About the Local Food Program
The Local Food Program started as a pilot program through HB 1132 that was passed in 2019. The pilot program provided $500,000 a year (for 3 years) for School Food Authorities to purchase Colorado grown, raised, and processed foods. The pilot program officially launched in School Year 2021/2022 and wraps up in June 2024. Currently, this program has invested over $2M in Farm to School purchasing and technical assistance across the State!
Thanks to Colorado Voters in 2022, we now have Healthy School Meals for All and it includes an enhanced Local Food Program where every school food authority in the state can apply to participate. While our Joint Budget Committee is still making decisions surrounding the amount of funding available for this program, we are committed to building sustainable and consistent investment from the State and other funding streams to support the process of making Farm to School the easy choice.
About Nourish Colorado
We are changemakers who strengthen connections with and between farms, ranches, and communities so that all Coloradans have equitable access to fresh, nutritious foods.
We achieve our mission by engaging in policy advocacy for systemic change, managing innovative programs, and developing community partnerships and grassroots networks to rebalance the food system and create healthy food environments.
About Nourish Colorado’s Healthy Food in Institutions Team
We champion nutritious food environments in schools and institutions – key community food access hubs. Our work started back in 2009 with the School Food Initiative where we partnered with over 60% of the school districts in our state through 2017. This work focused on increasing scratch-made meals and the usage of fresh fruits and vegetables. We launched LoProCO (Local Procurement CO) in 2018 with a goal to make farm to institution the norm in our State. Since then we have directly supported School Food Authorities across CO with their farm to school programs by providing support with menu planning, recipe development, marketing, procurement support, culinary skills and so much more. We also support our agricultural producers with connections, navigating school market channels, and growing their ability to enter those market channels. While our primary area of focus is in the K12 space, we also support Early Care and Older Adult Meal Programs with building their farm to institution models.
Our institutions have incredible buying power – allocating many millions of taxpayer dollars each year to purchase food – and can be drivers for positive change when it comes to creating a true food value chain by changing the food system from the institutional kitchen out! We value, honor, and appreciate our institutional meal programs all across our State for the amazing things they are doing to feed their communities tasty meals!
Thank you to our Sponsors of the Guidebook!
With the launch of Instacart Health, Instacart set out to expand access to nutritious food, inspire sustainable healthy choices, and scale food as medicine programs. This interactive, web-based Colorado Local Food Program Guidebook is an example of Instacart’s investment and commitment to advancing access to nutritious foods through schools. Instacart has been working closely with Nourish Colorado to envision and develop this site since early 2023. Nourish Colorado is deeply grateful for the seed investment from Instacart to launch this useful and accessible new tool!
The Rockefeller Foundation has a mission to promote the well-being of humanity around the world by breaking down the barriers that limit who can be healthy, empowered, nourished, well off, secure, and free. Their sponsorship of The Guidebook helped bring this website to life and supports the continued maintenance of the site. Thank you!
The Gates Family Foundation enacts their mission by working with partners and communities to build a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable Colorado for all. Their sponsorship of The Guidebook supports the development of resources and continued maintenance of the site. Thank you!
The Donnell-Kay Foundation aims to improve public education in Colorado through research, policy, creative dialogue, and critical thinking. We invest in projects, programs, and people who seek systemic solutions to strengthening the experience of learning for kids from birth to career.
The Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger awarded us a Healthy School Meals Community Grant. This grant supports the cost of having our resources translated into Spanish and easily accessible on the website. We appreciate being awarded this grant as it supports our efforts towards language justice. Thank you!
Rose Community Foundation has a mission to advance inclusive, engaged and equitable Greater Denver communities through values-driven philanthropy. Their sponsorship of The Guidebook helped bring this website and the resources to life! Thank you!
Thank you to our resource development team!
The people below played a key role in supporting and leading the development of many of the resources you will find in The Guidebook. This website would not be where it is today without their ability to take years of content from our trainings and translate it into tangible resources for those who are embarking on their own Farm to School journey. Thank you all for your commitment and dedication to this work!
Matt Kottenstette is a born and raised Coloradoan now living in Hotchkiss, CO and is an owner operator of Farm Runners, a food hub for the western region of Colorado. His roots in regional agriculture are in his grandma’s garden, then in academia learning through a sociological lens; sprouting into working hands-on at farms and orchards, and is blossoming into a career working to raise Colorado’s foodscape.
blaze Diamond’s work in food systems began in 2017 when he transitioned from a public school music teacher to working a 3-acre food bank farm, wanting to see his students have local food access. He’s been on and off farms of various contexts since then, working in for-profit settings, an indoor operation, and a pueblo-based nonprofit farm stewarding indigenous food pathways. In 2021, he graduated with a Master’s degree in Ecopsychology, having been a para-instructor in food justice and environmental justice during graduate school. His role alongside Nourish is to provide personal support and technical assistance to farmers and ranchers seeking market access with schools and institutions. Navigating the procurement practices, educating on food safety standards, strategizing middle-of-the-supply-chain logistics, and holding relationships to broker the movement of food, has been at the heart of his role. He currently farms 9,000 row feet of heirloom corn and dry bean, 1/4 acre asparagus plot, and a contemporary market garden on a small-scale, diversified farm.
Brian Kearney is the Regional Food Sales Lead with Kitchen Sync Strategies working directly with East Denver Food Hub and other hubs around the state. He has worked in foodservice operations since he was 16 years old starting as a busboy in an Italian restaurant outside NYC. He has over 20 years of culinary and management experience with 10 years working for CU Boulder dining services. I am the Regional Sales Lead at Kitchen Sync Strategies and have a passion for advocating for the fair treatment of food service workers and local producers, and providing quality ingredients to be enjoyed by everyone.
Rainey Wikstrom of The Healthy People Project serves as a strategic partner in promoting farm to institution successes in Colorado, and the good people making it happen.
Lily Lake moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2022 to study Sustainable Food Systems at the CU Boulder Masters of the Environment program. Before that, she spent several years working on organic farms in the Northeast. Growing food and learning about food policy sparked Lily’s passion for farm to institution work and drew her to Nourish and work on the Colorado Guidebook. One of her favorite components of being a part of resource development for the Guidebook has been the opportunity to work with so many people who are passionate about school food, including those on the Nourish team and from state and federal agencies, farms, ranches, nonprofits and food hubs across Colorado. With the energy and dedication of this many people behind the farm to school movement it’s impossible not to be excited for its future!
Alicia Loebl is a student in the CU Boulder Masters of the Environment program studying Sustainable Food Systems. She comes from a background in environmental policy and garden education and has worked in various roles in the farm to school world. She has a passion for food procurement and supporting institutions serving local and scratch-made options. She enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with stakeholders across Colorado and learn from the team at Nourish while working on the guidebook.
Matt Jackson is the founder of Nine Stories Creative Documentary Films. He set up shop in Northern Colorado in 2018 with the desire to bring high production value films to small market businesses that hadn’t had the opportunity to take advantage of film production in the past. Bringing 15 years of movie industry knowledge from his time working in the trenches of Hollywood, Matt and Nine Stories Creative’s passion has become telling the best story in the most authentic way with the best production value possible. Born in Fort Morgan, Colorado, Matt loves his home state and the wide spectrum of people and businesses that he encounters every single day. Next project in the works is a documentary all about the art of cheesemaking, focusing on local producers on both an artisan and commercial level.