Recipe for Success Foundation

Teaching, Empowering & Inspiring Healthy Eating

aka Recipe for Success   |   Houston, TX   |  http://www.recipe4success.org/

Mission

Since 2005, Recipe for Success Foundation has worked to combat childhood obesity by changing the way our children understand, appreciate and eat their food, and by educating and mobilizing the community to provide healthier diets for children. The Foundation strives to create a culture where nutritious food is shared, appreciated, and celebrated. Its signature, hands-on food curriculum has empowered more than 30,000 children with the knowledge and skills they need to lead healthier lives. Its efforts to make healthy food appealing and available to everyone include Houston's Hope Farms and award-winning national programs like Seed-to-Plate Nutrition Education™, farmers marKIDS, Eat It! Food Adventures children's cookbooks and the VegOut! 30-Day Challenge.

Ruling year info

2006

Founder and CEO

Mrs. Gracie Cavnar

Main address

P.O Box 56405

Houston, TX 77256 USA

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EIN

20-3377041

NTEE code info

Nutrition Programs (K40)

Children's and Youth Services (P30)

IRS filing requirement

This organization is required to file an IRS Form 990 or 990-EZ.

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Communication

Programs and results

What we aim to solve

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Our programs

SOURCE: Self-reported by organization

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.

Population(s) Served

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.

Population(s) Served

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.

Population(s) Served

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.

Population(s) Served

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.

Population(s) Served

Where we work

Awards

Texas Health Champion 2014

Susan & Michael Dell Center for Healthy Living

Goals & Strategy

SOURCE: Self-reported by organization

Learn about the organization's key goals, strategies, capabilities, and progress.

Charting impact

Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.

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.

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.

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.

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

Recipe for Success Foundation
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Operations

The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.

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Recipe for Success Foundation

Board of directors
as of 11/12/2019
SOURCE: Self-reported by organization
Board chair

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

SOURCE: Self-reported by organization

GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.

  • 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