Ecosource and Roots to Harvest have just released a report, Alternative Avenues to Local Food in School: Ingredients for Success by Multiple Authors, through the Alternative Avenues Project — a collaboration with students, teachers and school board representatives in Durham Region, Peel Region and Thunder Bay, with support from the Ontario Edible Education Network.
The collaboration focused on developing and testing strategies to incorporate local food procurement into secondary school food programs, while engaging students in food literacy.
The report outlines the current school food context in each region by considering how school food systems are shaped by multiple actors and what challenges and opportunities to local food procurement are in each region.
To illustrate the opportunities and solutions to common challenges, the report showcases 7 local food pilot projects, and developed 8 Ingredients for Success or guidelines for implementing local food projects.
Increasing education and access to locally grown food is a key opportunity for change that guides the Golden Horseshoe Food and Farming Action Plan, which is referenced in the Durham Region section of the report.
Be sure to view this valuable report in full here, and share it with anyone you think may be interested. For more information on the Alternative Avenues Project, be sure to watch the video Ecosource has created.