Recipe for Success Foundation

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.