Lori Sigfridson: School Food Champion

We sat down with Lori Sigfridson, a community champion from Tri-County, to talk about her important role in delivering school food programs.

Tell us about your role in your region and connection to school food.

I am the Active Healthy Living Consultant for TCRCE. In my role I support physical and health education as well as Health Promoting Schools. A significant part of our HPS initiative is to ensure that our schools provide the best possible food environments for our students. To make this happen I work collaboratively with school administrators, cafeteria staff, volunteers and public health nutritionists to support menu development, food service workshops, food procurement as well as breakfast, lunch and snack programming.

Over the years I have been fortunate enough to work with educators to bring nutritional literacy and life skills into the school community. While partnering with Co-op and O2 programs to build edible school gardens, greenhouses, chicken coops and planting fruit trees for small orchard development has seen a shift in school food cultures and the conversation changing from “feeding” students to “nourishing” them.

Why you do what you do?

I love the work that I do. In fact, most days it doesn’t feel like work. I have always been passionate about health and wellbeing. The fact that I am able to combine my personal passion with the career that I have chosen is truly a gift. I have witnessed a slow cultural shift of embracing healthier school food environments over the 10 years I have been in this role. Albeit challenging at times for a variety of reasons, our schools truly want what is best for their students and helping them create healthy school communities inspires and motivates me on a daily basis. Great things happen in our schools every day. Although we don’t always celebrate them, I am happy knowing that I have supported schools in making a positive difference.

During the shutdown and currently, has your role changed? If so, how?

The suspension of in school classes during the spring term was a huge concern from a school food perspective. As a region, we knew that some of our students and their families would find this time incredibly difficult and their ability to access health foods regularly would be a challenge. In usual TCRCE fashion, a group of us came together to help support the nutritional needs of our students and families as best we could.

Every department within the regional office came together and the Student Access Food Exchange (S.A.F.E) Program was born. It was all hands on deck! Going over and above their normal duties the team wrote grants, outreached to families and delivered food hampers across the tri-counties from May to September. The program could not have happened without the collaboration of many. Overall, the program provided 225 families with fresh food boxes weekly, with each box providing families with 50 lbs of locally sourced produce and meats to support their nutritional needs.

My focus shifted from supporting in-school healthy food programs to organizing a food box program that delivered directly to the doors of our students and their families. This was not a part of my job description, but a need arose and the team I worked with helped to fill that need. We knew that if we were able to support our students and families during this time that they may experience less stress and hardship that seemed to accompany the shutdown. In return, it would help them cope with other stressors better knowing they did not have to worry about buying groceries. We also saw It as a way to bridge gaps until restrictions were lifted, schools reopened and students would once again be able to have access to healthy foods during the school day.

Now that schools have reopened, I have turned my attention back to SHEP initiatives. All our schools are back to running breakfast programs 5 days per week, cafeterias are operational and healthy snack programs have been re-established. Supporting programs with menus, pantry lists, equipment and resource procurement have returned as duties I am responsible for on a daily basis. It is not business as usual as I continue to plan for alternate learning scenarios should the need arise. But for now, it is comforting knowing that currently our students are able to access healthy foods at school and do so with ease and dignity.