Today we’d like to introduce you to Janelle Manzano.
Janelle, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I am originally from the Bay Area and just moved to San Diego last summer! I studied Nutrition at UC Davis and graduated in 2017 with an interest in preventive health. During my senior year, I started an after-school program at an elementary school in Sacramento, whose P.E. program had recently been cut. Thus, the program focused on the importance of both exercise and nutrition. In addition, I interned at an education garden teaching students not only about how food affects their bodies but also where their food comes from and how to grow food themselves. (Being that UCD is a very agricultural-oriented school, some of that really rubs off on you.)
Through both these experiences, my interest in the clinical setting started to lean more towards the community, specifically the need for health education for young students. So, after graduation, I applied to do a service year with FoodCorps, an AmeriCorps program. As a FoodCorps service member, I served with two schools in Oakland, CA where I taught nutrition, gardening, and cooking education to students K-8th grade. It was quite the rollercoaster of learning for myself, as I have never managed my own garden before or tried to teach 30 students how to cook a “rainbow pizza.” But again, this experience showed me how these simple life skills can be the outlet that students need to ask questions about their health, food accessibility, and even the environment.
After my service year, I was excited to have found a job outside of my Northern CA realms. Today, I work for the San Diego Unified School District as the Farm to School Program Specialist with the Food and Nutrition Services. In this role, I help manage various Farm to School programs within the school, help with F2S projects within the county, teach nutrition education to students/parents/faculty, and help run our several social media platforms to further spread our message of local, fresh food for our students!
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Getting to where I am today, has been quite an exciting and interesting journey. These past few years, I have worked with a variety of unique communities that I have had to adapt to and with to make the most impact that I could. I faced a great variety of different people and I found great life lessons in all of them.
For example, I started with just one school in Sacramento then two schools in Oakland. Two cities, while similar in many ways, also had different needs/wants, resources, goals, and cultures. Now, I am working with a full school district, 250 schools, each cluster of schools in a different San Diegan community. Again, each community very unique in their own varying ways.
Trying to weave my way through these differences can be difficult. But I know what my goals are and just have to find ways to align them with the needs of the specific community that I serve. To be honest, stepping into all of these roles have been both daunting and overwhelming at times. Often I feel that there is so much work that needs to be done and I’m not doing enough. But I just have to keep reminding myself that a little can go a long way. I’m just glad to be “planting the seeds” and starting that conversation about eating healthy with young students.
Again, I thought I was going down a more clinical health route in my career. But I found this different community-centered path that I constantly feel that I am carving out from scratch. It’s still hard to tell others what I want to do or where I am headed. I take the opportunities as they come. My advice to other young women out there is to network. Find people with both similar and different passions. Discover ways to work and build together because this can lead to ideas and ideas can create changes. Big or small.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into Farm to School Program Specialist for San Diego Unified School District with the Food and Nutrition Services Department story. Tell us more about the business.
As the Farm to School Specialist for SDUSD, I help manage some of our F2S programs. These programs include supporting school gardens and providing nutrition education throughout our school district.
Ways I support school gardens is through our Garden to Cafe program, Youth Garden Stand, and Garden Gatherings. Garden to Cafe allows student-grown produce to be served in the cafeteria salad bar during lunchtime. Our Youth Garden Stands program gives schools gardens the opportunity to sell their student-grown produce back to their school community. For both programs, I provide training to school garden coordinators to assure they are following food and garden safety protocols as outlined by SD County Department of Health. (Food Safety is our #1 goal.) Lastly, Garden Gatherings are an opportunity for anyone in the school district to visit a school garden. It is a time to collaborate and network with school garden coordinators on ideas, projects, and share resources. I also sit on the county-wide Farm to School Collective, a collection of 5 school districts that all work towards F2S goals.
Another part of my role is to provide nutrition education to students, parents, and faculty. For years, there has been a negative stigma towards school food. But our Food and Nutrition Services works with a vast team that includes a variety of trained chefs, food service workers, dietitians, and more to provide both tasty and nutritious foods to our students. Our motto is “Healthy food. Successful students.” While almost all of our schools have salad bars, we go further by participating in the Harvest of the Month program. Harvest of the Month showcases new, local produce on the salad bar every month. For example, in October we had local grapes, November we had persimmons, and from January to April, we will have served four different types of citrus fruit to our students. (In the past, we have also served avocados, radishes, mushrooms, and different lettuce greens.) We also participate in California Thursdays, where we serve a meal that’s entirely sourced from CA ingredients. This dish features Mary’s chicken drumstick (an antibiotic-free, free-range chicken) born and raised in Southern CA and a locally baked bread roll. Again, we strive further by promising “California Food for California Kids.” This promise means we will continue to source our food from local, California farms/business as much as we are capable of. Whether it be our dairy, our bread, and especially our fruits and vegetables.
Despite all these efforts towards better school food for our children, we find that the stigma still remains. That is why I find it important to not only teach students why they need to eat more plants (aka visit the salad bar), but inform their parents/teachers to not be wary of our food either. I believe SDUSD has taken great strides in providing quality food for their students. I am more than proud to be part of their continuous Farm to School efforts especially because I see how hard it can be to provide the 24 million meals to our students every year. Being the second largest school district in CA, this can be hard. But somehow we make it happen in the best way and at the capacity that we can.
To learn more about SDUSD Farm to School – follow our social media or join our newsletter. (I write & create posts for both!!)
Note – I have some exciting F2S things planned for next school year… stay tuned!
Do you have a lesson or advice you’d like to share with young women just starting out?
The best piece of advice I can provide to a young woman just starting her career is to not compare yourself to others. Everyone is finding their path differently. Everyone has different interests and goals. Your interests and goals might shift, but that’s okay too. Work hard and network. You never know who you will meet, what they will teach you, how you two can work together.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 858.836.8901
- Email: jmanzano@sandi.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sdfarmtoschool/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SDFarmtoSchool/?ref=bookmarks
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/sdfarmtoschool?lang=en
Image Credit:
FoodCorps Portrait, wearing denim flannel (@bryanfarley)
Getting in touch: SDVoyager is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
