Georgia Farm to Early Care and Education
Georgia Farm to Early Care and Education
In 2017, Georgia Organics, The Common Market, Little Ones Learning Center, Quality Care for Children, and Voices for Georgia’s Children received funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to support their individual and collective work in farm to early care and education (FTECE).
FTECE strives to encourage young children to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, to provide hands-on education involving cooking and gardening, and to improve access to healthy, locally sourced food at home and in the community. The work of these five partners aims to impact state-level systemic collaboration in healthy food access, economic development, professional training, and early care education, with a focus on reducing racial disparities.
The Georgia Health Policy Center (GHPC) coordinated the strategic planning processes for the initial farm to early care and education and farm to school work. GHPC also facilitated the initial GFTECE partners meeting in which logic model inputs, activities, outputs, and potential outcomes were outlined. The partners then engaged GHPC to conduct the evaluation of their efforts. The evaluation focused on two core initiatives: the partner’s collective work at the systems level and the FTECE Learning Collaborative, a scalable training and technical assistance initiative conducted with 10 early care and education sites to build FTECE capacity.