Think&EatGreen@School built healthier, more sustainable school food systems by facilitating a community of learners in action research. The work of building healthy school food systems continues – discover ideas to involve your school today.

The project enabled students, teachers, and policy makers to influence how their food is produced and where it comes from.

Check out our Reports & Publications or View our Presentation from the final Think&EatGreen@School Conference for more information about how we did this.

The project intended to influence 4 key areas. In order to support comprehensive school health, we took a system’s approach to school food, focusing in on the following key areas:

1. Food production at school (i.e. food gardens, composting and environmentally sound and productive disposal of end products);
2. Food consumption, preparation and procurement at school (i.e. school food programs, cooking skills, and eating spaces, farm‐to‐school programs for fresh local food);
3. Creating and disseminating learning innovations which aim to integrate learning about the whole cycle of food systems, from production, processing, transportation, distribution, consumption, and disposal of end food products (i.e. composting and recycling vs. “waste”) and impacts of health and environment;
4. Researching and developing policy and programs to support more healthy and sustainable food systems at school.

The project supported many concrete school projects, which involved collaborative learning amongst a multitude of players, from: university students and researchers, health and educational institutions, to a network of community‐based and community‐supported non‐profit organizations working on food, health, and the environment.

Connections and networking were key to our systems approach, as we sought to link: farms to schools, city dwellers with farmers, school cooks with successful green chefs, restaurateurs, restaurant designers, gardeners, school authorities, teachers and students.

ThinkEatGreen@School was a dynamic project that brought healthy and sustainable school food systems thinking to the learning communities of the Vancouver School Board.