Center for Regional Food Systems

Summer Food Service Programs can be an ideal time to start looking at local purchasing. This webinar covers the basics of Farm to Summer, how to incorporate local purchasing into summer food service programs, and provides examples of Farm to Summer programs happening throughout Michigan.

This webinar is hosted by:

• Abigail Harper, MSU Center for Regional Food Systems
• Jenie Farinas, USDA Food and Nutrition Service
• Sara Harmon, Michigan Department of Education
• Doreen Simonds, Waterford School Districtict

Farm to Summer: Incorporating Local Foods into Summer Food Service Programs Webinar Slides

Webinar Transcript:

Abby Harper: So welcome everybody to our webinar this afternoon. This is the fourth in our My Farm to School Spring Webinar Series, and today we'll be talking about Farm to Summer programs and how to incorporate local foods into your Summer Food Service Program. I'm really excited about the awesome presenters with me today. My name is Abby Harper. Some of you may know me. I'm the Farm to School Specialist here at the MSU Center for Regional Food Systems, and I do both farm to school and farm to early care and education work throughout Michigan. On the line with me today is enie Farinas from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service Midwest Region Office. She is the Farm to Summer and child care contact there. We also have Sarah Harmon from the Michigan Department of Education and then Doreen Simonds who's the food service director at Waterford Public Schools. So I'm really excited to have all of these partners on the phone to bring you our webinar today, and I think it's going to be really valuable for all of you. Before we get started, I do just want to take a quick survey of who's in the room. So you will see a poll come up on your screen there with two very brief questions. If you could answer quickly, just so that we have an idea of who all is here on the webinar with us today, and we can tailor some of the information appropriately. So we'll give you guys a couple of minutes to fill out that webinar or that poll. All right, going give just a couple more seconds to see if anyone else wants to chime in on that poll that's popped up on your screen. All right, so, it seems like most of us are fairly new to farm to school or maybe have a little bit of experience, and we've got a good, combination of summer food service providers, some schools, some supporting organizations, and other folks on, as well. So a good mix of folks. That's exciting to see so we'll definitely go into some of the introductory to Farm to Summer stuff, since there seems to be a lot of folks on who are pretty new to it. So it's great to see you all here. All right, so just to give you a quick overview of our webinar today, we'll start with a brief overview of what firm to summer is, some of those basic 101s, as well as the benefits of increasing your local purchasing in the summer. We'll then spend some time going into the how-to of implementing Farm to Summer programs, including some of the procurement regulations that relate to Farm to Summer, and then we'll end with some examples of what Farm to Summer looks like. I mentioned Doreen Simonds from Waterford Public Schools is on. She's going to take a few minutes at the end to talk about their Farm to Summer work and some of the initiatives they have going on at Waterford, which I hope will help kind of contextualize all the information that we're going to give you with how it looks on the ground, and of course, we will certainly leave plenty of time for questions at the end. A couple of logistical notes. If at any point during the webinar, you have any technical difficulties, at the top of the screen, you should see it option for opening a chat window, and you can feel free to type in any logistical questions in there, and I'd be happy to help troubleshoot them as I'm able throughout the webinar. There's also a question and answer button. You should feel free. We're going to save plenty of time at the end for questions, but if you come up with some questions throughout, and you don't want to forget them, you can feel free to type them in that question-and-answer box, and if we aren't able to get to them throughout, we'll be sure to check back in with them at the end of the webinar, and I think that's all the logistical information. With that, I'm going to pass it off to Jenie Farinas, whose going to talk about an overview of Farm to Summer. So take it away, Jenie.

Read the full Farm to Summer: Incorporating Local Foods into Summer Food Service Programs Webinar Transcript