Community Food and Wellness Initiative

This initiative offers unique educational experiences at MTSO’s Seminary Hill Farm and with our Central Ohio partners to celebrate the land, regenerative agriculture, food, education and community. It sends out interns, or Community Food and Wellness associates, with our community partners to help support the development of community gardens, urban farms, and other food-related educational projects that increase food access and environmental resiliency, promote nutrition and active living, and create just community. The CFWI also helps to cover a portion of the food Seminary Hill Farm grows and gives to partnering organizations, as well as covering educational programs both on campus and with partners onsite.

We have seven primary objectives

Through the Community Food and Wellness Initiative, we aim to:

• Increase education and experiential opportunities to strengthen understanding of the connections between the land, food, community and wellness.
• Increase interest in sustainable agriculture, healthy living and community building.
• Assist with supporting the network of community gardens, urban farms and other food projects in Central Ohio.
• Support local participation in national and global food-justice campaigns and develop awareness of food-justice issues.
• Promote connections between those who grow, process and distribute local food products.
• Facilitate expanded distribution of Seminary Hill Farm’s produce in low-income neighborhoods.
• Provide paid internship opportunities for MTSO students with food-related partners.

We work with community partners both on our farm and in their own neighborhoods

The initiative can support Seminary Hill Farm staff in hosting guests and training sessions as needed, including small groups or conferences, and programs like the Children’s Garden and ADA accessible growing space. Being on the farm offers people of all ages experiences such as farm tours, hands-on gardening instruction, faculty lectures, cooking demonstrations, farm-to-table meals and kids’ activities that the CFWI supports as needed.

The CFWI has provided support for consultation, networking, organizing and program referrals within partner neighborhoods and the local food advocacy network. We have assisted with community-garden and urban-farm project development, as well as projects that increase access to good food from Seminary Hill Farm and other local growers. We have helped provide fair-employment opportunities within the farm and food space. Finally, we have connected with churches and community groups to host or engage with education around gardening, food, nutrition and active living.

More than a dozen MTSO students have served with Columbus food-advocacy organizations and churches as organizational interns and CFWI associates.

Good and Healthy recipes

MTSO has produced a six-part video cooking resource for the All People's Fresh Market, an initiative of Community Development for All People. In these videos, funded through a grant by the Harry C. Moores Foundation to the Community Food and Wellness Initiative, MTSO Sous Chef Daejah McCormick offers recipes using fresh food provided to those who shop at the Fresh Market.

Learn more

Partnership opportunities: Contact Kathy Dickson, kdickson@mtso.edu, CFWI project manager and director of field education, to learn about collaborating with the CFWI, including finding paid interns to assist with your program’s initiatives.

Contact Laura Ann Bergman, lbergman@mtso.edu, to inquire about Seminary Hill Farm tours, volunteering or additional collaboration with the farm.

In memoriam

We gratefully remember this initiative’s late coordinator, Patrick Kaufman, who died in September 2018.