Kansas Students Gain Skills and Feed Others
Kansas students are learning life skills and the value of helping others through the Kids Feeding Kids program, which teaches them about food insecurity and sustainability. The program partners with high school culinary arts classes to prepare take-home meals for families and organizations within their communities — and students build skills and empathy in the process.
Pete’s Garden is the parent organization of Kids Feeding Kids. It was created in 2020 by Tamara Weber, who is dedicated to making sure more Kansas City families have access to healthy, nourishing foods. Pete’s Garden focuses on recovering surplus food from Kansas City restaurants and caterers. Volunteers package and distribute the recovered food for free to local families and children via social service programs.
Diane Mora, education and program director for Kids Feeding Kids, was volunteering with Pete’s Garden when Weber learned about her dual background as a high school educator and professional chef.
“Tamara had this idea that if we could donate groceries to area high schools, maybe they would be interested in cooking it and delivering it to the families,” Diane said. “But she wanted it to be more robust than that and asked if I could create lesson plans around it and find a way to build it into a larger program, which is how Kids Feeding Kids was created.”
When Kids Feeding Kids began in 2021, only five high schools in the Kansas City area were involved. Now more than 30 high schools across Kansas, Missouri and Illinois participate.
Teachers involved in the program are provided with a standards-aligned food justice and culinary learning project. The students participate in the program during their normal school days, often through a culinary class or a family and consumer sciences (FACS) course.
“We take teachers through every step of what it means to teach the lessons, prepare and plan the menu, create a production schedule within their kitchen labs and find families in need.”
As part of the program, teachers commit to leading two distribution events — typically one in the fall and one in the spring — with their students. Leading up to the distribution event, teachers run their students through the lesson plans, which are focused on destigmatizing those facing food insecurity, demonstrating culinary skills and engaging students in community service.
One part of the learning module is for students to listen to an NPR podcast featuring interviews with families who talk about the circumstances that led them to experience food insecurity.
“We are very committed to making sure students understand it’s not a character flaw and there are many reasons families can find themselves needing assistance,” Diane said.
Depending on the classroom schedule and number of students, many classes take three days to a week to prepare the food for a distribution event. On the day of the distribution event, the class focuses on packaging the prepared food into servings. Teachers are asked to make 200 to 1,000 servings.
“That’s where the real-world learning and industry experience comes in for the students, because that’s what it would be like to cater meals on a large scale,” Diane said.
Chef Steve Venne and Meghann Leintz are two educators who have implemented the Kids Feeding Kids program in their own classrooms.
Chef Steve teaches Culinary 2, Front of the House Restaurant, and Catering and Event Planning at the Broadmoor Bistro for the Center for Academic Achievement, a signature program for the Shawnee Mission School District. He and his students have been involved in Kids Feeding Kids since its inception.
“The program has no financial cost to the school and gives the students an opportunity to serve an underserved part of our community while gaining knowledge,” he said.
“When I completed this project in my community, we partnered with the local church food pantry,” Meghann, a FACS teacher, said. “We made chicken fried rice, and it was very well received by all.”
To learn more about bringing Kids Feeding Kids to your school district, sign up for the 2025 Summer Institute mailing list on the website or through this form and keep an eye out for more information. Institute spots are limited, so an application is required.
Kids Feeding Kids is generously funded by WellSky Foundation, Sysco Foods and the Patrick Mahomes Foundation.
