Community Partner Spotlight: Chef Broderek Mills
When Shoestring parents came to pick up their children one afternoon earlier this May, they were greeted by their own personal chef! Chef Broderek Mills has worked in the restaurant industry for over ten years and has a passion for helping the people in his community discover tasty ways to eat nutritious foods. Operation Shoestring recently partnered with Chef Mills to have him prepare produce for our Parker Lifeshare Foundation funded Healthy Eating classes, and parents had rave reviews of his delicious plant-based recipes. Using zucchinis from our local farm partner FootPrint Farms, Chef Mills and the Shoestring parent team were able to introduce an accessible and culturally relevant method of vegetable preparation to the children and families in our community.
“It was so cool engaging with the parents,” says Chef Mills. “It was really great to build a relationship with them and introduce them to different types of produce.” Many people in Jackson, including families in our neighborhoods, live in something called a “food desert.” This term refers to communities that have limited access to grocery stores or other places that sell produce and other healthy food items. Chef Mills has found that many residents in under-resourced areas like food deserts may not have tried a variety of produce before because of a lack of access, and not a lack of willingness or interest. That’s why he loves partnering with organizations like ours to create experiences for families to try new foods. “It was awesome to see so many people excited to try something new, and to be so open to a new recipe like zucchini chips.”
And creating spaces for kids and families to try something new is personal for him too. “I grew up maybe hearing about what a zucchini was, but I didn’t even try one until fifteen years ago,” he reflected. Through health education programs like our Healthy Eating classes and our other family support workshops, Chef Mills and the Shoestring team see a way to show parents and kids in our neighborhoods where the food they eat comes from and the health-related reasons for seeking out produce. He reflects that “you know, a lot of kids I’ve worked with don’t know what a zucchini is. When we can identify what something is and where it comes from, we’re more prone to eat it. There’s a problem, especially in my community, where people don’t know how to identify the product or what it really is.” His goal is for Shoestring parents to be able to go into any grocery store or specialty market and “ be able to identify things like an avocado, a Mexican avocado, a jackfruit, a radish—and even a daikon radish too!”
Our Healthy Eating classes are consistently rated by our parents as one of the family support workshops that they’d rank the highest in overall life impact. Many Shoestring family members say in participant assessments that one of their biggest needs is better health and that our family support workshops help them in their attempts to eat better and to achieve improved physical fitness. And community partners like Chef Mills make eating healthy easier for parents—and delicious!
Parent with parents as they pursue healthy, hopeful, and self-determined lives as operationshoestring.org/support
