The Food Trust is excited to announce the launch of the Ready Set Grow Advisory Board!
In April 2018, The Food Trust released a call to form a new Advisory Board for its statewide Ready Set Grow Farm to Early Care and Education (ECE) Initiative. We received 27 nominations from a wide variety Farm to ECE stakeholders from across the commonwealth. Nominees included childcare providers, ECE and preschool teachers, Head Start staff, farmers, community organizers, advocates (nutrition and early childhood), food-service workers, and parents/family members of young children and farmers. Food Trust staff representing the Research department and Youth Leadership team scored the nominations using a rubric. The criteria used to select Advisory Board members can be summed up from this quote from Adrienne Maree Brown in Emergent Strategy:
‘We invite people to meetings for a lot of the wrong reasons – obligation, guilt, representation … even love. The questions to ask when shaping the invitation list are “Who is directly impacted by this issue?“, “Who is doing compelling work on this issue?” and “Who can move this work forward?“’
Nine nominees have been invited to join the Advisory Board. This board will play a lead role in shaping regional, place-based strategies to advance statewide support for Farm to ECE. Stay tuned to learn more about the Advisory Board members and their activities.