Oregon Farm to School Institute Brings Teams Together for Year-Long Professional Development and Action Planning

This article is pulled from episode 2-48 of The Farm to School Podcast hosted by Michelle Markesteyn and Rick Sherman. For the full episode and transcript, click here.

What happens when school administrators, cafeteria managers, teachers, and students spend three intensive days together planning how to integrate local food throughout their school culture? The Oregon Farm to School Institute provides exactly that opportunity—a year-long professional development program adapted from a proven Vermont model that’s transforming how Oregon schools approach farm to school programming.

A Proven Model Comes to the Pacific Northwest

The Oregon Farm to School Institute is based on a model that started over a decade ago at Shelburne Farms in Vermont. “It has been so successful and had such an impact that has grown from Vermont to New England across the country,” explains Melina Barker, Director of the Oregon Farm to School Network.

The USDA invested in Shelburne Farms and Vermont FEED to offer a program called “The Adapters,” helping state teams adapt the Institute to their local contexts. A few years ago, a joint team from Washington and Oregon traveled to Vermont for training on “how we would adapt it here in the Pacific Northwest because it hasn’t come to the Pacific Northwest yet.”

Other states can still participate in this adaptation process by applying to spend a week at Shelburne Farms, experiencing their summer retreat and receiving training on the behind-the-scenes work of running an institute.

Oregon’s Unique Adaptations

Oregon has made specific modifications to fit local needs. “We’ve separated early childhood education from K12. So we actually offer two different institutes. And we’re alternating years,” Barker explains. The current year focuses on K-12, while next year will feature farm to early childhood education, “and that model is a lot different because it’s just different needs of that community.”

The Power of Integration: Cafeteria, Classroom, and Community

The Institute’s foundation rests on what Barker calls “the three C’s”—cafeteria, classroom, and community. “Farm to school works best when those things are all deeply integrated into a school, school culture and integrated with each other.”

Oregon leads the nation in farm to school programming, offering “noncompetitive reimbursement grants that give schools and CNPs money to buy local food. No other state has that,” Barker notes. As one colleague puts it: “Fancy words for you actually have to opt out of getting state funding.”

However, Oregon has focused more on breadth than depth. “We don’t have as much depth in terms of supporting people to layer in that support for local food with what’s happening in the school garden with what’s happening in the classroom and community. And so…the institute is just like the next layer of what the support that we want to offer.”

The Seedling Program: A New Pathway

Recognizing that not everyone can build a full team immediately, Oregon added a “seedlings” program for individuals or pairs who want to participate but “couldn’t quite have all the components there to build a full team for their school or district.”

Sarah Neelon, a CTE sustainable agriculture teacher at McDaniel High School in Portland, participated as a seedling. A former FoodCorps service member from 2014-2015, she returned to farm to school work after wearing “a lot of the different hats” including garden educator and curriculum consultant.

“My colleague Kelsey Madison and I were lucky enough to be here…because we weren’t able to sort of sufficiently prod our admin,” Neelon explains. Despite having 1.5 FTE positions for sustainable agriculture and teaching intro to food processing, intro to sustainable agriculture, and urban farming, they lacked the full team required for institute participation.

The seedlings program focuses on “giving them ideas and tools and a plan so that when they go back to school, they can start building those relationships so they have a team maybe in future years to come to the institute.”

Why Cross-Sector Teams Matter

The institute requires what they call a “cross-sector team” including administration, child nutrition, and education perspectives. “It’s a commitment…not just like, oh, come here, eat and have fun. There’s like…you have to commit to doing stuff that’s weird and reporting back,” one coordinator notes.

This team approach prevents program failure. “I’ve seen programs fail that has an on fire school garden coordinator. And so if you have a whole team, if you have an admin there with you and they’re all building together, your chances of success are so much better.”

For Neelon, connecting with other perspectives proved invaluable. Sitting with “a Wellness coordinator at our table…a food systems something or another…all these other people that play different roles…hearing the pitfalls and the roadblocks for other folks, it’s just like, really illuminating.”

She discovered both sides of disconnection: “We hear someone saying ‘there’s that random high school that does AG stuff. And I just need to connect with them’ like a district person. And it’s like ohh we’re that. Except we need to get our district person to pay attention to us.”

The Summer Retreat: More Than a Conference

The program kicks off with a three-day summer retreat at Oregon Garden, the state’s botanical garden. “There’s a reason that we call this the summer retreat…It’s not a traditional conference,” Barker emphasizes. “We have some skill building workshops. We have some field trips, but we have a lot of time for teams to work together with their coach to actually have those conversations and build their action plan.”

Teams work “in a supportive, beautiful…environment where they can feel inspired and work together in a way that they cannot do usually during the school year.”

Mapleton’s Success Story: Student-Centered Growth

Stephanie Grijalva, an art teacher who also teaches English, coordinates talent and gifted programming, and leads a culinary project-based learning class at Mapleton School District, returned for her second year with her district’s supportive superintendent and new team members.

Mapleton serves about 150 students K-12 in a tiny coastal community with “one store, 1 gas station…a church, a library, the school,” about 15 miles from Florence and 45 minutes from Eugene.

Using the institute’s rubric measuring development across the three C’s, Mapleton saw remarkable progress. “Last year we were developing emerging in almost all areas and we saw growth across the board just in one year of working with the Institute.”

Student Asher Guile, a senior who has worked in the school garden for two years, joined as a team member—one of the only high school students participating. “Part of our philosophy at Mapleton is that all of our experiences should be student Led, student centered and so you can’t make the decisions you’re making at the Institute without Student Voice,” Grijalva explains.

The school features hydroponics in each classroom and a large system in the hallway, ensuring “kids always have access to salad and stuff.” Garden produce reaches the culinary class, and the district hosted two community dinners where “students designed the menus they added in produce from our garden. They served cooked, did the whole thing.”

All project-based learning areas integrate: “Media taking pictures of our garden and the growth…culinary taking whatever foods we grow…construction they help out with…materials to build planter beds.” Business students are developing marketing plans for the school’s second annual farmers market.

Creating Spaciousness for Collaboration

For Neelon at McDaniel High School, the institute’s value lies in creating space for intentional collaboration. While she has a “wonderful relationship with Chris Walters, our cafeteria manager” who will put garden lettuce on the salad bar and make flyers about it, “it’s always just so kind of last minute or hectic.”

“To have spaciousness to actually sit down with Chris and be like, these are our goals. Like what if we had a weekly something or you gave us a list and we could actually grow…honestly, just to have the spaciousness with Chris would be like, well worth it to be a team.”

The institute provides that framework. “If we’re interested in sustainability and we need to have a really clear action plan and the Institute provides that framework for us to create really clear goals and work toward those goals with check-ins throughout the year.”

Building Sustainable Programs Through Structure

The year-long program pairs teams with coaches who support implementation of action plans developed at the summer retreat. This structure “allows for greater success” according to Grijalva, while Guile described it as “a bigger view of what’s going on.”

The model addresses a critical gap in Oregon’s farm to school infrastructure—moving beyond funding and individual champion educators to building integrated school cultures where local food, gardens, and community connections are woven throughout the educational experience.

Listen to the full podcast episode to hear more details about the institute model, including field trips, skill-building workshops, team dynamics, and the power of bringing students, administrators, and food service professionals together for collaborative planning.