Recipe for Success Foundation
Teaching, Empowering & Inspiring Healthy Eating
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Seed-to-Plate-Nutrition Education™
The only initiative in the country of it's scope, RFS Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™ introduces children to the entire cycle of food along with taste and flavor combinations, nutrition awareness and and skills that will serve them for a lifetime, and empowers them to prepare healthy meals and snacks for themselves. With help from professional chefs, gardeners, nutritionists and teachers, the grade-specific S2P curriculum has been codified and extensively tested to produce an extensive S2P Instructor guide with hundreds of class content options designed to relate to harvest schedules, grade-level core learning objectives and a variety of delivery schedules and rotations. A national Affiliate Partner framework has been launched, underpinned by comprehensive instructor training, certification and ongoing support to ensure results consistent with historic achievements. S2P Programs are briskly expanding to every school district Houston and schools from coast to coast.
VegOut! with Recipe for Success
We created the VegOut! Challenge to support efforts of families and individuals to eat healthier by making it an adventure--the same way we entice kids to try healthy foods. Regardless of participant motivation--the fun of competition, the exploration of new food, or a personal focus on healthier eating--the end result is the same: A behavior repeated for 30 days becomes a habit. So, we say "Step up to the plate and pile it with veggies." VegOut! is a year-round advocacy promotion. A dedicated website www.vegoutwithrfs.org is full of resources to source and prepare fresh seasonal veggies and savory fruits. The site is linked to Facebook, Pinterest, You Tube and Twitter (#vegoutwithrfs) social networking sites and encourages comments and sharing among Houstonians electing to VegOut!, whether for the challenge month, any other month, for a day or just occasionally.
Hope Farms™ & Rolling Green Market
Hope Farms Showcase and Training Center is a 7-acre urban farm in view of downtown skyscrapers that teaches, empowers and inspires healthy eating in the heart of Houston's historic Sunnyside neighborhood. Using organic methods to generate significant crops in the midst of one of the city's largest food deserts, we train U.S. military veterans to become new urban farmers, provide jobs and internships for neighborhood youth, and cooking and gardening classes for all ages. You can visit our farm stand on Saturday mornings to buy our freshly harvested produce, or subscribe to Hope Farm Shares and have it delivered weekly to your door. Our Rolling Green Market is powered by a grant from the USDA and won recognition and support from the US Conference of Mayors, saluting it as an innovative solution to combat obesity in a large urban community. The RGM can be brought to your neighborhood or event to showcase fresh produce and cooking demonstrations. Hope Farms is a critical component in achieving Recipe for Success Foundation's mission to mobilize the community to provide healthier diets for children.
Farmers MarKIDS
Recipe for Success Foundation's farmers marKIDS curriculum provides children with knowledge and tools to transform their garden produce into a farm stand to serve the surrounding community while gaining food and financial literacy through experiential learning. Using our free, kid-tested farmers marKIDS toolkit with five lesson plans, facilitators can help children develop financial savvy, entrepreneurial skills and business experience while they make fresh produce easily accessible to their neighbors. Educators, parents and community groups can use the targeted lessons provided to prepare youth to operate their very own small business. The curriculum culminates in a farmers marKIDS stand, when students apply the skills and concepts they've learned to sell fresh produce grown in school, community and home gardens. The downloadable toolkit guides children's efforts in harvesting and pricing produce, promoting, advertising and operating their farmers marKIDS stand anytime.
Eat It! Food Adventures© Cookbooks
Eat It! Food Adventures with Marco Polo, a kid's cookbook/adventure series released Volume One: Leaving Home on September 10, 2012. It has since won eleven national publishing awards and work has begun on Volume Two. A television show of the same name is in pre-production with Houston PBS in preparation for national syndication. Using an adventure story to attract young readers to the fun of cooking and eating more fruits and veggies, Gracie Cavnar's book follows Ottavio Fornero, a pint-sized member of Marco Polo's famous expedition as he discovers wondrous foods through the rich cultural traditions of people along the old Silk Road. As Ottavio journeys from Venice to the Middle East, cooks and readers as young as seven learn thirty easy-to-follow recipes inspired by the trip.
Where we work
Awards
Texas Health Champion 2014
Susan & Michael Dell Center for Healthy Living
External reviews

Goals & Strategy
Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.
Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
Recipe for Success aims to prevent childhood obesity and encourage long term health by altering the way our children understand, appreciate and eat their food, and by educating and mobilizing the community to provide healthier diets for children.
In Houston, our goal is to expand our signature Seed-to-PlateNutrition Education™ to every elementary school in the 13-county region, and to empower Houston parents and caregivers with the tools they need to provide healthier diets for their children. We conduct robust community education campaigns, publish books and videos, and collaborate to foster urban agriculture and solve food access solutions with projects like the VegOut! Challenge, the Eat It! Food Adventures children's book series and television show, Hope Farms urban agriculture and Rolling Green Market.
Now that we have scaled our Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™ program delivery and support, our broader goal is to ensure that every community in the country is aware of it and has easy affordable access to it.
Our vision is that Recipe for Success will be widely respected for establishing a national model that promotes healthy eating as the norm and creates a culture where nutritious food is shared, appreciated, and celebrated.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
Nutrition Education
We make healthy food fun with our signature Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™ curriculum for students developed with help from professional chefs, gardeners, nutritionists and teachers. The largest program of its kind, RFS has reached over 30,000 children with an integrated schedule of classes in the garden and kitchen. We have documented: significant improvements in nutrition knowledge, increases in consumption of fruits and vegetables, and a greater willingness to try new fruits and vegetables. In 2010, RFS was asked by the current administration to bring our successful programs to national scale prompting the development of Affiliate Partnerships which launched in 2012. S2P Programs are briskly expanding to every school district in the Houston area, and to schools from coast to coast who have become Recipe for Success Affiliate Partners.
Community Call to Action
The VegOut! Challenge supports efforts for families and individuals to eat healthier by making it an adventure, the same way we entice kids to try healthy foods. VegOut! is a year-round advocacy promotion supported by a dedicated website that culminates every March with a 30 Ways in 30 Days Challenge to eat thirty different vegetables within the month. The Challenge launched in March 2013 when thousands of kids, adults, employee groups and families accepted the challenge to eat more veggies, which meant that National Nutrition Month reached entire new levels of healthy eating awareness in Houston and beyond.
Urban Agriculture and Food Justice
Hope Farms teaches, empowers and inspires healthy eating in the heart of Houston's historic Sunnyside neighborhood. Using organic methods to generate significant crops in the midst of one of the city's largest food deserts, we train U.S. military veterans to become new urban farmers, provide jobs and internships for neighborhood youth, and cooking and gardening classes for all ages.
The Rolling Green Market is designed to deliver significantly reduced-priced, fresh fruits and vegetables directly to families who are now marooned in identified food deserts, or who are otherwise considered to be suffering from nutritional insecurity.
Multi-media
Recipe for Success is determined to fight marketing with marketing in order to promote healthy eating attitudes and normalize healthy eating attitudes and habits. We are developing products in print, online, mobile and broadcast formats. We established S2P Press to publish a variety of books that celebrate and empower healthy choices. Our first, Eat it! Food Adventures with Marco Polo Volume One: Leaving Home, by Gracie Cavnar was released in 2012 to rave reviews and went on to win eleven prestigious publishing awards.
FarmersMarKIDS
A free downloadable curriculum designed to to teach children financial literacy skills and transform their garden produce into a business.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
Our organization benefits from an active board of directors, a community advisory board, chefs advisory board, science advisory board and teacher advisory board along with hundreds of volunteers. Our budget has grown from $250,000 in 2005 to over $1,000,000 in 2017/18 supported by individual and corporate gifts, grants and earned income. Our program reach has multiplied exponentially with the newly available Affiliate Partnerships which bring our nutrition education delivery to national scale.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
We began programming in five geographically and ethnically diverse Houston ISD Elementary Schools in the fall of 2006, where we tested our theories, fine-tuned our delivery, developed our Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™ curriculum and measured our results, which were impressive. After eight years, we have taught over 30,000 children about making healthy food choices and the skills they need to support those decisions for life.
We developed an extensive train the trainer S2P Instructor certification and online curriculum support site for our Affiliate Partners, which offers all 320 of our lesson plans, suggested formats and schedules, expert advice, forums webinars and podcasts to ensure that our programs are delivered with integrity and return the same impressive results we experience first hand..
We have grown to serve over thirty school in Texas either directly or through Affiliate Partnerships and in the summer of 2013, launched our first Affiliate Partnership outside of Texas in Washington DC. We now have adapted our program in several Texas middle schools as an After School Program in 2014.
Our first children's book , Eat It! Food Adventures with Marco Polo has won eleven publishing awards and additional books are underway.
In summer 2014, the Hope Farms program was awarded the Wells Fargo NeighborhoodLIFT grant and is expected to launch in spring 2016. Partnership with the University of Houston and Rice University's schools of architecture have rendered a Design Charrette of possibilities. With major support from Wells Fargo's Neighborhood LIFT program, United Healthcare and others, preparations are moving swiftly forward with on-the ground efforts expected to materialize in spring 2016.
A brand new program, Farmers MarKIDS, launched in Fall 2014, is designed to provide children with the knowledge and tools to transform their garden produce into a farm stand to serve the surrounding community while gaining food and financial literacy through experiential learning. The free, kid-tested toolkit with five lesson plans guides children's efforts in harvesting and pricing produce, promoting, advertising and operating their Farmers MarKIDS stand, and it can be downloaded on the Recipe for Success website.
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
Recipe for Success Foundation
Board of directorsas of 11/12/2019
Mrs. Grace Cavnar
Recipe for Success
Amy Anton
Kitchen Underground
Grace Cavnar
Recipe for Success Foundation
Paula McHam
Cigna
Genevieve Patterson
Banloch Consulting Group
Aashish Parekh
Trans4mative Advisors
Bryan Christ
Clay Development & Construction, Inc.
Priya Coffey
Jackson Walker
Sheree Frede
Digital Influencer @SheSheShow
Curry Glassell
Glassell Interests Llc
Rodolfo Guerra
United Healthcare Community Plan of Texas
Ally Shell-van Koolwijk
Neal Hamil Agency
Stacey Swift
Neiman Marcus
Barbara McKnight
Culinaire Houston
Ana Llovera
Shell Oil Company
Melissa Sugulas
Melissa Sugulas Style
Stephanie Pai Fleck
Nico Gleza
PricewaterhouseCooper, LLP
Kristin Blomquist
Masterson Advisors
Rebecca Tapick
Martin Preferred Foods
Amanda Boffone
Elizabeth Dwyer
Virginia McMullen
CHI St. Luke's Health
Stacey Swift
Neiman Marcus
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? Yes