Creating Partnerships at the Heart of Student Food Access

Oakland Unified School District’s Central Kitchen, Education Center, and Instructional Garden/Farm

Eat. Learn. Play. and the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) are working together to transform the childhood experience for Oakland kids. As part of this work, Eat. Learn. Play. is developing a strong partnership with OUSD’s Central Kitchen, Education Center, and Instructional Garden/Farm (The Center) to help ensure all Oakland students have access to quality school meals throughout the year. 

Opened in August 2021, The Center lies at the intersection of our eat, learn, and play pillars. The facility, located in West Oakland, is the heart of OUSD’s district-wide school food program network, connecting nutrition, education, and community programs at OUSD's schools, kitchens, and gardens. The ultimate goal is to have The Center be a hub for OUSD students and the Oakland community with a vision to provide 6 million healthy, scratched-cooked school meals every year to the district’s students. Eat. Learn. Play. understands the initiative is aspirational, and we are excited to be a supporter along the journey.

Many OUSD students rely on their school for two meals a day—sometimes even three—so there’s an urgent need for this work. Additionally, 77.8% of OUSD’s 35,000 students qualified for free and reduced price lunch in 2022-23. While the work at The Center is an ongoing effort, the Director of Programming for The Center, Michelle Oppen, is proud to share, “For school meals, it's going to take a few more years before we see big results, but we can already see that there's an introduction of new menu items happening this year. Our produce bars are at every OUSD school, and we're really working toward locally sourcing as many of those fruits and vegetables as possible.”

“Eat. Learn. Play. has been key to getting Central Kitchen operations off the ground, upgrading school site cafeterias, renovating schoolyards with gardens and other aligned features, and supporting our student-focused environment, food, and garden programming.”

-Michelle Oppen, Director of Programming, The Center

The Center’s partnership with Eat. Learn. Play. will intersect all three pillars. Oppen shares, “Eat. Learn. Play. has been key to getting Central Kitchen operations off the ground, upgrading school site cafeterias, renovating schoolyards with gardens and other aligned features, and supporting our student-focused environment, food, and garden programming, including student field trips, high school student internships, school garden supports, and teacher professional development.” 

This summer, Eat. Learn. Play. stopped by The Center and we were met with vegetable gardens in bloom, produce to be picked, high school interns busily giving tours to younger OUSD summer school students, and even delicious, handmade pizza readily available from the outdoor pizza oven. The Center has recently opened its doors to the public on select days, selling fresh produce collected from the garden at affordable prices. At each visit, the Eat. Learn. Play. team was blown away by all that was happening at the West Oakland site. 

Currently, The Center focuses specifically on serving OUSD students, but there are plans to expand the touch points to positively impact Oakland as a whole. Oppen explains, “We're trying to figure out how we stay connected to Oakland—whether that's partnerships with organizations or with the neighborhood that we're in, West Oakland. Though we're very student-focused right now, we hope that the space is able to offer community programming to Oakland residents in the future so that there could be cooking classes, garden classes, or other opportunities in this space.” 

Over the next three years, Eat. Learn. Play. is helping to ensure that kids have access to the healthy, high-quality food they need to thrive. By supporting The Center in becoming fully operational, Eat. Learn. Play. will help to meet the goal of providing over 6 million healthy, scratched-cooked school meals every year to the district’s nearly 35,000 students and 85 schools. 

Oppen states, “The partnership [with Eat. Learn. Play.] has really been much more than just funding. There's an obvious effort to be thought partners and strategic partners.” Eat. Learn. Play. looks forward to continuing this partnership with The Center and watching the seeds grow into healthy, happy childhoods for OUSD students and Oakland families.