Community Nutrition Education With Campus Kitchen

Nutrition eduaction is viewed as a necessary step to healthier lives for all of our community members. The Campus Kitchen team teaches nutrition year round to community partners. In offering government sponsored education on how to prepare produce, its benefits, and age appropriate recipes, Campus Kitchen attempts to help clients easily digest information on health. 

Volunteers may teach at the Lexington Office on Youth to help children understand healthy diets while making the lessons fun and interactive. In the past this has been taught through puppet shows, age appropriate recipes, food experiments, and other hands on activities. Previously, Nutrition Education had been taught in 6 week afterschool programs. Via the Agriculture extension agency and USDA SNAP education, Campus Kitchen provides volunteer teachers for these hands-on programs. 

During the Summer, Campus Kitchen Interns partner with the local YMCA to teach lessons to the campers. The team works with kids from 5-12 to teach invaluable information on why eating healthy is important. These lessons come from the USDA and SNAP programs. The children learn about food in its realtion to our bodies through games, lessons, and creative recipes.

"The Family Nutrition Program's mission is to teach limited-resource families and youth how to make healthier food choices and become better managers of available food resources for optimal health and growth. Our programs focus on basic nutrition, physical activity, safe food handling, and thrifty food shopping.

The Family Nutrition Program is offered through Virginia Cooperative Extension, an educational outreach partnership between Virginia Tech and Virginia State University."

Aside from direct lessons to children, Campus Kitchen also partners in the Summer with RARA's Color Me Healthy campaign. By distributing produce with recipes, preparation advice, and nutritional information, RARA and Campus Kitchen try to help adults diversify and enhance their diets in a healthy way. 

Summer 2020 we have also begun to partner with the four week camp Summer Fun to provide recipe kits for children in the area to have educational activities centered on nutrition. These recipe kits provide interactive coloring pages and a kit for different weekly recipes.