morning, I think, for our West Coast folks, Head Start community. So excited to be back with you all today. So appreciative of your attendance today and your interest in learning from our truly exemplary nutrition panelists. I, as a former program director, cannot tell you how excited I am having talked and heard about the awesome work going on at these programs so really excited you get to hear it, too.

I hope, as Tal said, that most of you have seen the recently published information memoranda. It's ACF-OHS-IM-25-03, Promoting Healthy Eating and Nutrition for Head Start Children and Families. I think probably many of you also attended our first nutrition webinar that we held on March 26, which really dove into the IM content and provided an overview of the ways that Head Start programs support healthy and nutritious eating. If you did miss that webinar, you can find it on our website. I think we'll drop ... Someone will drop in the chat both the link to the IM and to the recording of the webinar.

As you well know, working at Head Start programs, that these ways include, but certainly aren't limited to, providing healthy meals in classrooms and nutritious snacks during home visits, socialization and family engagement activities, includes helping families access affordable, fresh food options at home, supporting parents' nutrition education and engagement in regular physical activity and, very importantly, facilitating our families' connection to other nutrition-related services for which they might be eligible, like WIC or SNAP. Next slide.

I will not talk long here because really the stars of this are our program leaders but just to, again, make sure that we're all kind of have the right frame around our policy requirements for nutrition. Like both Dr. Todd-Smith and Tala said, nutrition services have been a hallmark of the Head Start program since its inception, and that's reflected in both the Head Start Act, our statute, right, and our Head Start Program Performance Standards, which detail in more specificity the program requirements related to food and nutrition.

On the Act side, we've got Section 638, which identifies nutrition as a key element of the funding provided to Head Start agencies, and then we have Section 648, which requires programs to have qualified staff who can promote healthy eating in classroom and home settings to prevent childhood obesity, so that language is actually in our statute. Then, of course, we take from the statute that language, and we use it.

We've used it to create these program Performance Standards, and our Performance Standards detail specific child nutrition requirements that conform to USDA guidelines, including for programs for which it's applicable, the requirements of the Child and Adult Care Food Program, or CACFP, as well as the National School Lunch Program and National School Breakfast Program for programs for whom those are applicable.

We have some requirements that are referenced up on the screen that pertain to designing and implementing services that meet the dietary needs of each child, family-style dining and, as mentioned, providing nutrition education and support for parents and caregivers as part of our comprehensive services approach. Definitely go check out that recent IM and the on-demand webinar, which will go into those requirements in a lot more depth. Next slide.

Then, as I mentioned, Head Start programs, one of the things I love about us is, we are connectors, and our programs are encouraged to further enhance federal partnerships with CACFP, with WIC and SNAP programs as well as develop partnerships, and I think we're going to hear about a number of those today with community providers at both the state and local levels. Do want to point out, make sure everyone remembers that families who already receive SNAP are now considered categorically eligible for Head Start services. That was, I think, a really exciting and important policy interpretation or guidance in recent years.

Head Start programs have many options to implement thoughtful and creative approaches to nutrition services that are aligned with our act, with the performance standards, and, of course, with our beloved Head Start Early Learning Outcomes Framework, ELOF. Enough from me. I am now very pleased for us to introduce, as I said, the stars of the show, leadership staff of our three Head Start programs who are part of our panel this afternoon. Sharon, would you kindly make the introductions of our panelists?

Sharon Yandian: Yes. Thanks, Jess.

Jessica: I think we can go to the next slide, too.

Sharon: Yeah. Thanks, Jess. Yeah. It's great to be here. Many of you might have been expecting Marco as Tala ... who is our health and family engagement branch chief and health lead in our office for many years, so many of you know him. Unfortunately, he couldn't be here today, but if he were here, he would say that school readiness begins with health.

A key component of health is nutrition. I'm going to do that shout-out for him. I know he's also sorry he's missing. The best types of webinars that we do honestly are the ones where we hear and learn from programs, and that's what we're going to be doing today. I'm excited to introduce you to the leadership from three Head Start programs from across the country who are going to share with us some of their innovative strategies around nutrition and healthy eating services.

We're going to start with Jessica Coffie, the director of Child Development for the Community Action Council for Lexington, Fayette, Bourbon, Harrison, and Nicholas Counties in Kentucky. Jessica, can you tell us about the key elements of your programs, nutrition services, just to kind of give us a ground us in your work?

Jessica Coffie: Absolutely. Next slide, please. Thank you for the administration for allowing us to be on here today to share the innovation that we are doing in our program. Next slide, please. Again, my name is Jessica Coffie, and I am the Director of Child Development in Lexington, Kentucky. We serve rural and urban areas. However, this is in 15 counties. We educate 1,652 children, and we have about 480 staff. Some of the funding mechanisms that we use, besides our federal dollars, are local and private dollars from our community. Next slide, please.

When we talk about nutrition ... Just to give you an overview, my background is nutrition. I love everything nutrition, food, healthy activities, all of it. When our program began incorporating more nutrition, we wanted to first address food access. Through our community assessment, we learned that not too many of our parents or our families had grocery stores within their area, so that allowed us to begin the concept of having a mobile food market.

What we did for our program is took an old bus that we had that we weren't using anymore, and instead of disposing of it, we were like, hey, why can't we turn this into a mobile food market? That allows us to take fruits and vegetables from different farmers to our families. Another approach we incorporated was community gardening.

A lot of our families had the space in order to grow fruits and vegetables. They just needed the education. We have incorporated community gardens. Something big in our program is educating our families about nutrition. The way we've done this is through a program we call Healthy Meals on a Budget.

With Healthy Meals on a Budget, not only are we teaching food safety, however, we are also teaching families how to shop for their budgets because, again, some of the families that we have are on SNAP. They're on WIC, and we wanted to teach them how to utilize their budget. Another way that we also incorporate nutrition activities are just telling our families how to eat healthy, and we want to teach our families how positive mealtime can be, so incorporating just little activities for parents and guardians to be able to incorporate their children in cooking time.

Things that we are doing inside the center, we also want our parents to incorporate that in the home as well, so having that mealtime together, having the children cook with the families, and also, again, teaching food safety to make sure not only is food stored properly but learning the aspects of their children being able to mix, being able to cut vegetables and just incorporating age-appropriate ideas around nutrition.

We also, with Healthy Meals on a Budget, do food demonstrations that we put on our YouTube channel. Many of our families mention, "We would love to come out, but we don't have the time to on that specific day or that specific time." We had our Healthy Meals on a Budget recorded and uploaded on our YouTube. Next slide, please.

One of the biggest ways that we are able to incorporate so many different nutrition activities is through our partnerships. Our partnerships have been just a great addition and collaboration to the nutrition activities that we do. We have partnered with different universities. The University of Virginia, we participate with a weSIP initiative.

This has allowed our parents to even be a part of the process of developing software. But we're also telling families, "Hey, there are many ways to incorporate nutrition. We want you to be a part of this initiative with the university." Also, the University of Kentucky, which is here in Lexington, Kentucky, we have a NBBL program, and that NBBL stands for Nutrition Building Better Lives. Our kiddos are learning how to grow.

Well, 12 of our centers have gardens that we're implementing. They also take fruits and vegetables from the garden and have Taste Test Tuesdays where the children not only get to taste new fruits and vegetables, but they also now understand that food doesn't grow at the grocery store. We are able to grow food ourselves.

Again, we talked about Healthy Meals on a Budget. We participate with Farm to School program. There are many, many collaborations that we have with our Black Soil that's located in Lexington, Kentucky, our Glean of Kentucky. Again, some of the universities around here have been a huge just partner with us, allowing us to leverage some of the funds to be able to incorporate many different nutrition activities. Thank you.

Sharon: That was fantastic, Jessica. My head, I'm stuck with many things, the mobile food market, the YouTube food demo, really literally meeting families where they are. That's one of the things I took away. I also know you have quite a geography in terms of how you're doing that. Thank you so much for sharing just a little bit because I know we're going to hear from you later too. I'm so excited.

Next, we have Keri Newman-Allred, the executive director of Rural Utah Child Development. Welcome, Keri. We can't wait to learn about your program. Now I understand you all have a program-wide approach to cooking healthy meals from scratch, even though many of your centers are located in food-scarce regions, hundreds of miles apart. Tell us a bit more about how you're doing this.

Keri Newman-Allred: Absolutely. Thank you, Sharon, and thank you to all of you. Thank you to the Office of Head Start, and to all of my friends out there, I know that we're friends on this panel now. It's been so great to work together. We're speaking ... If we were speaking together at a conference or in a room somewhere, we would all have that same understanding that we are friends and family here, I'm super excited to be here.

When I was getting ready for this presentation, I thought, "Oh, I'll do a visual of a map of our service area." I've been here for almost 12 years, and when I did the map of the service area and put where our centers were, I was like, "Huh, those are really far apart." Sometimes you get a different perspective when you realize that all of our service areas are different.

Jessica talks a little bit about her program, which is 1,600 children, I think you said, Jessica, that you serve, and we serve 317 children, and we have a team of 90 staff. We serve 338 families. I'm really happy to be representing the Policy Council, the Board of Directors, the staff and those children and families today as we talk about what we've done in this crazy big rural and frontier service area of Head Start. Next slide, please.

One of the things that we incorporated was what we call a Fresh and Healthy Kitchen. We have eight centers, as you saw, spread many hours apart. It's about 5 hours end to end, the service area, and we have cooks on site. Several years ago, we moved to a Fresh and Healthy Kitchen in half of those centers, so four out of eight centers with a fifth one coming this fall. We're very excited to be planning a fifth one.

What we decided to do was to put from-scratch, homemade food in front of children every day and incorporate the family and how we were going to do that, what foods we were going to choose. Three out of the four areas where these Fresh and Healthy Kitchens are, are in frontier counties, and a lot of times that means there's one grocery store, and they're not typically big chains. A lot of times in smaller areas, when you don't have a lot of competition, what happens is you do have higher prices, not just for food, but for other consumables and gas.

It just tends to be a little bit more of a food desert sometimes when you can't maybe choose from different grocery stores to go to. We found; by contracting with food suppliers, we were able to have trucks come in and bring some of these fresh and healthy foods into our kitchen. We came up with a few rules at the time, which was these kitchens would serve homemade biscuits, rolls, pancakes. They would make homemade soup.

They would bake the chicken and the fish and the turkey and the roast beef and make their own gravies and sauces. That really was ... It really was an idea to see what we could do and how fresh and healthy could we make these kitchens. What happened was, we ended up with food that was delicious, colorful.

We introduced new foods, not just in the four Fresh and Healthy Kitchens, but in all eight kitchens because the cooks would talk and get together. We would share pictures of what we were doing in the Fresh and Healthy Kitchens. Recently when I met with the eight cooks that we have to make sure that my slides were OK because I needed to go to the experts to make sure that they were OK, they shared that they're making homemade soup in the non-Fresh and Healthy Kitchen.

This really does have a life of its own, which is really exciting. We did realize that sometimes we do have to go to frozen fruit and vegetables if we can't access fresh, but we don't use canned. That's something that we don't do in our kitchens. Then some of the things we learned was that if we premade the homemade food, like if we made a burrito made out of all fresh ingredients, if we made something out of all fresh ingredients that was premade like a sandwich or something along those lines, that children would as a whole reject it.

We quickly learned that if you deconstructed the burrito that they would then make it themselves out of those fresh ingredients, which led to me visiting a center where a child was eating a grape burrito, meaning that it was a burrito filled with grapes, and that was a great example of not eating anything because they didn't like the burrito as it was made, but if it was deconstructed, making something that was unique to that child, and they were able to get whole food in that way.

We really pride ourselves on not using precooked meats or preboiled eggs. If you guys have had a preboiled egg, it is not egg-like. It is a pre-boiled egg, and that is not an egg. It is very different. We do not use premade or preprocessed food. Anytime we can get away from the CN label, we try to do that. Next slide, please.

This is the most exciting thing, and this has been around for, I think, 10 or 11 years. We had a nutrition specialist at the time. This was the time of "Top Chef" and a lot of cooking shows, and celebrity chef was a really popular thing at the time. We decided ... By we, I mean she decided to start this celebrity chef innovative idea in all of our kitchens where she got these chef hats made, and the children wear the little sous-chef hat.

Families would come in with their traditional recipes, and the cook would work with them to make sure that it was USDA-friendly, that it was brown rice instead of white rice or whole wheat tortillas instead of white tortillas. Then the children would come in and help serve the food. This picture is ... It's amazing because what happens sometimes is, families might be really busy.

We serve a lot of single parents who are working during the time of their child's school. The middle picture is a teacher because what we decided is, we wanted the child to have the experience even if the family was really busy trying to pay the bills and go to work and manage the complexity that is a family. We had the teachers step in.

Then the upper right-hand corner is the sheriff's office because we'll have community partners come in, and the sheriffs will come and serve the food and help the children so that they can see that families are involved in healthy food, but so is the community, and so are their teachers. Next slide, please.

Like Jessica talked about, we rely on community partners as well. We have a university, Utah State University, that has an extension in all those little dots that you saw on the map. We have nursing students come in to talk about physical activity. We've had cooking classes in our home-based socializations. Then we just have a bunch of different partnerships in all of our small towns because it doesn't matter if you live in a rural or a frontier or an urban area. There are partners right outside your front door. Next slide, please. The biggest thing and the thing that I wanted to end with is that what you do in your kitchens with the children that you love and that you serve and the families that you get to see, it doesn't just change the day-to-day of a Head Start classroom.

It changes the day-to-day of a family and that families who maybe didn't see how easy it was to cook from scratch, that they could make a chicken nugget that was fresh and really, really delicious instead of buying it out of a bag, that you can do those things within a budget and that you can do them in a way that is healthier with whole foods and that there are some challenges that we're going to talk about a little bit later but that they can be overcome if we have the knowledge and if we support each other.

The bottom quote there is from a family member who said, "I learned that he likes foods I have not tried at home. Healthy food he tries and loves I can now do in my home." That's really what we love in Head Start, is that family member, that mother, that father, that grandparent, the foster family, they are that child's first, best and forever teacher. Thank you.

Sharon: Well, I love that you wrapped up with that. Listen, we do have a question that seems quick in the chat that I'm going to ask you, if you don't mind, it really. I was struck by your discussion around the guidelines you set for the standards, the Fresh and Healthy Center, so you have that continuity. Someone wants to know if you could elaborate more on those kitchens that are not set up, or I don't know if they don't have cooks, but the ones that you referred to that were making the soup, even though they weren't the Fresh and Healthy Kitchen. Oh, you just put yourself on mute there, Keri.

Keri: I did the opposite. Thank you. They are set up to be as fresh and healthy as possible. What happened was, when we did the fresh and healthy for the four kitchens ... And as I said, the cooks were talking with each other, we have really, really good cooks in our center, like most of you do too.

The cooks make delicious food. As soon as the conversation started happening about how to make something fresh and healthy, and certainly we were creating menus that would allow fresh and healthy, the cooks who weren't even in the fresh and healthy classroom started to go towards that approach where it didn't take that much more time to make those chicken nuggets homemade. They have a ranch chicken nugget recipe. When I asked them what their favorite menu items were, they talked about muffins. The cook who said that is not in a Fresh and Healthy Kitchen, but she does homemade muffins.

I think it just opened the door of possibility of what we could do. Instead of thinking that the USDA requirements and the budget was more what we couldn't do, it allowed that creativity and innovation. What I do know is that that is catching ... That catches on, and it gets really exciting.

Cooks loved being able to be creative in their kitchens and make really delicious food in the way that they wanted to because that's how they show the love for those children. Cooks are the most popular person in that center. I think we all know that. If a cook comes in, kids know something good is going to happen. I would believe that about all programs, that the cooks would love the creativity to be able to make something fresh and healthy as soon as they realize that some of the barriers are not going to stop them.

Sharon: Right. OK. That makes sense. It really isn't about the fact that they don't have kitchen or cooks on site. It's around the standard that you've set around what it means to be a Fresh and Healthy Kitchen. Is that right?

Keri: Yes. We have Fresh and Healthy Kitchens, and then we have 95% Fresh and Healthy Kitchens.

Sharon: Got it. OK, perfect. Oh, thank you so much. That was really wonderful. We're going to now talk to ... We're going to welcome Joquene, who's the senior vice president for Early Childhood and Head Start Programs at Family Services of Westchester Incorporated in New York.

Now, Joquene, I learned that you and your staff have done tremendous work to provide a comprehensive set of nutrition and food services to ... You have over 900 families and children. Can you tell us a little bit more about your nutrition efforts?

Joquene Hall-Ramirez: Of course. Thank you for the warm welcome, Sharon, and thank you to the Head Start team. It's a pleasure to be here today representing the Family Services of Westchester. But before I get to all our efforts around nutrition, I would like to highlight who we are and our focus. We can go to the next slide.

Our nutrition focus is all about nourishing our communities by empowering our families through food and education. Here at Family Services of Westchester, we can skip to the next slide. Here at Family Services of Westchester Head Start Early Head Start Program, as stated, we are located in Westchester County, New York.

We serve approximately 981 children through at least 11 centers, both in urban and suburban areas, including White Plains, Mount Vernon, Port Chester, Yonkers, New Rochelle, and Mount Kisco, all in Westchester County. The program is staffed by over 200 professionals, which includes staff like our family advocates, our educators and all of our support personnel, which they are all dedicated to supporting the families and children we serve. We are primarily funded through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. We can skip to the next slide.

Family Services of Westchester nutrition efforts are centered around ensuring that every child and family that enter our program has access to healthy nutrition, food. We have implemented a variety of programs that include nutrition education and partnerships with local organization as well as food banks in our community. We offer workshops for our families to educate them on healthy meal planning and cooking on a budget.

We also wanted to equip our families with not just the education component but provide them with grocery gift cards and healthy food bags during each sessions to enhance our food security initiatives here at Family Services of Westchester. The grocery food bags include groceries to recreate meals prepared during each of these sessions that the families attend so that they can go home and recreate those meals at home with their own families.

This approach ensures that we are not only providing food, but we are also equipping the families with the knowledge and skills to make healthier choices at home. Our goal is to basically foster healthy community support, healthy community support in the growth and the well-being of all the children and families that enter our programs.

This year also we ... As an organization, we also really wanted to not only enhance our nutrition initiatives, but we wanted it to be data-driven, which led to our review of a PIR report where we noticed that our SNAP participation rates for eligible families were significantly low. To improve our SNAP enrollment rates, we have launched a PQI, a performance and quality improvement project, that we're focusing on leveraging our data to drive this measurable outcomes and to continue to foster the improvement towards our nutrition initiatives.

We also recently have collaborated our local SNAP organizations to ensure families are receiving support and that our staff within our program are also receiving training on how to assist families with enrolling into SNAP. The local SNAP organization that we have partnered with so far have provided our program with on-site and virtual information workshops about SNAP benefits and enrollment for both staff and families, which has significantly helped with our PQI project, increasing our family’s enrollment into SNAP throughout the year in our program. Next slide.

Of course, it's always great to have all of these initiatives and all of these approaches happening. As we all know, we have our Head Start funding. We here at FSW really look at other grants outside of our Head Start funding to really support a lot of these initiatives. We have a great team that we all work together to put together these grants so that we can bring in other funding to support these initiatives, to help support our initiatives and approach, our program partners with various organizations through ... as stated, through grants to enhance food access and nutritional support for our families in our program.

For this past year, we have had a notable contribution, which included 40,000 in grants from Albertson Companies Foundation for hunger relief initiative, which has allowed us to provide those grocery gift cards at our workshop sessions and provide the nutritional workshops to our families and also connect our families to SNAP and WIC services. Most recently as well, we received a $5,000 garden grant from the National Head Start Association to promote healthy eating and gardening, which we are super excited about and can't wait to get that started and showing our process on social media.

We have also received contributions in the amount of $250 in gift cards and that might sound ... It's not a lot, but it's how we still partner with our local grocery store, which provided that gift card so we can be able to provide it to families in need in our program. We have also received grants in the past and still currently work and partner with Dunkin' Joy in Childhood Foundation towards our food security initiative where they provide us gift cards to help buy breakfast, food for our families in our program.

As Keri and Jessica have stated, these partnerships have been vital to improving the well-being of our families. We've really thrived on supplementing our nutrition initiatives with partners. We try to look for partners that focus on the same mission to enhance that food security for families and the communities that we are serving. Next slide, please. Thank you.

While we have received grants from various organizations to support our initiatives to meet the needs of our program, as we all know, grants are not always easy to access. You're competing with a lot of different organizations when you're applying for grants. We have also focused on forming several key partnerships to enhance the nutritional access for our families with a strong focus on sustainability.

Some of these partnerships include local organizations such as Meals on Main, which focuses on delivering food to people where they live and work with a combination of their mobile pantry trucks and strategic food hubs. Meals on Main supplements the work of Westchester County pantries and soup kitchens by delivering recovered food and fresh produce to families in need. They work with us to provide weekly meal pickup schedule for distribution to our families, so we will get those schedules ahead of time so that our families will know where the trucks will be in the community so that they can pick up meals.

We also partner with the United Interfaith Food Bank here in Westchester, which provide families in our White Plains location with monthly grocery bags to help with food insecurities. They also include our home-based families as well as our center-based families. Our partnership with Feeding Westchester, which is a mobile market which delivers fresh nutrition food directly to communities across Westchester, specifically in areas that doesn't have traditional food pantries, they're limited to those food pantry access.

Our current collaboration with them includes receiving what we call Balanced Bites, which are snack packs for our children so that they can take home. They also organize county-wide food pantry events and offer referrals for those in need within our program, so we get first preference to those referrals when they're for those organized events.

Most recently something that I am really excited about and is now getting off the ground is we have been collaborating with Open Door Family Medical Center WIC and Westchester County Department of Health WIC program. Our goal with this collaboration is to improve WIC retention, enhance nutrition education in our Head Start program and establish a referral system between WIC and Head Start to ultimately develop hopefully a sustainable model for nationwide implementation.

These initiatives for us to significantly impact the families we serve, and we hope to continue enhancing our nutrition program. As always, none of this would be possible without the support of our partners and the Family Services of Westchester team. I'm incredibly thankful to them all and to the Head Start team for recognizing all of our efforts. Thank you.

Sharon: Thank you so much, Joquene. One thing that sticks out to me right away is your program must have a real pulse on the community, right, because people don't just partner because they know the program. They know your families and your staff, I imagine. I loved hearing about those partnerships and the grants and also those practical strategies across your systems and services to provide comprehensive nutrition and food services. Thank you so much. Then also to Jessica and Keri, I'm so energized learning about what all of your programs are doing. Now, we're going to shift into the question-and-answer portion of our discussion with all of our panelists. I'm going to invite Jess back to help us get started. Jess?

Jessica: Thanks, Sharon. Hi, everyone. Wow. I was like, I don't know if all you were using your little reaction emoji, but I was feeling lots of excited emotions hearing about just the incredible work. Excited to dive a little bit deeper into the nutrition and healthy eating strategies and services to help other programs learn from your experiences. Hopefully we can also get some of those great questions coming in, in the chat that people are asking as well.

First, each of your programs, it sounds like, has done an incredible job of being responsive to family and child food interests and needs, including the deconstructing, which I'm going to try with my 3-1/2-year-old twins. But let's talk about data a little bit more. How do your program use data to meet community, family and child nutrition needs and interests? Jessica, maybe start with you and your experience at Community Action Council.

Jessica: Absolutely. As everyone knows, Head Start is a land mine of data. With that being said, there are things that come to us, and we're aggregating data and looking through it and we're like, "Oh, I think we can make a difference in this way." First, one of the things we use is our community assessment, which has helped us identify food deserts. That's also how we incorporated our mobile food market.

We wrote that as a program goal to obtain more access or locations obtaining more access to food. That's how we got started on that mobile food market. We also were able to take our BMI data and tooth-decay data that we know comes from PIR data. That's how we were able to incorporate the weSIP Smarter, educating families to rethink their drink, doing less sugary beverages.

Also, with Healthy Meals on a Budget, we knew we wanted our kiddos and our families to be more active, but also our parents, through post and preassessments that we did beginning Healthy Meals on a Budget, we also learned that our families actually wanted to know how to cook. They also let us know that there are things that are barriers for them to cook, such as cooking equipment.

Some of our parents didn't have spatulas. Some of the recipes we had used crockpots, and they didn't have crockpots. That's where we leveraged some of the funds to be able, with outside sources, to be able to provide them with crockpots. That was an incentive to coming to our Healthy Meals on a Budget. We were able ... Beginning off, our reach was ... We just wanted to reach 90 families, and we end up reaching 180.

The light bulb started going off saying, "Hey, people want this. Our families want this. What else can we incorporate to ensure that we are meeting the goal?" There are several families through our pre- and post-surveys that we did with Healthy Meals on a Budget that allowed us to know that not only are our families incorporating healthy habits, such as reducing those sugary beverages, but they are adding more fruits and vegetables. They admitted to that on our post-survey.

Since the inception of Healthy Meals on a Budget, which was something that I have to say, I was freshly graduated from a nutrition program from the University of Kentucky, came to Head Start and thought I was just going to save the world with nutrition. I found out, oh, hold up. Not only do I need to be able to stay in compliance, but we are incorporating these different family engagement activities.

That's where Healthy Meals on a Budget came from, and it grew from there. We also ... Through our anecdotal data from our communities, we learned there are a lot of people that want to partner with us. That's how we stay connected. There were farmers looking for folks to give this abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables to. As the word, or as the new song "Boots on the Ground" is, we made sure that we were boots on the ground.

Not only are we educating our children inside of our centers, but we are connecting with our community as well. We have to stay out in our community and connect. We go to different events just to say, "Hey, do you know about Head Start?" because as my executive director says, Head Start is the best kept secret, and we don't want to be that best kept secret. We want to make sure that we can continue to connect with our community, and our community has said loud and clear that they want to stay connected with us too.

Jessica: I love it. I love the crock pot, really stuck with me. The idea like you can get a recipe out there, but if you don't have the equipment, it won't work. Then I also see a request for the ranch chicken nugget recipe in the chat. I might have to make sure we get that out. But thank you, Jessica. Next, I'd love to hear from Joquene and the Family Services of Westchester. You actually mentioned PIR data, I know, before. Can you talk a little bit more about the data that your program has tapped into to improve your nutrition services?

Joquene: Of course. Just like Jessica and I think all of us on this call, we are constantly looking at our PIR data and what's on there. We're not just submitting it to Head Start to check that box off. We are really looking at that on how we can utilize it to improve our programs, and which is what we did.

We also looked at our PIR data, not just as stated in my presentation earlier, we looked at our SNAP enrollment for families entering into our Head Start program, and we saw a significant trend of ... We discovered that families entering our program did not really utilize the SNAP benefits. We had a very low participation rates of families coming into our program. We really wanted to focus on, how do we increase the families entering our program that are eligible for SNAP, on getting them enrolled into SNAP? That's where the PQI project came in as an organization, which include our CEO in that as well.

It's not just for the Head Start department. It's the entire organization looking and tracking the families in Head Start. We're now looking at how many families coming at the beginning of the year with SNAP, and we're tracking how many referrals we are making to SNAP and how many of those families at the end of the year has enrolled in SNAP.

To do that with that data as well is what allowed us to really forge those partnership with the local SNAP organization, getting them to come in and educate us about the eligibility so that we can help assist families in the program to get enrolled but also come in and meet with our families through parent committee meetings, policy council meeting to educate them as well as we know there are some misconceptions with SNAP eligibility and Head Start eligibility.

We really wanted to eliminate some of that misconceptions, so we had those organization come in and really speak to our families and speak to our staff so that we can better connect our families to SNAP. Just like Jessica, we were so focused on nutrition. We also looked at our BMI data, which showed us that a lot of the children in our program had high BMI levels which is what led us to, you getting grants to really put forth an effort in providing workshops to families to address that issue where we can empower families with the knowledge and the skills they need to foster healthier eating habits at home, which is what we really try to do with the nutrition education component.

As Jessica stated, it's data, and all of us here at Head Start and Head Start programs know that's what's driving everything that we do on a daily basis. For us to show the outcomes, we really do want to look at the data. For us, the PIR is what's working for us right now to measure those outcomes.

Jessica: Thank you. I love ... All the mentions of the PIR speak right to my policy heart so very much appreciate that, Joquene. Sharon, I'll turn it over to you for next questions.

Sharon: Great. Well, as I'm listening to you, thinking about all the terrific examples that were shared, engaging parents and families in comprehensive nutrition services you all said is a key element of each of your program's commitment to healthy eating. Are there specific nutrition activities you plan that have been more successful than others in engaging families in healthy eating and cooking?

We did hear, I think, one or two already. If the answer is yes, which probably it might be, how did you go about implementing them? Joquene, why don't we start with you? I'd especially love to hear more about your activities and what you needed to do in your program for it to become what it is now, as you described to us.

Joquene: Yeah, of course. In our program, we implemented several nutritional activities that successfully engaged families in healthy eating and cooking, I should add. We started by surveying our families to assess their availability and preference for whether it's virtual or in-person session.

This initial step was crucial as it allowed us to cater our offerings to fit the need and comfort level of our families in the program. Based on that survey result, we organized a series of interactive workshops and cooking sessions. For the in-person workshops, we provided all the necessary groceries to participants, which they could then take home to recreate those recipes, as stated before.

This not only made it convenient for families but also encouraged them to practice healthy cooking together at home. We also wanted to create a supportive community atmosphere by encouraging families to share their experience and results from the sessions. Overall, the combination of understanding the family preferences, providing the hands-on sessions for the families and facilitating that community sharing has been key to making our nutritional activity success, especially this past year. The whole survey is what really pushed that effort along for us.

Sharon: Great. Thank you. Thanks for that concrete sharing. Rural Utah Child Development, you're next, Keri. What are some of your nutrition activities for families and strategies you found to be particularly helpful to increase parent and family attendance at your activities and offerings?

Keri: Thanks, Sharon. It's a great question because I think all of us on the call, all of us on this webinar have tried certain things, and some worked, and some didn't work. The more we share that, I think the easier our job is as we realize that we're sort of doing this together. We noticed because we also serve Early Head Start home-based families, and we noticed sort of anecdotally that if a group socialization had a meal that was included, the numbers went up. I don't know if we needed data correlation to prove that, but I know that there are certain activities that connect people and make maybe a little bit more comfortable.

I think food is a connector just generally in our culture in the sense that even if families are introverted or if they have some social anxiety about getting together, sometimes meeting over a meal or even helping prep the meal can help towards some of that social anxiety. If they're new to a home base and they don't know the other families, I think that food has been a great connector, around holiday seasons, in the summer, different times of year.

Sometimes when we have tried to have activities for parents after school with the expectation that they would return back in a vehicle with children, that maybe isn't as helpful unless there's a meal because what's even more helpful for families is if they know that their children and they will be fed for that evening, and then it's easier to talk about maybe some of the things that you need to talk about, have a parent meeting, get together and talk about the nutrition services, look over the menu, do those types of activities. I want to do a little bit more deeper dive into the celebrity chef because that has been the most sustained, successful practice.

I want to talk a little bit about why we think that that has worked so well. Sometimes in working with parents, it can be a bit of a habit to think that you are helping, and sometimes in helping, it can be telling or explaining or showing. At times, the parents don't get the opportunity to share back what their area of expertise is or to feel important or to feel that they're part.

Certainly, in policy council and parent committee, we have lots of opportunities for that. But in order to have increased conversations about nutrition, it's helpful for both people to come on the same side of the table and talk about healthy food instead of saying this is how you should be doing it, that you would meet together and sort of have a creative experience between the cook and the teacher and the family service worker and the parent.

Having that parent feel important and that they're bringing something that is of such value to the program and that their child is so proud when they get to wear the sous-chef hat and take a picture, and it's on our social media and that parents are recognized as that so important first and forever teacher.

One of the things that we noticed is that it celebrates the family when you incorporate the family, when you are in partnership with the family, which is the true vision of Head Start is a partnership with the family, that the staff and the family grow together. For years, I had this idea of doing a celebrity chef cookbook. I want to say the trick, and I think we all know this is, if you want something done in a program, put it in your goals, objectives and action steps.

Am I right? Because I'm right. My fellow leaders are saying yes. This last year, we did create this celebrity chef cookbook. The great thing about it is it has recipes. I'm going to make sure I'm centered. It has recipes, and then at the bottom, it has healthy swap-outs so that parents have that choice as they're bringing the recipes in. It has a really great section on the end when all of our cooks put their tips and tricks about how to make mealtime easier and more affordable. That is the true partnership in the vision of what we do in Head Start is seeing the value in each other, in our staff, in our families. That only creates better outcomes for the children that we serve.

Sharon: I love that example because it's also coming from the program, from the staff, from the [Indistinct] so people will want to dive into that cookbook even more so because it's more meaning ... It's meaningful. Thank you for that and your other examples. Really, really helpful. Finally, on this kind of theme of family engagement, Jessica, how has your program increased parent family engagement in nutrition activities?

Jessica: As you all know, I keep on talking about Healthy Meals on a Budget. That is just our pride and joy, just because, again, it has expanded. Again, our reach at first was 90 families, and by the end of that first year, we reached 180 families. But since we've been doing or educating our families on Healthy Meals on a Budget, we've reached approximately 2,300 families. This initiative has stuck with them.

Now we're trying to make sure that we mirror Healthy Meals on a Budget with what's happening in the classroom, because as you all know, I know everyone here is usually worried about class. I know that my ... I'm not the only one whose favorite subject in in school was lunch, because we have plenty of children who that is their favorite time.

They get to socialize, they get to eat, they get to have conservations. With our new NBBL program, with our kids being able to try new foods, not only are we incorporating class by introducing new words, but we're also increasing our math scores, our science and our literacy because we're having so much conversation about nutrition, about the foods, about agriculture.

Even though Healthy Meals on a Budget is the program that brings most of our families and connects our families to just healthier living, it's also connecting them with the classroom. We want to make sure that that connection, again, extends beyond the classroom. Healthy Meals on a Budget paired with our NBBL, our Taste Test Tuesdays, has been great in bringing families together and increasing our participation.

Sharon: Great. Thanks for that. That was one of the questions, a couple of the questions that came in around your Healthy Meals on a Budget. I think you did a great job of answering those without even knowing. How about that? I'm going to turn it back to you, Jess, for another theme.

Jessica: Thanks. Yeah. Let's talk about family-style meals, which we all know are strongly encouraged in Head Start programs and can help create continuity between school and home healthy eating habits for kids, but also know that many programs have found it challenging to go back to providing family-style meals at their centers post-pandemic. Keri, I'm wondering, can you describe how your program approached providing family-style meals while being responsive to feedback from staff and families?

Keri: Yeah, I'd be happy to. Full disclosure, Jessica Coffie knows that I am 100% stealing Taste Test Tuesday, and any of the RUCD team who's on this call, start writing that system, friends, because we are doing that. I think that's so great. We've learned a lot from each other just in preparing for this.

The family-style meals, what's really interesting in the time of COVID was everything changed very quickly, and the why was the same. It was because of the protocols and the health department and the rates of infection. We pivoted really, really fast in that period of time. What I think those of us who have been through that time together and are still here together, unraveling some of that quick change was challenging sometimes because the why was different.

There were people who were still worried about transmission rates of illness and who worried about germs and who worried about children having access to the food and passing it the way that the family-style is envisioned. What we found worked really well in our program was just talking about the why. Instead of saying, "This is the rule. This is what you have to do," giving people the opportunity to see the richness of a meal between families and children and staff in a center.

If you've ever ... Back when we did class reviews and the class reviewer would come into the center, didn't you love it when they came at mealtime because you're like, "We are going to crush this. This is going to be so good," because meals are the best time to talk about those open-ended questions and the back and forth and the warmth.

You have children there for 15 minutes if you're lucky and 20 minutes if you're lucky as a captive audience to talk about what they're interested in and the rest of your day. It's such a rich time. The skills that are built during a meal are so layered, the social skills of passing and turn taking and asking for what you need and deciding what you like and what you don't like, are building strong children with healthy communication skills and the ability to say, "I don't like that. I don't want to try that."

The teacher being able to model what testing new food because the thing about fresh and healthy food is sometimes you have to try it more than once. That also lends to so much connection. I think that the one thing that the class shows us is the connection between children and their caregivers and that mealtime is such a perfect time.

The impact of that is reduced if you just are giving them a plate and saying, "Finish your plate," or you're saying, "Take one scoop of this and everybody" ... Once we start creating the rules of a classroom that circumvent the feel of a family, we lose the connection of the teacher being able to interact with the children because children love their teachers. They will try new food for their teachers. Their faces light up when the teachers come in the room.

When you're sitting at a table, when you talk about what's the difference between the teacher's experience of letting the kids maybe be a little messy, and maybe you drop food because it's like food and glue are the same things with kids, that more ... I'm going to add glitter in there as well. More is better. You have to sort of roll with that, but what you're getting is the connection, and you are building that love relationship between the child and the teacher.

That's what kids are going to remember, that they're going to have this really healthy, colorful fresh food. Then they're going to have this connection with the teachers and the teachers are having fun and laughing and testing and trying things, and there is magic in that, that you lose when you become too controlled and prescriptive in a mealtime.

Jessica: I love that. There were so many choice quotes in there about glue and glitter and food, right, and just leaning into that. Thank you so much, Keri. I'm going to turn it back to you, Sharon.

Sharon: Lightning questions as we go to our next topic, which is going to be about nutrition partnerships. You know I'm going to go to Joquene for the partnerships. What are some lessons learned from building community partnerships related to nutrition? If you would be able to address, some people need to know, how do you get started with a community partner?

Joquene: Of course. For us here, it's constant outreach. I think a lot of times we are in communities with a lot of different organizations, and a lot of times we don't know the different services we provide and how it overlap into the same mission and vision that we're looking to provide for the communities.

I think a lot of time here in Westchester County, each service area that we service our families, there are different community networks where all organizations come together and really talk about their services. We tend to make those connections in that way. In areas where it's not happening, we tend to reach out to them and set up a call or get connected with them, and we meet and talk about their program and our program and look for those overlap and layers on how we can partner with each other for the same mission in the community to create this wraparound service around nutrition and things and other things, as well, for the families that we're all serving.

I think for when it comes to building community partnership, especially around nutrition, there are a few things to keep in mind. It's all about being flexible. It's any nutrition initiative or approaches, we want it to be flexible. We want it to be able to adjust on what the community really needs, whether that's tweaking things based on feedback or rolling with new challenges like economic shifts or changing health guidelines.

I know for us this year, as you notice, as I stated before, we provided gift cards to families, which is great. I want a grant where I can get gift cards so I can give it to my families. But I think one of the challenges where we have to be flexible around that is that we were giving our gift cards to our families, and then we'll get the redemption rate from the partnership that we have. I remember the first set of gift cards; it was a 6% redemption rate. I'm like, they're not using the gift cards.

We really had to take a pulse on why families aren't using the gift cards. A lot of times, the gift cards we were giving, they were to certain grocery stores that families couldn't get to, whether they didn't have a car, public transportation wasn't taking them there. We regrouped as a team to really think about, how do we increase our redemption rates, to maintain this partnership as well to show that our families really need this? What we did is we ... The flexibility in this is, we decided we're going to purchase the groceries with the gift cards, and we would distribute it from each of our locations.

I think a week ago, I got back about almost 90% redemption rate of the gift cards, which that partnership now we're creating, they really utilized this. It's being able to be flexible, and I stated sustainability is another biggie. Partnership needs to ... A lot of your partnerships are ... Even with us, we look at long-term success. We try to secure ongoing funding, getting the community involved, it's reaching out to other community, as stated earlier, other community organization that are trying to meet family food insecurity needs as well, those are the partners we try to get to sustain that long-term success for our nutrition initiative.

It's also super important to, as stated, regularly evaluate what's working and what isn't. Getting feedback from participants, whether it's from the partners or families really helps shape our future efforts. As stated, getting that redemption rate at 6%, to see that not a lot of the families are utilizing it, really helped us with the success of how do we really do this and make it work for us as an organization and for our families.

Being transparent with everyone, keeping that communication open, showing a real commitment to the community's well-being also goes a long way in boosting trust with our partners, as well as our families. I think it's just keeping some of those things in mind, so it's flexibility, sustainability and just open feedback and transparency with partners and families.

Sharon: Great. What strikes me, and I think this is a theme throughout the things that you have shared with us, is that you are taking a pulse all the time. It's not enough to just say you're following your efforts. Here's the gift card. Everyone should just want to use it. You're inquiring, why wouldn't they be using it? I think that is a takeaway I have too, is following all the way through.

You just don't ... There's not a one-off thing. You need to figure out what is going on. Thank you. Thank you for that. Jessica, can you speak to your partnerships? I'm curious, how does your program's approach to forming new partnerships vary depending on the type of organization you're partnering with? Again, help us with our colleagues in the chat that are wondering how to create these partnerships.

Jessica: The best way to create those is just go, just have conversations. You have to be comfortable with having conversations with your community. What we know we want for them to do is support us, so we support them as well. One way that I continue to keep the collaboration going is not only supporting their efforts, but I have them be a part of our health advisory council.

They feel like it's an honor, which it is because they are able to help talk about the very important things that come from them, that they love. We have some farmers that absolutely love talking about farming, love talking about nutrition. Why not put them on our health advisory council to help expand our knowledge? But also, that helps us ... or they help us connect with other people.

Again, we're in 15 counties. One farmer knows another farmer, and there are just different collaborations within our community that we want to, again, keep connection with. Again, they want to build connections with us just as much as we want to build with them. That's really what we do, whether it's university, like the University of Kentucky Health and Nutrition Department. That's the department I graduated from. Those advisors, I get to talk personally one-on-one with them.

They want their students to come and see what Head Start is about, what the nutrition aspect of Head Start is about. Getting out and making sure, one, people know who you are. There's one thing that as a Head Start family we could do better, and that is make ourselves known. I know I'm not the only one that saw us on the Today Show yesterday, OK. That was so exciting. Why not let the local community be a part of our family, our Head Start family? That's whether we want to get the word about who we are through recruitment or through just different media outlets, just being able to be out there and participate within our community.

Sharon: That's great. Just do it, and the confidence. What you're saying is, they need you. They need us. We need them. You just sparked one thing, and then I'll send us off. I was ... Something that I remember from long ago visiting a program, the executive director told me one of the things that I do is I encourage my staff to serve on the boards of other ... within the community.

You may do that, too, Jessica and others, because then they have to be the ambassador for your program, and then you're having that reciprocity and other things grow from there. It's also a professional development opportunity, for staff. You just sparked that memory, Jessica, when you were sharing that about your university. Jess, back to you.

Jessica: Thank you. I hope you all are seeing ... If we don't get time to all the questions and kudos you're getting in the chat, panelists, the reactions, I hope you're getting a chance to check that out. Last topic. We want to talk a little bit about serving whole food, healthy meals at your programs.

We know that many of our Head Start children attend full day programs where school meals or meals at the program make up literally half or more of their nutritional content for the day and their daily meals and snacks, so it's so critical that we have the opportunity to eat those healthy, nutritious foods packed with fresh produce and whole grains.

I'd love to talk a little bit about when and why your program pivoted or made the decision to offer whole food, freshly cooked meals to children and staff at center-based programs. Then, frankly, what are the challenges with that approach, and how did you budget for it? Jessica, not to go back to you too soon, but if I can put you on the spot with Community Action Council of Kentucky, I'd love to hear from you.

Jessica: Absolutely. We serve a lot of whole foods. However, we have to make a mixture because we have a central kitchen, and we bus out our food. What we've learned is some things work, some things don't. With that ... and also in one week living in Kentucky, you can experience all four seasons.

Wintertime, it's harder for us to get fresh fruits and vegetables, because we can have eight inches of snow, and our kids aren't able to get to the center. That will be food waste or ruined. We have to do a combination of fresh and frozen foods. However, again, with our foods being bussed out, we have to ensure that we are pairing the right combinations of foods as well.

There might be some programs who have that as a barrier as well. We do have a registered dietitian on staff to ensure, one, we're meeting the basic nutrition needs, but also, she's able to not only make our menus, but it makes sense to her of when to put what with what. Let's see. Whole foods and healthy meals. Again, it's a combination effect for us. We do utilize the CACFP program in getting reimbursed. But also, we do have to leverage out with some Head Start funding to be able to serve those meals.

Jessica: Yep. Makes a lot of sense. Appreciate the candor with your comments, too. Let's see, Keri, it would be great to hear a little bit from you and Rural Utah Child Development's approach to providing ... You talked a bit about this, but I know there's a lot of interest hearing more about providing meals from scratch.

Keri: I'm super happy to talk about this because this wasn't an idea that was based in nutrition at the beginning. It was that we were moving some slots around, and as you saw in our service area, when you move slots out of one center, it's not that your staff can go work at another center because they're two hours apart. It was during the time of working towards duration classrooms, there were some shifts in our communities, and we all know how responsive we have to be to those changing numbers.

We were moving part-day slots, and we had a morning and an afternoon classroom in four areas that turned into a six-hour classroom or a duration classroom, as we called it at the time. I was really concerned, because the cook who worked 37 hours for two classrooms, in one classroom, I didn't want them to lose the hours and the days of work. I worked really closely with the experts at our regional office, and we talked about all the possible things we could do. That's where the idea came, that we could increase our quality and have fresh and healthy food. That's really how it started.

Then when it became ... when other people started to catch that vision, the other ... that's why I say four out of the eight centers ... they all have cooks. All eight have cooks, but that's what we were trying to do with the four that we had reduced the slots at those centers. Those are really hard decisions when you have to do that, and you don't want your staff to lose their job that they rely on.

What we really looked at was when we first incorporated, if I could give anybody advice about how to move towards whole, fresh and healthy foods, it would be don't think you know how to do it the first year. Honestly, we went so gung-ho, did the menus, didn't listen as well as we should have to the cooks who said, "Eggplant pizza is not it. You can't make an eggplant a pizza crust." When I tell you we tried tofu in every possible way ... We got tofu feedback.

We asked how to make the tofu, what to do with the tofu. You know what? Rest in peace to the tofu because we couldn't make it work. We also couldn't be ... I'm going to say this, and I don't want this to come off wrong. We couldn't be moral about the new menu style. We couldn't say, "This is the way you have to get on board." This eggplant pizza is amazing because we saw the recipe on Pinterest. We didn't necessarily have a test kitchen per se. That would have been a great idea to have the Taste Test Tuesday and have the kids and the staff and the family say, that's not going to work.

There's a few other things we learned. Fish is not something you really want to get on sale. It's not really a bargain item for fish, so no cheap fish. Then other things like I mentioned, I mentioned the boiled eggs before. We do purchase pre-boiled eggs as well, because you can't ... It is certainly time-consuming. But we tried having the kids peel the eggs. That didn't work very well.

There's all those little nuances when you incorporate something new. I did see there was a question in the question and answer, Jess, that talked about the eggs. I don't want my offhand comment to be taken the wrong way, because there really is an issue with not wanting this to come across as a morally superior way of doing food. It's just what we could do at the time, and so that was important for me to clarify that.

Jessica Bialecki: I appreciate that, Keri. Thank you for pulling back and wrapping around to that. Sharon, I don't know if we have time to do this rapid-fire question.

Sharon: Sarah seems to think we do, but it's got to be really, really quick, ladies. OK. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. OK. Quick, quick response or pass. Looking ahead, what are some of the ways you hope to strengthen your nutrition services in your programs? Joquene.

Joquene: For me, and I think Keri stated as well, we've learned a lot from each other as panelists here today as well. I think for me, I've learned so much being in Westchester County, a lot of my programs ... Well, none of my programs really have kitchens. We service our food through vendors, which I think a lot of Head Start does do that as well.

But I think what I've really learned, I really wanted to take back for myself is, how can I initiate this process of having a chef or having a kitchen on site, and what that would look like for my program and how I can enhance that within my program to help offer some of these fresh food ideas to my families and the children in our program.

I think for me, it's just taking back what I've learned from the panelists here today, for me, to look at more internally into our program, is this something that we can actually do, even if we begin piloting it out of ... I have two sites that have kitchens. Maybe that's where I can start and see what that looks like.

Seeing food being bussed over from service areas to other service areas that are not close together really also had me thinking about that because some of my service areas are 5, 10 minutes apart. Seeing others that are far apart, and it's being done really allows me to think on that as well of this can be done. Now I'm going to go back and think strategically and talk to my team, of like is this something you want to try and what that would look like for us.

Sharon: Thank you for that. OK. Keri, we're going to go for a shorter. That was wonderful, Joquene. You're going to have to do it in less words, shorter, so that Tala has some time at the end. Keri.

Keri: Somebody do a word count. Home-based visits, fresh, healthy snacks, and the home-based celebrity chef, take a picture of cooking a favorite meal at home. Done.

Sharon: Done. Excellent. Great, second response. Jessica, bring us home.

Jessica: We would like to increase WIC collaboration, bringing WIC into our programs and having a quicker access for our families and initiative I call Homegrown, where we teach our families or teach our parents how to grow fruits and vegetables, whether they live at a house or they live in an apartment.

Sharon: Fantastic. Well, I can't say again how insightful ... You're like the three rock stars. We really love to hear from program leaders, but you really brought it today. Thanks for taking the time to be with us and our programs across the community. We're going to replay this. We use clips of it, so it will live on and on. Don't you worry. Now we're going to pull down the slides, if we haven't done that already. I'm going to turn it over to Tala for you to share a few resources, closing remarks.

Captain Hooban: Thank you. I have to say, I'm not running a program, but I'm running a household, and I had so many notes to take while we were talking about this. I have to say my 5-year-old somehow likes tofu and thinks it's cheese, so I just roll with it. It's whatever. On this slide, we're going to close really fast because I know we're running out of time, or we have run out of time. We are going to have some slide ... Is it on the next slide for resources? There you go. Resources and materials.

I hope this webinar got you moving, and you can just go, but I know how hard that is, so there are some resources on here for you that if you need a little extra time with everything you heard today, please look there. We will also have this webinar recording also uploaded to these resources’ pages on the headstart.gov.

I think we don't have time for our lovely question, but our awesome panelists also volunteered to share their e-mails with you. That will be coming out. If you have something that you learned today, I'm sorry to whoever is running the slides. I am running all over for you. If you have something that you would like to share and you haven't or you're having barriers or experiences that you'd like to make sure we know about, please, please, please reach out to us. We love hearing from you.

This was a lot of fun for our team to put together. We met some new friends that will probably be on speed dial. Sorry, ladies. If you want to e-mail us at ohs_policy@acf.hhs.gov, or contact your regional office, your leadership team, please do. We are here for you. We will have more nutrition resources as we move forward. Thank you for those who asked questions.

We didn't have time to answer them and put comments in there. We will, per usual, look at ways to support you with resources to support those answers that we didn't get to today. I'm so sorry. This was the quickest closing on Earth. But I really loved hearing from you ladies. Cannot thank you enough. I really, really appreciate your time. This took a lot of prep, and it took a lot of your time today, too. I really, really appreciate you guys taking the time out. Thank you to everyone who joined. I hope you have a great Tuesday. Let's stick with that. Thank you, ladies, again.