School Farms Target Food Insecurity, ‘Supermarket Redlining'

For-profit companies are making good private schools available even to Africa’s poor. They can do it – and can do it on an enormous scale – by hiring neighborhood residents to teach, and scripting out every word of every lesson on an e-reader.

Blue Engine, which places recent college grads as full-time teaching assistants in New York City public schools, is helping poor students thrive in college. They focus on small teacher-student ratios, frequent feedback for teachers, and a concentration on 'gateway' courses associated with success in college.

It’s no secret that, although progress has been made, school lunches need help to become more nutritious and sustainable. School officials in San Francisco are partnering with researchers from UC Berkeley's School of Public Health to better school lunch programs and, ultimately, curb child obesity.

Half of U.S. farm workers are Hispanic, but few make it to leadership positions. A historically white non-profit, FFA, is creating equal education programs in California to increase leadership opportunities for minorities in agriculture.

Adolescent smoking remains a challenging health problem because of the allure of cigarette branding. Australia is piloting the transformation of cigarette packaging with a generic look that reduces the appeal of smoking. In Florida, the Truth campaign has exposed that cigarette companies targeted teenage consumers and, in response, created a set of new advertisements that presented the cigarette industry with transparency.

After incarceration, Black men and women have a difficult time re-integrating into society without financial and educational resources. A former Black Panther activist has created the non-profit Oakland &the World Enterprises to offer an urban farm as a prisoner re-entry program and community center. The Oakland project supports self-sufficiency, self-determination, and empowerment for Black people.

In an agricultural system designed for big-industrial growers, many farmers struggle to bridge the relationship between their produce and consumers, as well as strengthening local economies. The food hub is a collection of buildings that process and distribute the sale of local food. Eastern Market in Detroit is an example of a food hub that makes local produce accessible to low-income neighborhoods.

Programs to get fresh produce carts to areas with no access to healthy food work best when government and determined entrepreneurs team up. Success from this model is evident in New York City, where the city has incentivized the selling of fruits and vegetables by street vendors in areas that are in the most need of the produce.

In India, many farmers, especially women farmers, have transitioned to organic farming. While it requires a serious set of skills and knowledge, organic farming increases yields and decreases costs by eliminating the need to buy pesticides. The move is both ecological and economical, and the Indian government is trying to spread the solution.

The System of Root Intensification (SRI) method resulted in dramatically high yields from one Indian village. The system centers on a "less is more" approach and results in higher yields—without the use of GMOs. The idea has faced barriers in spreading, as scientists are wary of it, even as villagers embrace the empirically successful approach.