SNAP-Ed will be terminated in October, adding to federal cuts that are impacting national efforts to curb obesity and instill better eating skills at school.
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SNAP-Ed will be terminated in October, adding to federal cuts that are impacting national efforts to curb obesity and instill better eating skills at school.
September 17, 2025
Students at Garfield Elementary School in Savannah, Georgia, make herb butter. (Photo credit: @MackenseyAlexander, courtesy of The Charlie Cart Project)
This is the first in a series of stories covering the end of SNAP-Ed, which ran for more than 30 years, and how it will impact American communities.
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Rita Elaine Leary has been a middle school science and social sciences teacher for 36 years—31 of them in Chicago’s public schools. For the last four years, she’s incorporated a food education curriculum into her classes at Ashburn Community Elementary School. She has never seen her students so engaged as they taste spice mixes to understand West Africa’s influence on Spain, prepare Ukrainian dumplings to appreciate the culture of that war-torn country, and bake bread to learn about cellular respiration.
“Food education takes it to another level,” Leary says. “I’ve done robotics, and that draws in a bunch of kids. I’ve done coding. Some kids really love coding. We’ve written science musicals. That gets some kids. But food? Pretty much every single attempt has been a win.”
This school year will be her fifth time using curriculum from food education nonprofit Pilot Light, she says, “and I’m not going to stop.”
Pilot Light is the kind of program that is hard to argue with, bringing food literacy into schools to fire up core lessons for students and helping establish healthy eating skills. It is well-funded through fundraising galas, foundations, and corporate sponsorships, making it a rare bright spot amid dwindling support for programs nationwide working to address childhood obesity—which impacts nearly 20 percent of children and adolescents—and other nutritional challenges.
As the school year ramps up, significant changes are coming to school food literacy.
The largest is to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) program, which has provided nutrition education, cooking demonstrations, and workshops to 90 million low-income Americans, mostly children, for the last 30 years. SNAP-Ed will be terminated on October 1, a casualty of the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill.
Research have consistently demonstrated that SNAP-Ed participants improve their diets, consuming more fruits and vegetables and better managing their food resources. On the executive side, the Trump administration has made cuts to other food programs that supported school nutrition and education.
Civil Eats spoke to school food literacy programs that exemplify different levels of impact, to learn how each is faring and how funding cuts are rippling through the food system.
FoodCorps, founded in 2010, is a national service organization that teaches students about food, nutrition, and gardening. Meant as a scalable response to childhood obesity and diet-related disease epidemics, it has so far trained 1,500 service members to teach nutrition education and gardening in schools. It acts as a kind of Peace Corps for school food in the U.S., and its teachers earn a modest stipend for one year of service.
FoodCorps received most of its grant funding from AmeriCorps, which was decimated in April when the Trump administration ended nearly $400 million in AmeriCorps grants. FoodCorps has had to cut its budget by $13 million—more than 40 percent—according to a statement from Co-founder and CEO Curt Ellis and President Rachel Willis.
The organization has continued its work this school year, though at a smaller scale, partnering with schools in eight states, where 50 FoodCorps members are continuing to give food and garden education to public schoolchildren. That’s down from 162 FoodCorps members last year, working in 220 schools and school districts across 16 states and Washington, D.C.
FoodCorps says it is developing new approaches, including working with people who are “embedded in the systems of food and education we seek to change.” In addition to professional development support to teachers, it will offer a new 20-person annual fellowship. “Our work will look different in the coming school year . . . and we know the transition may be bumpy. But FoodCorps has faced hardships before. We’re committed to seeing this one through for the children at the center of our work.”
The organization’s impact, however, transcends direct work with kids, since many of its passionate garden and nutrition advocates go on to become food system leaders in their communities.
“We know the transition may be bumpy. But we have faced hardships before. We’re committed to seeing this one through for the children at the center of our work.”
“We often talk about how in order to change the food system, you need to ensure students know how to cook and garden,” says Sunny Baker, senior director of programs and policy at the National Farm to School Network. “Those FoodCorps service members are invaluable. And a lot of times, the [FoodCorps role] turned into paid positions in districts.”
For example, Janelle Manzano, who is now the farm-to-school coordinator at the San Diego Unified School District, was a FoodCorps service member in Oakland in 2017. Ally Mrachek was a service member in Fayetteville, Arkansas, before becoming a child nutrition director at Fayetteville Public Schools. (She’s now a farm-to-school consultant at LunchAssist.) Others have gone on to do important food policy work at the state level, like Kendal Chavez, who is New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham’s food policy advisor.
“FoodCorps is a funnel of talent for public schools in America,” Baker says. “Their alumni are some powerful, amazing leaders.”
Aubrey Hinton, a cooking teacher and garden coordinator at Pomeroy Elementary in Santa Clara, California, makes strawberry almond milk smoothies in class. (Photo credit: Ana Homonnay, courtesy of The Charlie Cart Project)
The Charlie Cart Project sells fully stocked mobile kitchens and a curriculum to go with them, as well as ongoing training and support to teachers. Federal funding cuts don’t directly impact the Charlie Cart Project because the nonprofit doesn’t apply for those grants.
Roughly half of its funding comes from cart sales; foundations, individual donors, and corporate sponsors provide the rest. But the federal cuts may hurt some districts’ ability to buy Charlie Carts. In recent weeks, the organization has heard from four separate people that they won’t be able to purchase Charlie Carts this fall due to funding cuts, according to founder Carolyn Federman.
“It seems so silly, but I was like, if we can’t bring the kids to the kitchen, let’s bring the kitchen to the kids.”
Federman launched the Charlie Cart Project in 2016, after working as director of Alice Water’s Edible Schoolyard Project, in Berkeley. She also taught basic culinary education at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, the project’s main location, where her children attended school. She always had to lug food, knives, cutting boards, and other cooking equipment to class, which gave her the idea for the mobile kitchens.
“It seems so silly, but I was like, ‘If we can’t bring the kids to the kitchen, let’s bring the kitchen to the kids,’” she says.
She designed a cart that could be an all-in-one kitchen, complete with the basic appliances needed to lead a cooking lesson: a small induction cooktop, a griddle, a toaster oven, a Vitamix blender, and a gray-water rinse station. A teacher—or librarian, food educator, or parent volunteer—could roll the cart into a room and plug it in. She named it Charlie Cart, after the 1860s Chuck Wagon.
Charlie Carts cost $14,000 with shipping and include access to a K-5 curriculum with 54 lessons that can be adapted for older kids or adults. The seasonal recipes align with Common Core educational standards. Today, there are 625 Charlie Carts at schools, libraries, food banks, and even Veterans Affairs sites in 47 states.
In Charleston, South Carolina, the Lowcountry Food Bank partnered with the local library system to buy five Charlie Carts for area libraries. Dana Mitchel, director of community health and nutrition at the food bank, says SNAP-Ed funding paid for the initial training for librarians. SNAP-Ed is essentially a national obesity intervention program, designed to prevent food-related illnesses like diabetes and heart disease by encouraging healthy eating habits.
“Just seeing kids and families feel more confident working with food is really very exciting,” says Mitchel. “The stories we get are, ‘I didn’t know I could have my child work so safely and productively in the kitchen. I’m excited to be with them in the kitchen now.’”
Federman saw a big uptick in libraries buying Charlie Carts during the pandemic. “Libraries have way more flexibility than schools and can stand up programs super fast,” she says.
Pilot Light Executive Director Alexandria DeSorbo-Quinn serves yogurt parfaits to Chicago-area preschoolers. (Photo credit: Therese Pudela, courtesy of Pilot Light)
Chicago-based Pilot Light was loosely formed in 2010 by four celebrity chefs who were inspired to teach culinary education in public schools after one of them attended First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Chefs Move! to Schools” events.
Pilot Light won’t be affected by SNAP-Ed’s elimination. The organization was already wrapping up a USDA Farm to School grant before funding for that program was cancelled, and the bulk of its revenue comes from fundraising galas, corporate sponsorships, foundations, donations, and professional curriculum development for school districts.
Like the Charlie Cart Project, Pilot Light recruits and supports teachers who are already employed by school districts and who want to incorporate food education into their lesson plans. Each year, they offer fellowships to 25 teachers, who receive one-on-one coaching and professional development from Pilot Light staff and learn from experts in food education, health, and agriculture. The teachers also get a $2,000 stipend and some funding for supplies and chef visits.
Pilot Light was already wrapping up a USDA Farm to School grant before funding for that program was cancelled, and the bulk of its revenue comes from fundraising galas, corporate sponsorships, foundations, donations, and professional curriculum development for school districts.
Pilot Light created its own food education standards with a panel of experts in 2018, with eight focus areas, including the environment and health. The standards were updated in July to reflect teacher feedback and real classroom experiences. They are broad enough that teachers can tailor the standards to their subject area and student body.
“You can teach any subject through food,” says Executive Director Alexandria DeSorbo-Quinn. “I’ve seen students write poems about a dish that’s been passed down in their family for generations. Suddenly, they’re not just learning about metaphor or structure; they’re connecting language to their identity and their history, all through food. That’s when their eyes light up.”
The Pilot Light curriculum requires students to complete a food advocacy project. In recent years, students in a sixth grade science class in Chicago submitted a city ordinance to ban plastic foam at Chicago restaurants, even holding a press conference at City Hall.
Many teachers go on to serve as mentors to new Pilot Light fellows or present at conferences.
“We invest heavily in that first year, and they keep impacting their students year over year,” DeSorbo-Quinn says. “They become our greatest champions and ambassadors.”
A student prepares a recipe in a kitchen class from the Edible Schoolyard Project. (Photo credit: Fox Nakai, courtesy of Edible Schoolyard)
The Edible Schoolyard Project has similarly avoided cuts, as it relies on foundations, grants, and community support, though it does receive some funding from the state of California.
The project has been a model for all school food education programs since Alice Waters (also a Civil Eats advisor) launched the organization in 1995. At its height, the program had seven schoolyard projects around the country. Today, it operates a program in Stockton, California, and its original location at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley is still flourishing.
The Edible Schoolyard Project has similarly avoided cuts, as it relies on foundations, grants, and community support, though it does receive some funding from the state of California.
Each year, teachers take over 1,000 middle school students into its 1-acre organic garden to learn about science, math, history, and poetry while also soaking up the importance of nourishment, stewardship, and community. Its Stockton location is a 6-acre working farm that hosts field trips and community events. It has a community garden program, with 40 families cultivating their own plots, and a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program that provides 130 bags of fresh produce for low-income community members every week.
To date, Edible Schoolyard has inspired 6,500 like-minded programs across the globe—in 47 U.S. states and 75 countries.
The nonprofit’s website is a hub of information for global educators, gardeners, and chefs who want to incorporate gardening and cooking into their lesson plans or programming. It runs free online curriculum and virtual learning experiences such as grant-writing tips and how to integrate academic standards. The downloadable lesson plans are aligned with Common Core standards and include worksheets.
Culinary literacy groups will continue to need private funding sources as federal funding cuts become permanent or long lasting, creating ongoing downstream impacts. The loss of federal funding could strain state, county, and local governments, which may make it harder to run programs like the Charlie Cart Project, Food Corps, and Pilot Light, all of which rely on those partnerships.
“People are going to have to make hard decisions,” says Mitchel, from the LowCountry Food Bank.
Despite the cuts, these nonprofits say they’ll continue the work they are doing in some way, shape, or form. “People who want to do this work find a way,” says Federman of the Charlie Cart Project. “They know it’s really important.”
Many organizations are also finding support with one another. Ashley Rouse, the Edible Schoolyard Project’s executive director, says her organization has been joining a monthly call with peers across the field. One possibility that’s come up is smaller nonprofits with similar missions joining forces and absorbing one another. “How do we shrink and grow?” she asks.
Rouse describes these sessions as “radical collaboration.”
“In moments like this,” she says, “it feels more important than ever to come together, share what we have, and support one another so that the impact and growth we’ve seen in edible education can continue.”
Due to an editing error, Rachel Willis was listed as Food Corps co-founder. This article has been updated to reflect her title as president of Food Corps.
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