Intensive Courses

Strengthening Your Local Value Chain with Smart Procurement Strategies

Speaker: Elliot Smith, Kitchen Sync Strategies

Join Kitchen Sync Strategies for an interactive workshop designed to deepen your district’s farm-to-school procurement. Elliot Smith will share intermediate-to-advanced tactics for building resilient regional food systems by redistributing information, risk and power among schools, farmers and aggregators. You’ll explore menu planning aligned with local seasonality, practical communication techniques and budgeting strategies that withstand funding freezes and shifting markets. Real-world case studies illustrate how to boost local purchasing through ground-truthed value-chain coordination.

Creating and Sustaining School Gardens

Speakers: Tristana Pirkl, Daniel Barrera Ortega, John Fisher & Em Shipman

This three-hour intensive brings together national school-garden leaders to share best practices for launching and scaling equitable, sustainable garden programs. From securing funding and designing inclusive curricula to building local garden networks, you’ll engage in hands-on activities and peer-to-peer learning. Learn how to integrate garden-based lessons into your school day, foster student leadership and measure program impact. You’ll leave with actionable strategies to cultivate vibrant outdoor classrooms that connect students to healthy food systems.

Farm to School in Indigenous Communities

Speakers: Cetan Christensen & Richard Elm Hill, First Nations Development Institute

Co-hosted by FNDI and Native community partners, this workshop guides you through crafting a culturally grounded Farm to School program plan that advances food sovereignty. Using the Native Agriculture and Food Systems Investment framework, you’ll set goals, assess capacity, and visually map your program’s strengths and opportunities. Through structured rating exercises and community testimonials, learn to embed traditional foods, language and values into school meal initiatives. Ideal for coordinators, educators and youth organizers committed to building inclusive, culturally relevant food systems.

Farm to ECE Deep Dive

Speakers: Emia Oppenheim, Association of State Public Health Nutritionists & Cynthia Greene, Shelburne Farms Institute

This deep-dive session equips early childhood educators and nutritionists with proven strategies for integrating farm-to-ECE across curricula and meal programs. Emia Oppenheim and Cynthia Greene will lead interactive discussions on nutrition standards, garden-based learning activities and family engagement. You’ll analyze real-life program models, co-design age-appropriate food-education experiences, and develop a step-by-step action plan for your site. By the end, you’ll have a clear roadmap and tools to bring fresh, local foods and hands-on learning to the youngest learners.

Food Systems & Self: Equity Through Design Practice

Speaker: Lucy Flores, Studio Magic Hour

In this reflective workshop, Lucy Flores shows how implicit bias and power dynamics shape food-system programs—and how to interrupt them through design practice. You’ll surface unexamined assumptions, map how identity and privilege influence decision-making, and begin building a practice of “positionality” in your work. Guided exercises and group dialogue help you reimagine program design grounded in equity and inclusion. Every participant receives a Positionality Pack card deck to sustain this critical self-reflection beyond the intensive.

Bringing Farmers to the Table: Train-the-Trainer Workshop

Speakers: Tomas Delgado, NFSN & Tammy Howard, National Center for Appropriate Technology

This hands-on train-the-trainer session prepares educators and TA providers to support farmers entering K–12 markets. You’ll explore the “Bringing the Farm to School” curriculum, mastering modules on procurement pathways, food safety and bid readiness through practical exercises. Farmers and school food coordinators share success stories that demystify school purchasing and highlight strong producer relationships. Leave with ready-to-use tools, facilitation tips and tailored strategies to guide farmers into sustainable school-food partnerships.