Four Key Food Behavior Change Motivators in a Tribal Community

By Anastasia Cabral, RD Periodically, our partners across the US share important participant and patient feedback. This is incredibly helpful to: Highlight the most impactful curriculum elements; Identify which evidence-based Experiential Drivers of Behavior Change are especially motivational for a particular population; Support curriculum improvements. Recently, new partners in Nevada completed the first cohort of…
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Navigating 2024-2025 Budget Challenges: Introducing Willow’s Subscription Plan for Schools

As schools across the country prepare their budgets for the upcoming academic year, a critical financial milestone looms on the horizon. The expiration date for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) III funds are fast approaching. These funds, initially provided to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, have been crucial in maintaining…
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Interested in Exploring a Career in Teaching Kitchens? We Are Piloting a New College-Level Course That Has You Covered! 

The emerging field of Teaching Kitchens has been growing rapidly, especially among health professionals (nutritionists, health coaches, nurses, physicians etc.). As pioneers in the field, we know that developing the workforces for this new field is critical. FamilyCook foresees a range of roles, including peer educators and Teaching Kitchen Assistants, whose backgrounds mirror the diverse communities…
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Planting the Seeds of Healthy Habits With Digital Communication Channels 

As parents and educators, we all want to encourage our children to develop healthy habits that span across their physical, emotional and social well-being. It’s no secret that digital channels play a large role in how young minds think and grow; but did you know it can also be an incredible tool for implementing positive…
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Building the Evidence Base for Teaching Kitchens: Demonstrating Sustained Effect

Having the funding and ability to follow participants in Teaching Kitchen (TK) interventions over time is extremely difficult and rare. Most programs are working off of philanthropic grants with shorter time frames and such funding sources are infrequently renewed. Hence just keeping a TK effort going is tough enough, let alone obtaining IRB approval and…
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Success: the Purposeful Addiction

As we explore the tenth and final of our “10 Experiential Drivers of Behavior Change” you may ask: how can your Teaching Kitchen be set up for participants’ success? What does success mean at different age and stages of development? Sometimes we need to cross disciplines to fully understand the power of success to achieve…
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Come Together: How Aligning Systems Drives Impact

In NYC, Teen Battle Chefs create new school breakfast recipes, like these breakfast tacos. Integrated breakfast programs like these increase school breakfast participation, on-time attendance, and ensure children are fed and ready to learn.   As Teaching Kitchen practitioners look to scale up and significantly broaden impact, we look to tap into existing systems –…
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Skill Reinforcement: Driver of Behavior Change

Skill reinforcement is a driver of behavior change for healthy eating patterns.   I’m always a bit surprised at how much faith teaching kitchen program designers place on cooking demos. No question: Demos can be very inspiring. They provide concrete ideas. They teach radically different (and much healthier) meal concepts than what their audience (usually…
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Skill Building

Skill Building: Driver of Behavior Change

Skill building is a driver of behavior change for healthy eating patterns.   Teaching kitchen program design isn’t complete without skill building. While researching how our drivers of behavior change work at different ages, we learned something very interesting about skill building. For adolescents and adults, the process of skill building is the heart and…
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What is a teaching kitchen

What Is a Teaching Kitchen?

Creating Helpful Definitions for Teaching Kitchen Initiatives We’ve been busily developing projects for a wide range of new and potential clients across the US. As we do so, it’s become clear that many Teaching Kitchen-related terms lack consistent definitions. Just this week, I was asked to explain the difference between cooking classes and a Teaching Kitchen! And…
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