FAQs

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Food & Community will invest in community to increase access to good food and physical activity where children live, learn, and play. Specifically, the Foundation targets investments to improve school food systems, increase access to good food and physical activity, and shape the national movement for healthy eating and active living.

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Food & Community is determined to be clear and collaborative in its work. Please help us live out our values by asking us your questions as they arise. Email communications@wkkf.org to submit a general comment or question.

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A food system includes the who, what, where, when and why of our food—from farm to form. Food systems are composed of the many interconnected steps that go into planning, producing, storing, processing, transporting, marketing, retailing, preparing, and eating.

Our current food system is unsustainable and inequitable—from fossil-fuel intensive farming practices, to rural and urban “food deserts” that disproportionately leave low-income communities and communities of color without access to healthy food. This contributes to diet-related chronic illnesses, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and childhood obesity, which are crippling our health care system.

Food & Community is committed to transforming our food system to ensure that all children have good food. By good food, we mean food that is affordable, healthy, green (produced in a manner that is environmentally sustainable), fair (meaning no one along the production line was exploited) and locally grown, when possible.

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Food & Community wants to transform school food to grow healthier generations of children. Schools are the public tables at which many of our children eat up to two-thirds of their daily meals—changing the way we feed children in school directly impacts their health and well-being.

Within the Food & Community work, investments will include those that amplify the voices of parents and students demanding good food in schools, promote school curricula that integrate food and wellness into the school day, support farm-to-school efforts nationwide, connect school districts with regional producers and support school efforts to transform the way districts buy food.

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For more than 80 years, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation has used its voice to advocate for equitable access to good food and physical activity, and to bring meaningful change to our food systems. The Food & Community program continues this legacy through investments that improve the health of our nation’s most vulnerable children by transforming food systems and the places kids live, learn, and play.

Through the Food & Community Program, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation targets investments to improve school food systems, increase access to good food and physical activity, and shape the national movement for healthy eating and active living.

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Please direct all media inquiries to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s communications team at (269) 969-2079 or via email at communications@wkkf.org. Please include your deadline in all messages. Your request will be routed to the appropriate staff person, and you will be contacted as soon as possible.

If you require direct assistance, contact Becky Noricks, W.K. Kellogg Foundation Communications Manager via the media line at (269) 969-2079.

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Physical activity environments refer to places or environments where people can be active. These places or environments can include schools, sidewalks and streets, parks, trails, recreation facilities, workplaces and more. Physical activity environments can also include transit and transportation systems—how people move from place to place without driving. Equally important to physical activity environments are the policies and practices that encourage being active.

Opportunities for physical activity have been designed out of the places we live, learn, work and play—from schools that lack playgrounds or have eliminated physical education classes, to places that have become unsafe for our children. While this is a problem nationwide, in some places a lack of opportunity, limited resources and fear of crime have eliminated outdoor physical activity from children’s and families’ daily lives.

Food & Community envisions a nation where all children and families have safe, accessible places in which they can be active and play. Improvements to our physical activity environments can include building and redesigning neighborhoods with sidewalks, safe streets and quality parks. It can also include instituting policies, which require physical activity and play in our nation’s schools. Supporting physical activity will require civic participation, policy-driven solutions and long-term investments. Efforts must benefit our most vulnerable populations, who experience the greatest health disparities.

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After ten consecutive years of supporting the growing Food & Society and Food & Community movements through an annual convening, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation now plans to hold the meeting on a biennial basis, making our next gathering in Spring 2012. Please save May 22-24, 2012 for our next Food & Community network gathering to be held at the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, North Carolina.

We remain strongly committed to the Food & Community movement and to our national network of partners, and plan to support the convening of smaller, focused groups during the interim in 2011.