Episode 157: Food Education with Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn of Pilot Light
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn is the executive director of Pilot Light, a nonprofit that helps educators incorporate food education into their lessons. She joined the organization in 2014, hired personally by its founders as its first staff member, and since then, she has proudly worked in partnership with many educators, chefs, and community members to grow the reach of their food education programs from one school to 79, impacting over 20,000 students nationwide.
Alexandra and I discuss her career journey, starting with her days at a stroke center where she used hip hop to teach stroke prevention. We also dive deep into Pilot Light and the group’s involvement in developing food education’s seven standards. Alexandra’s story is a testament to the need for vision in the worlds of education and social work.
Topics Discussed:
Educating children to educate their parents
Learning from feedback
The value in listening to peers
Resources mentioned:
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Read the transcript for this episode:
Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn is the executive director of Pilot Light, where she leads the development of Pilot Light's vision and strategic goals. She was hired to the organization in 2014 by its founders as its first staff member, and since then, she has proudly worked in partnership with many educators, chefs and community members to grow the reach of their food education programs from one school to 79 impacting over 20,000 students nationwide. Welcome Alex, so nice to have you here.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 0:28
Hi, Lily. Thank you so much for having me.
Lily Jones 0:31
Absolutely. So I would love for you to take us through in whatever direction you'd like your professional journey,
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 0:39
Sure. Well, probably, like most people, I ended up in a place I didn't quite imagine when I first started. My background is in public health. I am trained in epidemiology and health promotion, and I started working at Harlem Hospital in New York City, where I was managing their stroke center, and we had a charge from the state of New York to educate the broader community around stroke prevention, the signs and symptoms of stroke and what to do if you're having a stroke. And our team, because my boss, who was a neurologist, he was friends with a hip hop artist named Dougie Fresh who lived in the community, and his kids went to school in the community, had sort of come up with this idea of, you know, what if we educated kids in schools about stroke, and did it through hip hop music to engage them, but also to make the content sticky, which I think when I share this with folks, they're always like, Oh, you educate. You talk kids about stroke, because, you know, you think kids, they most kids have no experience with it. They're kind of naive to it. But what we were doing was essentially, our goal was to train kids, to train their families at home, what they learned. So it was a train the trainer model, but through the student. So we started running this program called Hip Hop stroke in Harlem schools, in New York City public schools, and had incredible results, and it was because kids were learning the signs and symptoms of stroke through hip hop music. I can just start singing the songs off the top my head, and I am sure any kid that went through this program can still do that to this day, but it made it sticky, and then we gave them all sorts of tools that they could use to bring home to their families. And stroke education is really important, because a lot of people don't know the signs and symptoms, and they're, for the most part, painless, and if you activate 911, upon realizing that you or somebody around you is having a stroke, you can save their life because there's a medication available at the hospital. So it's super important information, and many people are just not exposed to it. But we saw that these students were taking it home to their families, and we had stories around kids who were had actually one student was standing on a subway platform and activated 911 when they saw somebody who they thought was having a stroke. We had another student at home called 911 and I even saw our we had all sorts of materials, comic books and things around the program. And I saw kids with them out kind of as they were around the community. So we had these anecdotes. We also had data to show that kids were taking it home, they were remembering it, and that prompted us, at the time, to start a nonprofit that expanded this notion of teaching through hip hop music, engaging kids in health education through hip hop music and culture. We, we called it Hip Hop public health, and we sort of expanded this model to nutrition education and physical activity education and in Yeah, it was incredibly impactful. And I loved it. And like, you know, most things in life. Sometimes your your personal life, you have to make decisions. And I got married, and my husband was from Chicago, and he got a job in Chicago, so I started looking for another role. And one night I was I was scrolling online, and I found a job position for the this first executive director of pilot light, and it was posted by our chef founders, and it was all about using food to teach and using food to engage students and learning core content. And I remember seeing this and just thinking that is first of all, so up my alley, because food and music are very similar in the way they connect people and just engage everybody, but also this idea of bringing it into the classroom, I thought was in aligning with teachers existing objectives. I thought was really smart, so I applied and fortunately I got it. That was 12 years ago, and I'm grateful every day because I've had the pleasure of working alongside our founding chefs, but also, and I'll share more about pilot but the many educators and colleagues of various kinds of expertise that we've engaged to grow our programs and grow our reach now throughout the country.
Lily Jones 5:23
Amazing. I love hearing about all of that. I mean, I think as a teacher, I definitely found music to be such an impactful way to teach, really anything. And I love that connection between food and music too. Thinking back. I mean, I've been out of the classroom for a long time and working on curriculum in different ways and integrating these subjects, but when I was in the classroom, my favorite unit I did was breads around the world. And we learned about different cultures around the world and how they made bread and how it was different. It was like science and social studies and culture, and was so fun. Like, I still want to do this unit as a grown up.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 5:56
I mean, I think that exists as a Pilot Light lesson on some level. Bread, rice, pasta, there's certain foods where you can teach about all different cultures and how these foods bring people together. I'm going to share a video with you as a follow up. That is so that is so cool that you did that and to your point, yes, you know you, maybe you're embedding this in your social studies curriculum, but you're touching on reading, and you know, maybe as you're making the bread, you're measuring and connecting to math. And there's just so much that can come out of a food education lesson. And in so many ways, it touches on kids lives, even beyond, you know, just showing them how food is so, so much a part of our lives and so connected to our culture and our identity and our history, and speaking to something like bread around the world is a perfect ...perfectly exemplifies that,
Lily Jones 6:50
Yeah, and it's so instantly engaging. They do it all the time. We recently did a curriculum project for an after school program. I'm in Berkeley, California. So this was in Oakland, and it was a gardening program, but we did several lessons of where they got to eat, what they, you know, grew in the garden, and those were by far the most popular ones.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 7:12
I'm sure, especially in Berkeley, where you can grow all year long. But that's awesome. Yeah, anytime food. And I mean anything hands on. But food is, I mean, yeah, kids, they just light up and they're excited and just open to whatever is coming to them. And when you can connect it to the garden too and give them a chance to just appreciate where their food comes from, it's really cool.
Lily Jones 7:38
Yes, for sure. So tell us a little bit more about Pilot Light. I know that you came on kind of after it was founded. Can you tell us a little bit about its history and how it's evolved over the years?
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 7:50
Sure. So like I said, we were founded by leading chefs in Chicago, incredibly talented chefs. They're still very much engaged in our programs today, Paul Khan Matthias merges Jason Hamel and Justin large, and during First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign, there had been a call to action to chefs across the country to do something in their schools and local communities related to food and the chefs they wanted to contribute and be part of this, and in use the connections and the networks that they had to really uplift this as a cause, a mission in Chicago, and like anything else, when you have a big call to action, it's always like, you get and I'm sure you've been to events like this, where you Come back and you're like, Well, where do I start? Where do I start? That was a great conversation. But now, what do I do? And they came back to Chicago and had that moment of, what do we do? And it sounds like after a series of meetings, said, You know, we have Matthias's daughters went to school at a Chicago Public School, and they were like, Let's just start there. Let's go sit down. We'll talk to the principal and the teachers there and get their advice. And so from what I understand, they went in and said, you know, we want to connect your students to the power of food. What's the best way to do that? And the response was, let's work with the teachers. And that conversation definitely set our path, but we kind of meandered as far as how we got to where we are today. And the first iteration of the program was where the chefs would sit with the teachers and say, you know, what are what unit? What are you teaching now, whether it was magnets, plate tectonics, American Revolution, poetry in conversation, they would come up with a plan to teach that through food. So teaching about the Boston Tea Party in the American Revolution, or teaching about magnets through induction burners. Years or plate tech, not plate tectonics, by cooking eggs in a sous vide and showing how the the the composition of the egg changed with just with a very small changes in temperature, and comparing that to the Earth's crust, teaching poetry through food and using it as a way for students to tell their food stories and connect to their families and their history. So beautiful lessons coming out of these classrooms. At the time the chefs were going into the lunchroom, the lessons would all be taught in the same day, and then there'd be a lunch that would be served to the students that tied in all these different concepts. This was when I came on, and I just remember thinking like, this is the most amazing experience for these students, and just being really excited to be part of it. And the the charge that had been given to me was, let's figure out how to grow this to more schools, and in early our early our early attempts at this, we we expanded to five schools in addition to that one school across the city of Chicago. And very it was very sort of opportunistic. It was who would introduce me to somebody and but it ended up that these were very different communities that we had coming on, different cultural backgrounds, different levels of access to food, even though we just found it was hard for something to be apples to apples across these schools, even within the same district. And then on top of that, chefs are very busy people, and there was no way that we could do this consistently across these different schools, and have the chefs organized in a way that would that would make sense and make this scalable. These first six schools taught us a lot of lessons, so at that point, we we made two pivots that that allowed us to grow. The first was we really shifted our focus to teachers. So we we started running professional developments. We started investing in teachers. We would actually pay teachers a stipend to spend time in our in our PD, and then to bring our program back to their classroom, we started sort of standardizing some of the lessons that we had and that we'd done at the first school, so that teachers would have these exemplars, so they'd have something to build off of and take with them. And that proved early on to be a good direction for us, especially the stipends for teachers, which I'm sure, as an educator, you can appreciate, there's a lot of time that goes into bringing something new into the classroom, especially, I think there's kind of a fear factor sometimes when anybody here is like, Oh, we're going to bring food into the mix with kids. But like, what does that look like in a classroom? And how can we, as pilot lights, support you in doing that.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 13:02
The other, the other step that we took that's still very much of our work today really guides everything that we do, is establishing our food education standards. And we, I tell this story a lot because I think it's important in thinking about what food education is we, at early days, I would be trying to recruit schools or or donors and funders, and would use this term food education, and it's definitely something in our space now that's more recognizable. But at the time, folks were like, oh, because we're founded by chefs, they thought it was culinary education, or they thought we were doing nutrition education or agricultural education, and we're sort of pigeonholing us into these different buckets based on what they thought that meant. And we had a realization of a we need to define this term food education as more of like food systems education, or like comprehensive food education, but also we had to do it in a way that made sense for teachers. So we in 2017 we convened stakeholders across a variety of disciplines. We had folks in fields of education and child development, food farmers, chefs. We had an eating disorder expert. We had anybody who we thought would have an important lens or perspective into what students K through 12 needed to know to have healthy and informed relationships with food. And we had many teachers in the room with us, and we spent two days building out those pillars of what food education is, and those discussions over those two days led to we have seven food education standards now. Our first standard is food connects us, and that is very much the foundation. The heart of what we do. If you if you know when students sort of learn all the ways in which they connect to food and through food, how they can connect to each other and connect to their families and their communities, that's that's where you develop that appreciation for the role of food in your lives. And then the standards that come after that are around food and food and the environment where our food comes from, food and health, food and decision making. And our last standard is all around food and advocacy. So kind of building up to what students can be able to do, or should be able to do once they acquire all of these knowledge and skills in the earlier standards. But we have those seven standards, and then we worked with a team of teachers to build them out into specific competencies, broken down by grade band, we crosswalked them at the time to Common Core, social emotional learning standards, national health education standards, so they essentially served as a blueprint for teachers that they could pick up in their classrooms and they could implement in a way that was adaptable. It was sort of a choose your own adventure type thing, and in those standards, have they guided all of our programs ever since they they've served as our North Star as an organization. And there's something that very much through our work with teachers and when we first meet with them, the standards are front and center, because that no matter what the program or the lesson, that's what we're going to do. But also in our conversations with policy makers and funders, we're really trying to build appreciation for what this field of food education is, but how food through, through these standards, food can be used as a tool to teach and engage students as a mode of experiential learning, and they've that roadmap or the you know, those standards have served as an incredibly helpful resource to us as we've brought our programs and our initiatives to any partner,
Lily Jones 17:01
I think that's such a smart move to focus on the standards and to create the standards. And it's so interesting hearing about the process. I appreciate that you brought people from many different disciplines together to really create these and I think that great standards are such like a grounding mechanism for teachers to really know what's important to focus on, and I appreciate that there's also not a million of them. Like it's manageable, and it's something that teachers can work for. And I like hearing about how you're using it in various different capacities, with teachers, with policymakers, and that it really brings things together.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 17:36
Yeah, we we're all fangirls or fan people of our standards at pilot light and but yeah, they, we found teachers. They they embrace them, they love them. Probably one of the number one pieces of feedback that we get is just like, I love the standards. I love what I could do with them. And actually, so we published them officially in 2018 and just to come back to the first comment you made some we knew we couldn't do it alone. We, you know, we could have written out a set of standards and been like, okay, here they are. But we really wanted to have a diverse set of, you know, expertise and in perspectives as far as what what food education meant from all these these different folks, and that's what really made them what they are. And I'm incredibly grateful to the folks who contributed them to early days and had some faith in us to spend two days with us in developing these but recently, this past year, we actually updated and revised the standards and essentially republish them, because we had this feedback from hundreds of teachers throughout the country who had used them and and we had stories of what that had looked like. We also the initial version was K through 12, and we've just seen so much opportunity and so much excitement around our work in pre K that we wanted to expand them down, and one of our colleagues, who's a pre K teacher, Megan Gottlieb, led the writing and development of that component. But the new standards just came out, and I would love for your your viewers and listeners to take a look, and I'll be sure to share the link with you, because they're they're beautiful. We're so proud of them. They include those stories from the classroom so that teachers can pick them up and see, you know, whatever community, urban, rural, suburban, coast to coast, they can pick them up and and see themselves on some level. And see, you know why food education can make sense for their how it can make sense for their classrooms?
Lily Jones 19:44
Yes, we'll definitely add the link, and I would love to check them out. So we'll also add them.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 19:48
We have our curriculum programs where we teach teachers about curriculum, and have kind of a bank of different standards, so we'd love to add those there as well for teachers to use.
Lily Jones 19:56
And so yeah, can you tell us a little bit about how teachers are using these standards and teaching food education in conjunction with other subject areas,
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 20:06
Sure, so we do have teachers who pick up the standards and run with them. We also have a number of programs that we deploy to support teachers in this in this journey and building their capacity around the model. The first is the Food Education Fellowship, which is actually just entered its seventh year. And each year we recruit teacher leaders from throughout the country who who want to become leaders and ambassadors of this movement around integrated food education. Each year we bring on about 25 teachers. This year we have 26 from throughout the country, and like I said, we invest in our teachers. They receive a generous stipend. They join us for monthly professional development. We provide coaching. They get access to a peer network of other educators who who are in on this journey with them and want to work together to bring this to life in their classrooms. And the fellowship we've had teachers pre K through 12th grade at every content area. You can imagine. It's funny. Actually, we're talking about music. We had a music teacher join us this year, and I'm so excited to see what she does in her classroom. But we've had a lot of special ed teachers stem all core content areas. We've we had an AP Human Geography teacher a couple years ago, just improves. You can teach anything through food. And I there's so many examples of what this looks like, and I'm always afraid I won't do it justice. But for example, a middle school math teacher trying to bring proportional ratios to life for his students. Ended up working with his students to take a vegan pancake recipe and scale it up to serve more people. And then throughout that they were they were preparing a meal together and learning about proportional ratios, but also there was components around science and in community as part of that lesson. We think of another example that's poetry. I mentioned before, poetry and food stories, but one of my favorite lessons was where a teacher was called you are what you eat, and students brought in recipes from home and and cookbooks they had actual like food in the classroom. And the kids moved from station to station and developed these poems that they then shared out and just really beautiful. And I often think like, oh, if I remember every time I learned about food or food was part of my classroom lessons as a kid, and I always think, oh, gosh, these kids must be taking all of this with them. I especially our fellowship. We hear from teachers who have been in the classroom for many years that it it transforms their practice and brings creativity into the classroom, where students kind of have an energy and they're excited and the teachers are having fun. And once they see that this this impact, and that their kids are just that much more engaged, it really sticks. And people just keep doing it, and that's the goal of the fellowship, very much, to really invest heavily. So they keep doing it, year after year, which we have an alumni network to support and also that that they're serving as ambassadors and bringing other teachers into the program and into the model. So we have teachers who have kind of developed these pods in their communities where other teachers keep applying, which has been very exciting to us.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 23:39
We have another program that's kind of on the other side of the spectrum. The fellowship is very intense, and in the sense it's a time commitment, and teachers are compensated for that time commitment, but we recognize it's not for everybody. So we have a program called snack time explorers that hinges on the USDA Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program. And what that program is, is boxes of fresh, fresh cut produce that are delivered to just schools throughout the country, mostly Title One schools and teacher. Are you familiar with this program? Oh, most people aren't. It's kind of this best kept secret, but 2.7 million kids throughout the country receive these boxes of produce in their classrooms, and they're all broken down into individual servings. They're dropped off with the teachers, and typically what we're hearing was happening is that teachers were passing out the produce and moving on. It was a component of their day. But to us, that was an opportunity for food education. And we partnered with a produce company out of Columbus, Ohio called Dano produce to develop a program called snack time explorers, where, essentially, teachers are provided with a toolkit to teach to these these produce boxes that are coming into the classroom and to support implementation. It's super plug and play. They don't really have to. There's no prep involved, really. It's just, you know, when, when these boxes arrive, the teachers can kind of go through this tasting process with the kids, where the kids become explorers, and they get passports, and they're encouraged over and over again to try the produce that arrives in their classrooms. So they're, you know, and the stuff that comes through this program, it's not just apples and pears and grapes, it's bok choy and fennel and star fruit and watermelon radishes. I think it's, it's very cool, the the exposure that it provides to students and teachers are guiding them through that process. They're all eating it together. And there's definitely, you know, there's components around building student curiosity and in strong social, emotional benefits to giving students this experience in the classroom. But also, teachers are saying, like so, much less of it's going in the trash now, and kids are actually enjoying it and experiencing it together and experiencing it with their teachers, and it's something that they look forward to in most schools and districts. I think they receive them twice these boxes, twice a week. So so that program isn't as much integrated into core content. But like I said, it has these social, emotional learning components, and there's teachers are embedding it in a way that makes sense into their classrooms. But what we have seen, and what we like to see, is that when teachers engage, then they kind of they apply to the fellowship. For instance, they kind of up level that experience and get more into it, because they've seen what happens when food is part of learning. And then finally, we have our food education center, which is an online digital library. With we have right now, about 135 free lessons. We have all sorts of resources for teachers and also for families, and our goal with that is to just disseminate our mission to as many teachers and community members as possible, and just make it really, really accessible to them. And everything on there is aligned to our food education standards, but if you go into that library, you can break it down specifically based on content area or grade level. So what you were talking about with bread around the world, there's a lesson on on rice on there, there's a lesson on pasta, very similar, and, and, yeah, again, it's all free. And we just, we want to get it out there and make sure that teachers have the tools they need to implement.
Lily Jones 27:40
What cool programs, and I love hearing about all those three different ways that teachers can get involved and use this information in their classrooms. I think it's really cool thinking about partnering with that organization around getting the snacks in the classroom. Really thinking about like, where is this already happening? Where it could be happening better? You know, smart move, right? Like kids are eating this fruit, but not really engaging in it. So it's so interesting to hear about how things change. Where it's the same activity, right? They're still eating the fruit, but we're adding a layer, and how that can make so much of a difference.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 28:15
It's it's solved for a challenge that we have. And I'm sure you can appreciate a lot of times, teachers are like, Well, how am I going to pay for that? Or how, like, it's one more thing. How am I going to what does this look like to bring food and food into the classroom? And aside from the logistical complications, or, you know, it's also just the expense and the burden of doing it. And the beauty of the freshman Vegetable Program is that it's already coming into the class. But through our other programs, we encourage teachers to first of all, we in our we often give provide a stipend so that teachers at least have the resources that they that they need to implement. But we encourage teachers to look to the school garden and look to the cafeteria and look to those places in the community where food is already present. And also, we've seen teachers, sometimes, depending on their district, aren't allowed to have food in the classroom. For instance, there's some wellness policies and different especially post covid, different sanitation guidelines and things like that that make it impossible for food to be in the classroom. But that doesn't have to be a reason not to do food education. So we, we really, in those cases, lean into integration and what it means to teach through food, and whether that's with, you know, a beautiful book on food or or content that you can find online or in our library or through the school garden or nature, something like that. We try to provide other pathways to teachers to show the different options for when the various policies make some of this work impossible.
Lily Jones 30:00
Hmm, yeah, it's so interesting hearing about pilot light and all the great work that you all are doing. I want to shift gears a little bit to your experience working at pilot light. And I know through every you know, professional or personal experience that I've had, like I always, learned so much, and so I'm so curious just to hear from you, what have you learned about yourself or in general, through your work at pilot light, sure.
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 30:23
Well, I've been with the organization now for 12 years, and I think I love being in a role where I get to work with folks from so many different areas of expertise. We have we have teachers on our team, we have chefs, we have folks in public health and different types of creatives that we've worked with. And I think it's the the lesson that I've taken which I think our programs are stronger. Our work is stronger because of these perspectives that we bring on and listening to them and always thinking about how we can be inclusive around who's around the table. I also think just beyond that, listening is really important, and not like I was telling you just I told you a little bit about how our work and our model and our programs evolved, but there's so many ways in which they've evolved. I think you have to keep iterating to grow and to create impact, and the folks who are around the table are key to that and that, not just that, but also through programs. Always like, if you're if you're collecting a survey or an assessment, or even in just casual conversation with somebody, always be thinking about how that that data. They're all data points as far as what, what they can contribute to your growth and and, yeah, I think just the the people and that we've been really lucky to bring around us, my, my biggest kind of emphasis has always been on, like, just making sure those that everybody's part of the conversation and that we're we're listening and learning every step of the way.
Lily Jones 32:06
That's a beautiful takeaway. Thank you so much, and thank you so much for sharing about your work and pilot light. Can you tell people where they can connect with you and learn more?
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 32:15
Sure. Well, you can go to our website. It's www, dot pilot light chefs.org. You could also follow us on social media. We're on we're on LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook, and our handle is at pilot light chefs, across all of those, please follow us. And then, of course, actually, while you're on our website, you can sign up for our newsletter as well, where we you can actually indicate that you're an educator, and we'll make sure that you get information about our programs. We do most of our recruitment in the spring. So for our fellowship, for instance, teachers around the country, any you know, like I said, any grade level, any content area, we're looking for folks who are passionate about passionate about this, and want to lead, so definitely get on our newsletter so that you can be the first to hear when it's available. Snack time explorers, we recruit district to district, but if you're in one of those districts, you can apply, apply to us and also receive a stipend for your time that you've contributed to the program. And then and on on our food education center, the digital library that I told you about, we're about to launch video trainings for teachers, and some of those will be available for for teachers out there throughout the country who just want some practical advice on how to bring this to life. And our our goal is, and our mission, like I said, it's just to put this in the hands of teachers who can bring this to their students, and we're here to do whatever we can to support you and to make it accessible and to invest in you. So if there's something you don't see that you want, or something that would make it easier, also don't hesitate to reach out through any of those channels and let us know.
Lily Jones 33:59
Wonderful. Thank you so much, Alex,
Alexandra DeSorbo-Quinn 34:03
thank you so much for having me. Bye.
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