MILWAUKEE — Lisa Kingery is a public health dietician who's lived in Milwaukee for nearly two decades.
She completed a community-based needs assessment in 2006 which showed there was a major need for programming to address health in the city's younger generation.
“Milwaukee has an obesity and overweight rate at about twice the national average,” explained Kingery.
That need set her on a path to create a curriculum that would teach kids the importance of eating the right foods and giving them the skills to do it at home.
“It was meant to be a reinvented home economics, so instead of making cookies or brownies like I did in my home economics class, it was more like teaching children real skills in the kitchen like how to cook healthy whole plant meals from scratch.”
Kingery started by creating Youth Chef Academy courses for 7th and 8th graders. She then saw such a demand she expanded the curriculum to as young as kindergarteners, officially creating the non-profit FoodRight in 2015.
Since its creation, their courses have been taught in 25 different Milwaukee Public Schools and have reached 6,000 students.
“The goal is really to empower them so that they can take control and ownership of their lives and their health, and change the food system in their own community,” said Kingery.
While Kingery says the city has made progress, like creating new community gardens and opening more farmer's markets for healthy produce, there is still a long way to go.
“Milwaukee still struggles with a lot of issues,” Kingery explained to TMJ4. “We have a really high poverty rate, especially for children, and we're a very segregated city and so all of that really impacts the health, of not just the kids, but entire communities.”
This year alone FoodRight will be in 13 schools and 55 classrooms. The nonprofit has several free and healthy recipes listed on their website.
Kingery says they are always looking for volunteers to help chaperone classes inside Milwaukee Public Schools.
Visit Foodright.org for more information on volunteering.
