My name is Amie Hamlin and I am the executive director and cofounder of the Coalition for Healthy School Food (CHSF), a nonprofit organization based in New York. Our organization was founded in 2004 after I wrote a legislative resolution in New York State asking that schools serve a healthy plant-based entrée each day for school lunches and teach about plant-based nutrition. A resolution is not a law, but it gets introduced and voted on the same way as a law, and our resolution passed unanimously in both the assembly and the senate. Resolutions like ours serve an important educational purpose. In our case, the resolution explained why the request for healthy plant-based food in schools is important, especially when the plant-based food is provided as an option for the main dish.

We have successfully helped school districts around the country, and we regularly communicate with the school food service directors in more than thirty states. We have formal partnerships with schools in both New York City and Ithaca. In New York City, we brought the top twenty executives from the Office of Food & Nutrition Services (OFNS) to hear T. Colin Campbell, PhD, at Montefiore Hospital when he was giving a cardiac medical grand rounds presentation organized by Rob Ostfeld, MD. After the presentation, Dr. Campbell met with the twenty executives for an hour, and the Center for Nutrition Studies (CNS) donated twenty Plant-Based Nutrition Certificates so that each of them could take the course.

I cannot even express the joy my board of directors and I experienced that day. The event felt, and in fact was, truly historic. It was an amazing way to lay the groundwork with OFNS, which we have worked with ever since. In 2012, we requested that OFNS create a vegetarian menu that schools could opt in to. Although we wished it would have been completely plant-based, even just securing a vegetarian menu was historic—this was the first public school district nationwide to offer an opt-in vegetarian menu. Four schools adopted the menu with our help; meanwhile, we focused on getting the 1,800+ NYC schools to offer more plant-based choices.

We successfully got schools to offer hummus daily as a main dish. We held Family Dinner Nights with vegan meals for up to 200 people (students and their families). Each dinner was accompanied by a doctor or dietitian talking about plant-based eating and disease prevention or reversal. The children also had a physical activity and learning component, which helped boost their appetite. For another exciting event, we had Michael Greger, MD, speak to five hundred top administrators and the management of OFNS in a packed school auditorium! We have done so much more—this is just a sampling.

Our Vegan Fridays (later renamed Plant Powered Fridays) initiative is one of our biggest accomplishments. We laid the groundwork for this over the past fifteen years through our partnerships with OFNS and, more recently, Mayor Eric Adams. We requested a vegan day in all 1,800 schools just before the pandemic began; once Mayor Adams came into office and the pandemic eased up, the initiative was put into place. We continue to work closely with the mayor’s office and OFNS to promote, improve, and advocate for the program.

The interest in our work is abundant—so much so that sometimes we can’t keep up with the demand. All the pieces are in place for change; we only need additional support to expand our programming.

We are so grateful for CNS’s friendship and support. With the grant we received from CNS, we are updating our curriculum Food UnEarthed: Uncovering the Truth About Food, a prekindergarten through second grade curriculum that teaches children about food through weekly lessons. Our curriculum goes far beyond the typical school nutrition education. It’s not just, “Eat more fruits, veggies, whole grains, and low-fat dairy.” Instead, children learn to think about where their food comes from—plants and animals—and to eat less (or no) animals while consuming more plants. They learn about the many reasons, including nonnutritional reasons, for choosing plants. We’ve been piloting this curriculum for a few years, and the grant will allow us to work with an experienced curriculum writer to update some of the lessons and activities to make them even better. Once we complete this update, we will offer a webinar to teachers around the country who wish to use it in their classrooms.

I feel so fortunate to be able to do this work. I love spending my days getting healthy food on school menus, providing educational programming and resources to help bust nutrition myths, and providing children, families, and the whole school community with facts about how a plant-based diet benefits our health, the environment, and the many social justice issues related to our food choices.