This event came across my desk this week, sent by a student from my Santa Monica College class, Lise Matthews. Root Down LA is striving to reduce the number of kids with obesity in the city buy helping to create “healthier school food communities”. A very worthy cause…
Youth Food Community Health An evening of great food and shared ideas! RootDown LA asks: What will you bring to the table? Saturday April 18th, 7pm Where: Jennie Cooks Catering: 3048 Fletcher Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90065; 323.982.0052 RSVP by email or phone: rootdownla@gmail.com; 310.422.9226 |
RootDown LA is having its first
“Not-Quite-a-Fundraiser”
and you’re invited!
Who are we?
We’re
RootDown LA and we’re on a mission to help tackle the obesity crisis in
South LA by engaging youth at Manual Arts High School to build a
ground-up, demand focused model for creating healthier school food
communities. With our youth driven healthy food messaging, wacky
cooking activities, non-traditional nutrition lessons and trips to McGrath Family Farms, we get kids to get kids to eat their veggies.
If it’s true you may want to help out, you could provide us with your knowledge, contacts, ideas or financial support.
We’ve accomplished quite a bit since we first dragged our beets and
broccoli into classrooms last year; so far 300 kids have dug into our
lessons and over 100 kids have agreed to bring their own forks, spoons
and ugliest shoes to the farm.
But it will take more than two
renegade health and nutrition educators to really get this thing off
the ground and germinate it elsewhere. Which, is ultimately what we
want to do.
Right
now, RootDown LA is in a unique position to fill a critical gap that
exists in school communities between the supply of, and demand for,
healthier food. RootDown has already shown success building demand for
healthy food from the bottom up. And we now have the opportunity to
work in concert with policy makers from the top down, to assure that
supply and demand are built in tandem to more effectively bring change
in the school food community and in doing so, catalyze healthy changes
in the broader community.
So
please mark April 18th on your calendar and join RootDown LA for an
evening of great food, stories from the classroom, and lively
conversation about how we might all work together to build healthier
communities. Everyone is welcome, donation or not.
We
look forward to connecting with you. If you are unable to attend that
night, we’ll keep you on our mailing list until you tell us to remove
you!
Katy Atkiss & Megan Hanson
Co-founders, RootDown LA
RootDown
LA is a program of Community Partners, a duly registered public
charity, exempt from Federal income taxation under Sections 501(c)(3)
and 509(a)(1) of the Internal Revenue Code.
