Nourish Program at Nowa Nowa Primary School

This article was written by the Health Promotion Team at Gippsland Lakes Community Health and originally appeared as a post on The Shared Table, the Foundation’s online community website.

After visiting schools running kitchen garden programs looking for inspiration, we thought how can we be involved in this process?

With funding from Communities for Children, facilitated by Uniting Gippsland, we launched the Nourish Program at Nowa Nowa Primary School, which incorporates the school’s kitchen garden program.

Gippsland Lakes Community Health also provided funding for staff at Nowa Nowa Primary and four other schools in East Gippsland, as well as our own team of health promotion specialists, to attend training with the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.

Nowa Nowa Primary joined the Foundation’s Kitchen Garden Classroom as a member in September 2017, and students have been busy over the past six months establishing their vegetable gardens and building their cooking skills.

As part of the Nourish Program, we invite family members into the school at the end of each term to sit down at the table and share the amazing food produced by the students. It is an event with much excitement as students harvest and prepare, and share the wonders of their cooking.

Attendance by family members has doubled since the first event. When we asked a staff member from Nowa Nowa Primary what they thought the element was that got more parents and family members to the second shared event, her response was “the colouring-in pictures”.

The students had decorated their invitations in a personal way that encouraged their family to attend. The students wanted their parents to see their creative work and physically handed the invitations to their parents.

It has been so wonderful to see the joy on parents’ faces when they see the beautiful lunch. We encourage other schools to invite family to share food around the table.

• To find out how your school or centre can dig into pleasurable food education like Nowa Nowa Primary School, head to the Kitchen Garden Classroom membership page.
• Any questions? Call our friendly Support Team on 13000 SAKGF (13000 72543).