Add Passion and Stir

Kirsten Saenz Tobey, Co-Founder and Chief Impact Officer of Revolution Foods, describes how the B Corp she co-founded is helping kids now and in the future. “Our focus has always been to build lifelong healthy eaters, and to do that through primarily school and institutional food systems and access to high quality, healthy food,” she says. One of Revolution Foods’ keys to this strategy is getting...

The First Lady of Hawaii, Dawn Amano-Ige, is fighting childhood hunger in Hawaii with a simple tool: breakfast. In partnership with No Kid Hungry, Ige launched the Jumpstart Breakfast program in 2019 to ensure that children across Hawaii had access to a nutritious breakfast regardless of their ability to pay. As Ige notes, “As a teacher and educator, I know that if a child is hungry in the classro...

Businesses can have significant impact on the health of communities. C.D. Glin, Vice President of the PepsiCo Foundation, and Kim Fortunato, the first woman to serve as president of the Campbell Soup Foundation, are leading the way for their organizations. “We're grant makers, but we're also change makers… We think about ourselves as being demand driven, demand responsive, participatory, and we pu...

Washington, DC pediatrician Kofi Essel is committed to giving families the tools they need to thrive. In his work at Children’s Health Center Anacostia and The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Science, Essel practices “culinary medicine,” which merges the art of cooking with the science of medicine. “Nutrition is recognized as one of the most powerful tools to transform t...

Since 2015, Chefs Cycle has given chefs an outlet to fight hunger AND push their own physical limits. After a two-year break due to COVID, the Chefs Cycle event returned in 2022 – with an intentionally smaller footprint to keep things safe – with a two-day, 200 mile ride in the Santa Rosa region of California. With more than 90 riders, a mix of new and returning, the event exceeded its goal of $50...

Brandon Chrostowski discovered his career path in restaurants after an arrest nearly landed him in prison. Years later, he founded EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute to provide training in culinary arts and hospitality for formerly incarcerated adults in Cleveland, OH. “’Broken,’ ‘discounted,’ ‘damaged,’ ‘a threat’ - this is what the majority of people think about someone who's returning...

In 2016, when she wasn’t busy as an attorney, Joanne Lee Molinaro started blogging about food, heartbreak, cooking vegan, love, insecurity, and everything in between as The Korean Vegan . As she explains, “I don’t share my stories simply to share my stories… I do it because I feel there is a kernel of truth in my stories that more people need to hear.” Today, she shares her truth with more than 4...

Chopped celebrity chef Marc Murphy spoke with us right after he returned from seven weeks feeding Ukrainian refugees in Przemysl, Poland with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen (WCK). Since the invasion of Ukraine, WCK’s Relief Team has been on the ground supporting families sheltering in the country as well as refugees in six countries with nearly 200,000 hot, nourishing meals every day. Murphy w...

Frances Moore Lappé published the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet in 1971, changing the way Americans thought about food policy and world hunger. A 50th Anniversary edition of this seminal work was released in 2021, adding to Lappé’s list of 20 cookbooks with the underlying theme of living democracy. “We have to think of all of life as participating with one another in order to make big dec...

Born in Tijuana, Mexico, Reyna Montoya and her family were fleeing violence when they migrated to Arizona in 2003. She was in the 8th grade, did not speak English, was undocumented, and remembers feeling shame and anger at her parents for “bringing her to a place she didn’t like and didn’t belong.” It was traumatic. Naming this traumatic experience and working towards healing is central to Montoya...

“You can change people’s moods really fast with food.” This sentiment is at the heart of all that Greg and Subrina Collier believe. A husband and wife team behind six successful restaurants including Charlotte, NC’s-acclaimed Leah & Louise and the founders of the Bayhaven Food & Wine Festival , a three-day celebration of Black foodways, Subrina and Greg are at the forefront of the movement...

In his more than 30 years in the industry, Chip Wade, President of Union Square Hospitality Group, has seen all sides of hospitality – from the kitchen to HR and real estate development. Throughout his career, he’s been a champion for expanding leadership diversity in the hospitality industry. “In our industry we are woefully underrepresented with women in key leadership positions and that is the...

On today’s very special episode of   Add Passion and Stir ,   we speak with DC chef and restaurateur Erik Bruner-Yang, who was on the ground in Medyka, Poland with Jose Andres’ World Central Kitchen. World Central Kitchen is feeding hot, nourishing meals to tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees coming across the border.  When we spoke with Erik on the night of Monday, March 7th, c...

Stephen Satterfield is the founder and CEO of Whetstone media and host of the critically-acclaimed Netflix docuseries High on the Hog. Satterfield is using education about the relationships of Black people with food and agriculture to inspire and galvanize. “Not seeing yourself as a part of a cultural narrative is deeply, deeply damaging,” he says. “I'm advocating for the language of food as a mea...

As the daughter of a teacher, a teacher herself, and the former Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Kaya Henderson believes in the power of education. In this conversation, part of Add Passion and Stir ’s ongoing Rebuilding Series , Henderson recounts how she grew up in a household with an ethic of “to whom much is given much is required” and how that instilled a desire to give back. An opportunity t...

Sharif El-Mekki is the founder and CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development, which is focused on revolutionizing education by dramatically increasing the number of Black educators. “People are naive enough to think that once you enter a school, racial bias disappears,” says El-Mekki. “If a Black child has a Black teacher, they have a higher sense of belonging, they’re less likely to be sus...

Cities are on the frontlines of responding to the short and long-term impacts of hunger in their communities and mayors have witnessed firsthand the hardship their constituents face. On this episode of Add Passion and Stir, we speak with two mayors leading the fight against child hunger. Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond, Virginia and Mayor John Giles of Mesa, Arizona are the inaugural Chair and Vice...

With just over 580,000 residents, Wyoming is a state where “when you meet someone, it really is about one or two degrees of separation before you are starting to find common friends,” says First Lady of Wyoming, Jennie Gordon. That connectedness makes the knowledge that 1 in 5 children in Wyoming suffer from food insecurity even more personal to the First Lady and the people of Wyoming. As First L...

In this episode of Add Passion and Stir from early 2019, Thrive Global Founder and CEO Arianna Huffington and renowned pastry chef and North Fork Table and Inn owner Claudia Fleming discuss a topic very relevant today: the effects of stress and exhaustion on creativity, productivity and health. “For all of us, what moves the needle, whether it’s in a non-profit or for-profit business, are creative...

In this conversation from October, 2020, James Beard award-winning Minneapolis chef Ann Kim discusses her immigrant experience, approach to food, and observations about her community in the wake of the George Floyd murder. “It is our job to make changes, educate and learn. We can’t make decisions rooted in fear,” she says. “People scream when they feel like they’re not being heard. I was trying to...

Rachel Sumekh, Founder & CEO of Swipe Out Hunger, discusses hunger on Swipe Out Hunger campuses and the value of activism. “One in three college students in the US today is food insecure. We pitch education and we pitch going to college as a pathway to get out of poverty, and yet our students get there and we cannot deliver on that promise,” says Sumekh. Swipe Out Hunger is the leading nonprof...

As we continue to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, No Kid Hungry is telling the stories of what children faced during the crisis - and the incredible people working to feed them. Working with local artists in cities across the country, NKH’s Rebuilding campaign created a series of five micro-documentaries and murals in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, and Washington, D.C. to showcase th...

Interior designer and philanthropist Charlotte Moss and Ford Foundation President Darren Walker discuss the importance of ending child hunger. Moss selected No Kid Hungry to be the beneficiary of her latest project, Home: A Celebration . Home is an ode to Edith Wharton’s The Book of the Homeless, which was a 1916 fundraiser to help refugees and children during WWI. Home features 120 artists, poets...

Reverend Jim Wallis, Chair in Faith and Justice at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and Founder of Sojourners, reports on how dozens of faith organizations continue to advocate together for making the Child Tax Credit permanent, among other provisions in the proposed Build Back Better legislation. “We came together across many of our theological and political boundaries in t...

For nearly 25 years, the Child Tax Credit has helped eligible American families with the cost of raising children. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan included significant changes to the credit: the amount per child was increased, 26 million more children were made eligible for the benefit, and the credit became a monthly cash payment as opposed to an annual lump sum. The impact of these changes are...