Dear National Rural Education Association,
We are writing to you on behalf of the World Wildlife Fund's Food Loss and Waste team. We run a program for K-12 schools called Food Waste Warriors that provides grants (and stipends), toolkits, and lesson plans to empower teachers and administrators in all schools to engage their students and take action on the issue of food waste.
Food waste is an issue teachers and students confront every day, and with the incredible demands already placed on teachers, our program seeks to both compensate teachers and equip them with flexible and fully customizable resources to turn cafeterias into classrooms—helping students to conduct food waste audits in their cafeterias, advocate on the issue of food waste, and identify creative ways to reduce it.
Our new grant application cycle opens on June 1st and will close on July 20th. All applicants in any U.S. state or territory are eligible to apply for this year's grant cycle—though applicants working with schools or districts located in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Maryland, and Washington D.C. will be prioritized to support our current food waste policy objectives. We would like to let rural schools in your network know about this grant program for the 2021-22 school year. For more details and to apply, please visit our website
here.
An estimated 30-40% of food is wasted in America, while more than 41 million Americans face hunger, including nearly 13 million children. At the same time, wasting food wastes water, energy, and wildlife habitat. We started this program because schools, which serve more than 4 billion lunches per year in the US, can turn cafeterias into classrooms and measure the scale of the issue as part of a learning experience.
Thank you for your help!
Sincerely,
Laura Espinoza
