GARDINER — Laura Budde reflects fondly on memories of working alongside her mother in their backyard garden in suburban Minnesota.

She enjoyed picking green beans and taking them straight to the kitchen to cook and eat fresh.

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FoodCorps service member Laura Budde hands out surveys Wednesday during the Maine Harvest Lunch at Gardiner Area High School. Budde is one of 50 FoodCorps service members serving across the country and one of six in Maine during the inaugural year of the program. Budde helped organized the Maine Harvest Lunch with local food from area farmers.

Later on, Budde came to realize how disconnected most Americans are from the production of their food, how ignorant some are about nutrition and preparing healthy meals, and how little access many have to whole, fresh foods.

Budde is especially moved when she sees these problems among children.

“It’s hard for me to see students in a lunchroom where there’s lunchboxes full of packages — and also with good food, because parents don’t trust what the schools are feeding to their kids,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to change.”

Joining the FoodCorps

Budde, 22, is one of 50 service members in the inaugural class of the national service organization FoodCorps.

One of six service members in Maine, Budde splits her time among Regional School Unit 11 schools in Gardiner, the Capital Area Technical in Augusta and Bowdoinham Community School.

FoodCorps is an offshoot of AmeriCorps and is funded by the federal government and private foundations. It aims to decrease childhood obesity through nutrition education, building school gardens and bringing healthy, local foods into school cafeterias.

Budde recently graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in environmental science. She found out about FoodCorps through Facebook.

“It sounds crazy, but it’s the only position I applied to during the graduation process because I knew it was what I wanted to do,” she said. “I knew I wanted to do work that gave kids access to growing their own food and learning what real food is.”

Despite a stipend of $15,000, 1,229 people applied for the 50 service positions. Organizations in 38 states and the District of Columbia applied to provide assignments, and the service members are serving in 10 states.

“We have the most that any new FoodCorps program in a state can have,” said Ellie Libby, an educator with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, which wrote the proposal for the state. “We’re very fortunate to have the maximum amount of positions and doing work all over Maine.”

One of the Cooperative Extension’s partners in the proposal was Healthy Communities of the Capital Area, which already helped schools build gardens and connect them with farms.

Among the seven school districts that Healthy Communities of the Capital Area serves, the organization identified RSU 11 and Augusta Schools as having the highest need based on income and obesity rates, said Renee Page, program manager for school and youth initiatives.

The advent of FoodCorps was very timely, Page said, coming when childhood obesity is attracting national concern, and both school leaders and outside activists are trying to improve school lunches.

“I think it’s growing, and I think it’s becoming more organized, and there’s more collaboration,” she said. “Several years ago you might have heard of a few schools, say, sourcing local food for the school lunch program. Or they might have a small raised-bed (garden) or a small composting pile. I think it’s being better thought out in that it’s not seeds in a cup and plant them when they sprout.”

‘A resource for the community’

Budde’s role is not only to bring in new ideas but also to support the initiatives of school staff members.

“I think of myself as a resource for the community,” she said. “I can bring some new energy and be someone that’s dedicated to that work. It’s my full-time responsibility.”

Having Budde around offers some relief to Rene Albison, a special education science teacher at Capital Area Technical Center. Eight years ago, Albison revived the school’s greenhouse, which was built it 1968 but had been used as a storage shed for several years.

“I was doing all of the grant writing and all of the manual labor there, plus the field trips that come through,” Albison said. “The plans that I have had certainly are going to move forward much faster now that I have her.”

Already this year, Building Trades students have built raised beds of plastic glass, and students in an electrical class installed new lights.

Budde and Albison hope to work with other students this year to set up a composting program, a rain capture system for irrigation and a vegetable garden to supply the Culinary Arts program.

“It’s really neat work because they have a lot of cool programs going on that I’ve been able to collaborate with,” Budde said.

In RSU 11, Budde is concentrating on establishing gardens at Gardiner Regional Middle School and River View Community School before it snows. She secured donations of lumber from Lowe’s and Lapointe Lumber and coordinated Gardiner Area High School students to clear brush at the middle school for their Day of Caring last month.

This winter, she’ll work with Food Services Director Mike Flynn and School Health Coordinator Tara Marble to build relationships with farmers to source local food for all the district’s cafeterias.

Budde also will start spending more time in classrooms, leading nutrition and agriculture education. She’s already had a taste of that in Bowdoinham, where she’s working with the Food Freaks, a student club formed 11 years ago.

“Some of the kids have been in it for years,” Budde said. “They’re very excited and very knowledgeable.

“There are kids who aren’t in the Food Freaks program, and they’re picky eaters. I anticipate that will be a challenge in Gardiner and Augusta. We want to get them to where Food Freaks is.”

FoodCorps will last at least three years, Marble said, but it’s undecided whether Budde or another service member will be working in central Maine in the coming years.

Whoever it is, the program is designed to make lasting change, Page said.

“It’s so important to make it sustainable,” she said. “Laura’s not here to just build gardens and then leave.”

Susan McMillan — 621-5645

smcmillan@mainetoday.com

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