Cooking Demo at Third Place Commons

A couple of weeks ago, chef volunteer Carol Peterman helped us out by demoing OFL recipes NW Apple Salad and Thai Basil Chicken Chili at a community resource sharing event at Third Place Commons. Read all about it here on her blog!

Teaching Food Resource Management in OFL classes

Our goal at OFL is to teach people how to prepare healthy and nutritious meals on a limited budget. So while cooking and nutrition are both core components to an OFL class, food resource management is also equally important. Last month we offered a special training opportunity for our volunteers, focusing on how to effectively teach food resource management in OFL classes.

But what is food resource management exactly? Food resource management (FRM) skills are the skills necessary to make the most of available food resources. These skills include menu planning, smart purchasing techniques, and creative usage of available resources.

Week five of the class traditionally involves a field trip to the grocery store, where participants get hands on practice with label reading and comparison shopping. This class session is the most obvious opportunity to focus on creative development of FRM skills. For the new OFL volunteer, leading a successful grocery store tour can be somewhat daunting because it is so different from a normal class. In order to make the grocery store visit more approachable, we asked one of our longtime volunteers Gaynol Flora to lead us through an example grocery store tour. For those of you that missed the field trip, Gaynol wrote an excellent tutorial that takes you through the store. You can read all about it on her blog.

One great way to prepare for a grocery store tour is to think about a couple of the take home messages or skills that you are hoping that participants will walk away with, and then try and brainstorm an activity that you can do in the store that will help to reinforce this skill. As we like to say at OFL there are no bad foods, and this is especially important to keep in mind at the grocery store. We are not there to tell people what to buy and what not to buy, but rather we are trying to equip participants with the skills necessary to make informed choices at the grocery store. For example, say you are hoping that participants will be able to identify whole grain products in the bread aisle. You can choose a couple of loafs of bread, and ask participants to check whether or not they are whole grain products. How do they know? Have them practice reading ingredients lists to identify the whole grain breads.

Overall the workshop was a really great chance for OFL volunteers new and old to share and brainstorm different ideas. I think that we all walked away with a bunch of great new ideas about different ways to build FRM skills throughout an OFL class.

Whole Foods 5% day to benefit Operation Frontline Seattle

Mark you calendars: On Wednesday October 28th, all five of the Whole Foods Market stores in the Seattle Metro area will donate 5% of their net sales to support Operation Frontline and Solid Ground! If you or your friends like to shop at Whole Foods, the 28th is the day to go wild and do all of your shopping!

Feel free to forward this on to anybody who might be interested, and if you are on facebook check out our event and invite all of your friends: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=200786106152

There are 5 conveniently located stores for you to choose from:

Bellevue
888 116th Ave.
Bellevue, WA 98004

Interbay
2001 15th Ave. W
Seattle, WA 98119

Redmond
17991 NE Redmond Way
Redmond, WA 98052

Roosevelt Square
1026 NE 64th St.
Seattle, WA 98115

Westlake
2210 Westlake Ave.
Seattle, WA 98121


Tell all your friends! We look forward to seeing you there.

Please take 2 minutes to help SAVE HUMAN SERVICE FUNDING in King County

You might remember a few months back Solid Ground ran a very successful petition campaign to protect City of Seattle human service funding. Now, with King County proposing a 2010 budget that would decimate human services and leave thousands upon thousands of county residents without the resources and support they need to overcome hunger, homeless, domestic violence, despair and other critical needs, we are going back to the electronic petition strategy.

Here is the link to the petition: http://apps.facebook.com/causes/petitions/290

IF YOU LIVE IN KING COUNTY: please click to it, sign it and pass it on. You can email the link to friends, or if you are a Facebooker, you can use the Facebook INVITE tool to pass it on to your FB buddies.

IF YOU DO NOT LIVE IN KING COUNTY: Please do not sign, but please do pass it on to your friends.

A little contest: Whoever recruits the most signatures (as tracked by the software) will get a little gift bag assembled by the RD elves at Solid Ground

Ok, 2 minutes: click, sign and pass it on. Thousands of folks throughout King County are relying on you!