Dr. Robert S. Harvey, president of FoodCorps, a national organization committed to ensuring that all children have access to nourishing food, is a Renaissance person.
He’s also a minister, author, and educator. Prior to FoodCorps, he served as superintendent of East Harlem Scholars Academies, a community-based network of public charter schools. Before that, he was the chief operating officer at Simmons College of Kentucky, a historically Black college in Louisville.
The throughline of Harvey’s career, however, is his commitment to improving the lives of Black people in marginalized communities, including children.
He is the author of two books. His first tome, Abolitionist Leadership in Schools: Undoing Systemic Injustice through Communally Consciousness Education (Routledge, 2021), explores school leadership and racial equity through the arc of an abolitionist lineage. His second, Teaching as Protest: Emancipating Classrooms through Racial Consciousness (Routledge, 2022), frames philosophical and practical instruction with an advocacy aimed at freeing teaching and learning spaces for students and teachers.
FoodCorps is a nationwide team of leaders that connects kids to real food and helps them grow up healthy. FoodCorps places these leaders in limited-resource communities for a year of public service where they conduct hands-on food education, build and tend school gardens, and facilitate getting high-quality local food into public school cafeterias.
There are 10 FoodCorps members in Missouri, currently serving in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas. FoodCorps has more than 200 partnerships with school districts in 18 states, includingSt. Louis Public Schools.
Through its partnerships the company provides “hands-on food education, nourishing school meals along with culturally affirming experiences with food that celebrate and nurture the whole child.”
The company’s philosophy is simply phrased on its website:
“Food is a basic human need for everyone — but especially for our kids. Without food, kids can’t learn and grow.”
Using similar language, the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) states that “millions of mostly low-income and minority families in America subsist in vast ‘urban food deserts’-areas with no or distant grocery stores. These areas, dominated by convenience and liquor stores, gas stations, or fast-food restaurants that sell foods high in fat, sugar, and salt “pose serious health threats to children.
“It’s easier to buy a pint of liquor, a fried chicken wing, or a gun than a fresh tomato.”
Under the banner “Our Vision for a Just FoodCorps,” Harvey’s company proudly boasts of its “mission, vision, policies, procedures and efforts” to “celebrate different cultural approaches to eating.”
“We identify as a social justice organization,” it states, adding that the staff is required to undergo “anti-oppression training programs” to find and refine the company’s “commitment to undoing racism and classism.
FoodCorps unabashedly says it “strives to create an environment that reflects the diversity of our partner communities and in which everyone can show up and feel brave, supported, and valued for the contributions they make to this organization.”
The company, Harvey added, celebrates “the richness, complexity, differences, ethnicity, gender identity, nationality, race, religion, sexuality, socioeconomic status and other identities and/or lived experiences” of its partner agencies.
“We remind ourselves every day that food itself is an essential driver of positive change, especially in schools,” The website states.
In an interview with the nonprofit, “Food City, Serving Our Communities” earlier this year, Harvey expanded on the theme of diversity, equity and inclusion regionally.
“My highest hope and vision for our region is one of access,” Harvey said.
“How do we ensure that more folk-folk, who don’t look like the people at the top of that chain, are able to participate in the entirety of the process and ultimately have a life that is not just nourishing but a life that is economically viable – a life that is thriving in terms of their health and their sense of belonging when they engage with food and the food industry here in St. Louis? That’s what matters most to us.”
Harvey said he and FoodCorps envisions a world “where young people, namely Black and Brown ones, reclaim the work traditions of food, land, and justice that informed so much of our ancestral history.”
Accomplishing that goal, Harvey said, means “we must re-dignify the meaningfulness of manual labor, resource postsecondary readiness and non-college pathways, and lastly, reframe the ways we talk about food from a clinical-centering to a values-centering.
“In effect, we must ensure that our kids can see careers in food and farming as pathways fueled by dignity where they can thrive for themselves and for their families and their futures.”
Sylvester Brown Jr. is the Deaconess Foundation Community Advocacy Fellow.
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