Q&A
NYC School Food EATS program goals and partnerships with urban agriculture
1:35:46
·
4 min
Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez inquires about the goals and long-term vision of the NYC School Food EATS program and its partnerships. Qiana Mickie, Executive Director of the NYC Mayor's Office of Urban Agriculture, explains the program's focus on scaling urban agriculture education, connecting farmers to public schools, and informing city procurement to support farmers of various scales.
- The program aims to increase fresh, regional, and hyper-local produce in school food procurement
- It includes training for small to mid-scale farmers to better connect with school food programs
- The initiative works on scaling the number of farm and food businesses, with a focus on MWBE certification and culturally relevant producers
Jennifer Gutiérrez
1:35:46
I I just had a question.
1:35:49
1 just one specific about your, your remarks and your testimony.
1:35:54
I'm curious in the, the partnership with, New York City Public Schools in the Cornell Cooperative Extension.
1:36:02
I know in your testimony you mentioned, that one of the goals of New York City School Food Eats is to strengthen partnerships and linkages Mhmm.
1:36:13
Within our food system to support historically disadvantaged farmers.
1:36:16
And I know you're in, maybe, like, year 1a half or year 2 of this partnership.
1:36:21
Is that right?
Gale A. Brewer
1:36:22
Year 2.
Jennifer Gutiérrez
1:36:22
Year 2?
1:36:23
What are some of the, I guess, goals?
1:36:27
What does the goal what does it look like for you all, for your office?
1:36:32
What does it look like to be successful in the in this partnership, and what are some of, kind of, like, the long term goals that you were looking to to meet through these partnerships?
1:36:39
And I support it.
1:36:40
I think it's wonderful.
1:36:41
I'm just curious how you're thinking about building it out in year 5, 10, and beyond.
Qiana Mickie
1:36:46
Oh, sure.
1:36:47
Well, right now, what we've learned in the pilot, the 2 pilot years, is that there are some critical elements that need to continue to be supported and scaled.
1:36:57
That is the ag education.
1:36:59
And again, it's the connection between urban farmers, who are already growing in the direct connection to public school students.
1:37:07
In addition, scaling up our community chef demos with that.
1:37:11
So the students are able to learn about nutrition education, culturally relevant food, as well as the life cycle of food.
1:37:20
We also realize that in order for this to continue and be sustainable, it needs to have an element that we're informing city procurement.
1:37:30
And one of the strongest avenues is school food.
1:37:33
So here, what we're looking at is if we're trying to increase fresh produce, regional produce, and our hyper local farmers as well as our rural farmers, that we need to give them procurement that's relevant to their scale.
1:37:45
So this the the New York City School Food Each Training in particular is is modeled for small to mid scale farmers to have be primed and better, have better success in connecting to school food.
1:37:58
The training also gives us the opportunity to help inform, the office of School Food and Nutrition on how to build stronger bids, to work with urban growers, to work with value based growers, to work, with, sorry, regional growers.
1:38:16
But we also have to think about scale.
1:38:19
And, this is one of those things when it comes to agriculture and our food system is we wanna continue to support community agriculture, which I think this reimagining program does with our Urban Ag partners.
1:38:31
But we wanna also support our regional and Urban Ag growers to to grow at scale food reduction levels.
1:38:38
And those levels will be what is really informative in city procurement.
1:38:42
And in order to work with them, we kinda have to meet them where they're at.
1:38:46
So that's helping them better connect to MWBE certifications.
1:38:50
And this training, we have a module that does that.
1:38:53
It also helps to demystify the process around bids, RFPs, for school food.
1:39:00
But this is really institutional.
1:39:02
Right?
1:39:02
So if we're really helping this training, that just launched, we're in our 2nd week.
1:39:07
Tomorrow is it's a multi month virtual training with farmers.
1:39:12
With the the goal here in order to think about scaling moving forward is if we can learn from the successes of our urban net growers, our public school students, our teachers, and identifying those school gardens as well as city procurement, This will give us the information that we need to build those stronger pathways for them.
1:39:32
So with this training, we hope to scale the number of farm and food businesses, not just in the training, but MWBE certified, which is a Meryl priority.
1:39:43
And again, we've seen that that's an indicator for value add of value based, procurement as well.
1:39:48
We wanna make sure that there's more culturally relevant small to mid scale growers.
1:39:53
We see this as an opportunity, through this initiative.
1:39:56
We're working with our partners of Cornell, with their experience with regional food and our, school system with procurement to really think about what the school system's institutional procurement need, and how can we also support regional farmers, but also how do we support emerging urban ag businesses.
1:40:15
And their and their crops and production into getting into school food.
Jennifer Gutiérrez
1:40:18
And I appreciate the emphasis on on scale.
