Rainbow Grocery Serves Up Healthy Afterschool Snacks

Our plan

Located in San Francisco's Western Addition neighborhood, Creative Arts Charter School (CACS) was founded in 1994 by a dedicated group of parents committed to providing their children with education based on creative exploration. Our mission centers on serving under-served populations, and as a result, CACS attracts students of all ethnicities, family configurations, and socioeconomic backgrounds. More than 30% of CACS students qualify for and receive free lunches. Due to its current fiscal crisis, the State of California has drastically reduced funding to public schools. CACS and all other SFUSD schools have had to make programmatic cuts in order to protect teachers' jobs and “core” instruction. Our Afterschool program is one of the areas hit hardest. Each weekday from 3:15 – 6pm, this vital program serves children of working families who are unable to pick up their kids at our 3:15pm dismissal time. No one is turned away due to lack of funds. To enhance our cash-strapped Afterschool program, two working parents and the Afterschool Director designed a special Afterschool initiative to provide healthy food and education on sustainable organic food, food preparation as an art form, and food production and consumption as a social justice issue.

What we did

Afterschool currently serves 93 students, and they receive a snack each afternoon. We built our plan around ensuring that all food served is organic and non-processed (i.e., vegetables, fruit, homemade baked goods, fresh-squeezed juice). Due to budget limitations, Afterschool previously relied on very inexpensive food from warehouse stores and leftovers from the District's “hot lunch.” The snacks were often insufficiently nutritious (pretzels, animal crackers, tortilla chips – in other words, foods made with high-fructose corn syrup and other unhealthy ingredients.) In addition to improving the food we serve, we designed interactive, project-based instruction focused on such topics as: ecologically devastating factory food vs. green organic farming; transportation/distribution vs. local food; packaging and landfills; and conditions for migrant workers and workers in agribusiness factory farms. We've also engaged in an ongoing conversation with the students about how “convenience” and fast food keep hard-working people poor with hidden costs and how these foods also lead to health problems for people who are often under- or uninsured (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.). Our Afterschool families are often members of communities most impacted by these issues and most in need of education to escape these traps.