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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Rhonda Keyser, Program and Policy Director of Cafeteria Culture
4:55:17
·
120 sec
Rhonda Keyser from Cafeteria Culture testified about their successful food waste reduction program in schools and their partnership with Compost Power. She highlighted the program's impact on reducing food waste while increasing food consumption among students.
- The program has reduced 35-80% of overall food waste in school cafeterias while increasing food consumption by 15-30% per student.
- Cafeteria Culture is working to scale up their food waste reduction program and increase students' access to compost sites.
- The organization appreciates the city council's budget allocation to compost network projects and their partnership with Domingo Morales at Compost Power.
Rhonda Keyser
4:55:17
Hello.
4:55:18
Thank you, Chair of Ryu, and to the council for this opportunity to speak.
4:55:24
My name's Rhonda Kaiser.
4:55:26
I'm Cafeteria Culture's Program and Policy Director.
4:55:29
I come to you today straight out of a program teaching the second graders the worm dance or going over that they learned with Domingo.
4:55:38
And they were also learning about food waste and teaching their peers about food waste.
4:55:45
This is a program that we're doing where we are reducing waste at the source.
4:55:50
Thank you very much for mentioning that.
4:55:53
The students are reducing food waste by from their cafeteria.
4:55:59
Between 3580% of overall food waste, they're reducing it.
4:56:05
But they're also eating between 1530% more food per student through this program.
4:56:12
And it's about not about austerity or scarcity, it's about agency.
4:56:15
And that's what our programs do.
4:56:17
Our students have agency.
4:56:19
As some of you may remember from the last budget hearing when two groups of our students came to testify.
4:56:26
They just got over math testing, so we didn't really have time to do that this time in their schedule, but we're very excited to scale up the program that we've been working on.
4:56:36
We really appreciate the city council's budget allocation to compost project compost network folks and also to us.
4:56:49
We've started with a partnership with Domingo Morales at Compost Power, and we've chosen schools deliberately that were near his sites so that students could see a working compost site that's active and that's accessible to them, that they have access to the resources that they're gonna get from these sites.
4:57:08
So we wanna scale up both our food waste reduction program and also our students' opportunity to interface with compost sites.
4:57:16
Thank you.