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Posted by Carl Rollins | February 1st, 2010

[UPDATE: time and room change!] A hearing on the Healthy Schools Act of 2009 will be held on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 11:00AM in room 500 Wednesday, February 10, 2010 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 412 of the John A. Wilson Building located at 1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW. To sign up to testify contact Aukima Benjamin at the DC Council: ABenjamin@DCCOUNCIL.US or (202)724-8062

Like most of the food movement folks in DC who are concerned with community food security and its relationship with public health, I am very excited about the Healthy Schools Act of 2009 that is winding its way through the DC Council’s legislative process. Improving school cafeteria nutrition is long overdue, as are the physical exercise provisions. This bill is a great first step and has the potential to positively impact DC schools and the children who grow up here. I plan to testify in support of the bill at the hearing on February 9th and I encourage others to join me!

However there are areas where I see the need for improvement. One of these has to do with the lack of measures to enable District food enterprises to really take advantage of the farm to school provisions. In other states, farm-to-school initiatives have created significant demand for produce grown by the states’ own farmers.

In a sense, this element is lacking in the Healthy Schools Act as proposed. Why? Well, DC has few farmers.

This, though, can be remedied by amending the Act to specifically cite the decades old DC law–the “Food Production and Urban Garden Program” (DC Code §48-402).

Posted by Carl Rollins | January 26th, 2010

The following is an exerpt of testimony delivered by Carl Rollins, of the DC Environmental Education Consortium, to City Council in advance of tomorrow’s hearing (Jan 26th, 10:30AM in room 120 of the Wilson Building, 1350 Pennsylvania Ave NW) on the District Facilities Plan.

For those who support protecting the environment and solving health problems associated with food insecurity, the most troubling aspect of city planning and development is the lack of vision when it comes to urban agriculture, community gardens, schoolyard gardens, and facilities to store and process food produced from these activities.

The use of park and recreation land is left to the Department of Parks & Recreation (DPR), which has a Strategic Facilities plan — but this “plan” probably lies in some kind of turn-around limbo like virtually every other substantive initiative within that agency.