By Kathleen O'Hare de Chadenedes
I was surprised to see the message in my
inbox. Mark (not his real name), one of
the most recalcitrant food service directors
in Santa Barbara County, had
inquired about applying for a grant to
replace some failing cooking equipment in
his school kitchen.
Four months earlier, I had resigned myself
to the idea that we had fatally damaged
an already tenuous relationship. Here is
what happened: Mark had agreed to host a
School Food Initiative (SFI) Culinary Boot
Camp at his school district. (The Boot Camp
is a five-day session, taught by professional
chefs, combining classroom learning along
with hands-on kitchen practicums.) But
then, as the date approached, he contended
that he was too busy to attend. A Boot Camp
instructor—one of our consultants—sensed
the frustration of the newly inspired participants.
Mark’s refusal to join them signaled
his unwillingness to deviate from business
as usual. Overstepping professional boundaries,
the instructor urged Mark’s staff to
demand that the school board replace him
with a new director who fully embraced
healthy scratch cooking.
When Mark got wind of this, he contacted
me, angry and hurt. My embarrassment
over our consultant’s actions paled in comparison
to my exasperation at the fact that
we had given Mark a plausible excuse for not
engaging with SFI. I tempered my hopes of
transforming a difficult partnership into
a success story, but hoped for a second
chance, which had now arrived via email.
I sent Mark the grant application. I applauded
myself for following the first rule of
partnerships: meet partners where they are.
I succeeded in getting the grant approved and
contacted Mark with the good news. After
almost a year as SFI director, I felt confident
enough in my relationships with prospective
grantees to include mutually agreed-on stipulations
in the grant agreements. I sent a draft
of the stipulations to Mark for his review. But
instead of a respectful exchange of ideas, I
received an indignant reply. He refused to accept
any award with strings attached. Determined
to make this work, I carefully crafted
my response. Finally, he agreed to accept
the funds and the stipulation to use the new
equipment to add one more scratch-cooked
entrée to the menu each week.
Victory was mine—until it wasn’t. In his
interim progress report, Mark indicated
that he could no longer serve one additional
scratch-cooked entrée per week because he
lost student participation (i.e., revenue) every
day he served a scratch-cooked entrée,
while also incurring increased labor costs.
Losing money, he said, could lead to the loss
of his job. No one at the district disputed
Mark’s claims, so I asked how we could help
support him. He responded that what he really
needed was nutrition education for the
students so they would learn to accept the
healthier lunch choices. I tried a new approach:
shower Mark with programs and services
as proof of our commitment to his district.
That year, I recommended that Mark’s
district receive two school gardens, complete with a paid garden manager. I also assigned
a dedicated SFI chef to provide
assistance with menu development,
recipe testing, and service logistics.
Still facing resistance, I met with
the superintendent. To gauge his level
of philosophical alignment with SFI,
I asked how he felt about the practice
of scheduling recess before lunch. I
explained the benefits of recess before
lunch: children were motivated to eat
more of their lunch and drink more of
their beverage; they wasted less food,
and returned to their classrooms calmer and
ready to learn. He responded enthusiastically,
saying that he loved the sound of that commonsense
approach and he also appreciated
the fact that it would cost nothing to implement
such a beneficial practice. He vowed to
take the idea to his leadership team the following
week for their endorsement.
Well, Mark sat on the leadership team.
And when I called to follow up on the issue,
the superintendent said that he had
met with major opposition from the team.
When I learned this, I felt used and naïve.
I pictured an unflattering image of myself
chasing potential partners down the street
waving a $50,000 check, begging them to accept
not only our money but also all the support
programs we offered.
But then a new image emerged. I realized
that Mark had given me a gift: the inspiration
to adopt a new strategy. I vowed, from that
point forward, to work only with the willing.
While I still acknowledged the value of
“meeting potential partners where they are,”
I also saw that achieving systemic change
would require different rules of engagement.
Contrast the Mark story with the development
of SFI’s relationship with food
service director Sandra (not her real name
either). We got off to a rocky start too, but we
each achieved our goals by following other
essential rules of partnership: aligning our
values, earning trust, and sharing risks.
At an early Culinary Boot Camp, Sandra
had folded her arms across her chest, declaring
that she would never cook raw poultry in
her district’s central kitchen. (Her practice
at the time had been to assemble processed
menu items at a central kitchen and distribute
meals to the schools.) The district had
built most of its schools during the heyday
of the heat-and-serve approach to school
meals. The satellite kitchens lacked the appropriate
infrastructure and equipment to
comply with the local Environmental Health
jurisdiction’s requirements for serving bulk-packed,
scratch-cooked entrées or salad bars.
The financial cost of remodeling presented a
seemingly insurmountable obstacle.
Unionized food service staff loomed
large as another hurdle. Used to the daily
rhythms of assemble, heat, and serve, union
members might object to processing fresh
produce for salad bars and cooking entrees
from scratch. The change could mean more
work for the same money and more risk of
on-the-job injuries. After Culinary Boot
Camp, however, Sandra and her staff exhibited
a shift in perspective. At Boot Camp, participants
had gotten excited about producing
healthier, fresher food—and instructors
had supported their excitement by teaching
them how to do it safely and effectively,
and by offering the possibility of procuring
equipment so they could do it efficiently. The
barriers appeared less daunting.
Before Boot Camp, Sandra had resigned
herself to running a school food service
operation that fell short of her ideals, but
now she began to believe in the possibility
of change. More important, her values and
those of her staff aligned with SFI’s aspirations.
That essential pillar of effective partnerships
opened the door to progress.
SFI’s full-time chef advisor conducted a
Boot Camp follow-up session. She also provided
on-site assistance—acting as a safety
net to help participants leave their comfort
zones and achieve the goals they had set in
Boot Camp. For example, she convinced
Sandra to try a scratch cooking pilot at two elementary
schools. SFI would fund the project
and offer the chef advisor’s support. (The high
schools and junior highs in the district offered
some healthier menu choices at the time, but
the elementary schools still received individually
packaged, highly processed entrees.)
Sandra possessed the courage to change; her
staff exhibited inspiration and dedication
to serving healthier school food;
and pending the pilot’s success, SFI also
offered to cover the cost of a district-wide
transformation.
The pilot had two goals: proving
that producing and serving healthy
food would cost no more than the
current program, and showing that
students would accept the new food,
resulting in the same or better participation
(and therefore revenue).
We worked together on the pilot, from
kitchen design to menu creation, food preparation
workflow, and meal service logistics.
As we negotiated the grant stipulations,
Sandra hesitated before agreeing to the
terms. She acknowledged that the stipulations
might cause some dissension among
her staff. She also noted that revenue could
plummet if students missed favorite menu
items and declined to participate. We countered
her concerns by listing all the ways we
would help this pilot succeed, and Sandra
regained her resolve. Our discussions illustrated
another essential rule of partnership:
by talking through concerns and solutions
openly, we were earning each other’s trust.
The pilot succeeded. Students selected
the scratch-cooked entrée twice as often as
the more familiar prepackaged lunch. Best
of all for Sandra, the new program did not
increase costs. Sandra took this success to
the school board and received support for
bringing healthy scratch cooking and salad
bars to the entire district.
To make this happen, Sandra teamed up
with the heads of facilities and her boss and
made a plan to roll out the new food program
to the entire district. Working with estimated
costs, we identified the financial commitments
of both partners, with the district
shouldering almost 50 percent of the cost of
renovating the central kitchen and remodeling
of satellite kitchens, thereby complying
with a third essential rule of partnerships:
sharing risks.
An additional boon to the transformation
of school food service arrived in the
form of a new superintendent and assistant
superintendent. Both believed that healthy
school meals play a role in greater academic
achievement, as well as social and emotional
development. For the first time since Sandra
arrived at the district she felt supported by
the administration.
The assistant superintendent invited Sandra to speak at monthly principal meetings
where she could explain the transformation
of food service and ask for principals’
support as allies and advocates for
better school food. She did, and they stepped
up. Additionally, after the assistant superintendent
reached out to the community
to support the district’s students, Sandra
saw a marked increase in attendance at the
Wellness Committee meetings she had been
doggedly hosting for parents and other interested
district residents for several years.
The committee, in turn, began to engage a
diverse group of school community representatives
such as teachers, administrators,
coaches, parents, and school employee
union leaders to seriously address ways to
comply with federal regulations while making the healthy choice the easy choice for
students and staff. The network of partnerships
forming within the school district and
the community was wonderful to see.
We experienced similarly positive outcomes
in other districts in Santa Barbara
County. We had begun by supporting food
service, the most powerless faction in the
school community. And elevating the professionalism
and capabilities of food service
did produce better school food in many districts.
But working with a broad network
of partners seeded deep-rooted systemic
change, helping schools and districts see
themselves as centers of health and wellness,
bolstering their efforts to improve student
learning and lifetime health.
Our experience with Mark taught us
to work with the willing, and working with
Sandra reinforced for us some essential
tenets of partnership. Progress had nothing
to do with money or power or authority—top-down pressure works only as long
as pressure can be maintained; it is the antithesis
of sustainability. Rather, progress
was achieved through the day-to-day work
of building relationships that transcend
the roles of grantee and grantor, listening
to our partners’ concerns, and developing
alternative solutions.
Developing a partnership based on
aligned values, earned trust, and shared risk
made it possible to change the food on the
plate and the culture of the school district
and community, supporting students’ lifetime
health and learning.