CACFP Week!
Did you know that this week is CACFP Week? That’s the week where we celebrate the Child & Adult Care Food Programs, which fight hunger all across the country by providing delicious and nutritious foods to children in child care centers, homes, and afterschool as well as for adults in day care.
This educational campaign to raise awareness of the CACFP is sponsored by the National CACFP Sponsors Association and runs from March 17th to March 23rd.
To celebrate this week, we would like to extend our appreciation for all of our hard-working staff members involved in the CACFP program.
During CACFP Week we were especially thankful for…
⭐️Chris!⭐️
Chris is our Nutritionist and CACFP Coordinator – EES is very fortunate to have Chris! She works diligently to make sure our Nutrition Program goes above and beyond. Chris is dedicated to only serving fresh vegetables and fruits to our classrooms and has developed many community partnerships to bring in this fresh local produce.
In collaboration with the cooks, she creates all of the menus to make sure the children are being served all of the meal components at each mealtime, and oversees the meal records and production sheets. Chris also provides consultations for families around nutritional needs and conducts healthy snack projects in all our classrooms with the children.
She attends many CACFP-related workshops and instructs our teaching staff on all of the CACFP requirements at our annual Pre-Service trainings. Despite all of the other work on her plate, Chris also reliably performs classroom mealtime observations to ensure all CACFP requirements are being followed.
Thank you Chris!
⭐️Kathi!⭐️
Kathi is the cook for our Westminster Head Start and Early Head Start sites. Kathi comes in early every morning to prepare hot breakfasts for about 42 children and 12 adults. Although we contract out our lunch meals from the Westminster School, she is responsible for setting up these meals and cooking all meals for any of our children with special dietary needs. Kathi makes endless trips to the store for milk and snacks, and orders all of the food for the Westminster sites. She prepares all of the snacks and ensures that all foods adhere to CACFP guidelines and supplements the meals we get from Westminster School.
Kathi is very attentive to providing the children with a variety of foods to eat as well as making certain that they have extra for those hungry bellies! She has completed the ServSafe training and additionally participates in many other CACFP trainings to keep up to date on all of the latest requirements. We are so grateful for her dedication to providing fresh, healthy meals and snacks, and going above and beyond to meet all of the nutritional requirements for the children we serve.
Thank you Kathi!
⭐️Bob!⭐️
Bob is the cook for our Birge Nest, Canal Street and Infant/Toddler Center sites. Bob prepares breakfast, lunch and snacks for every site, does all the food ordering, and makes multiple trips to the local grocery store. Since we always strive to provide high-quality healthy foods, we appreciate Bob’s eye for the best deals that keep our food budget affordable. He has attended many CACFP trainings and is also ServSafe certified.
We can count on Bob to make sure that the food he cooks is nutritious, delicious, and fresh and that it meets all CACFP guidelines. Bob additionally prepares food for all special dietary needs and works closely with the on-site nutritionist to do all of the menu planning to ensure that every meal goes above and beyond the CACFP guidelines. Bob works 6 days a week to make sure there is time for menu planning, ordering, cleaning and food preparation. This ensures that our littles and staff get their yummy healthy food served family-style to them on time every day.
The children all know him by name and get very excited when he brings their meals into the classroom. Bob has been working at EES for over 6 years and has NEVER called out sick!! We are truly lucky to have him on staff.
Thank you Bob!
⭐️Katie!⭐️
Katie is our assistant cook at Birge, Canal, and ITC. She has attended multiple CACFP trainings and is ServSafe certified. In addition to helping our cook with the food preparation, Katie also enters all the production sheets into the computer, which then get printed and distributed to the classrooms so that they can fill in the amounts that are served to the children. Katie is a very flexible person and often fills in for the cook or the delivery person when they take vacation time.
Thank you Katie!
⭐️Ken!⭐️
Ken is often one of the early birds in the Birge Nest, coming in early in the morning to collect hot breakfasts which he will then deliver to the children at our Canal Street site. He also supports the CACFP program by participating in the preparation of lunches and snacks and doing store runs for milk and any unforeseen ingredients that may be needed.
Thank you Ken!
⭐️Crystal, Suzanne and Brenda! (a.k.a The Financial Team! a.k.a. “Masters of the Moolah!”)⭐️
Our financial team works tirelessly behind the scenes to take care of all the money-related aspects of the CACFP program. You need to be extremely patient and detail-oriented to handle this kind of work! Fortunately, that describes our team well.
✨Crystal takes charge of gathering the data. She collects our meal records and enters the precise number of meals that were served to the children into our database. It’s all about those numbers! She has to get those numbers absolutely right so that Suzanne can bill correctly.
✨Suzanne takes up the torch from there. Her job is making sure that we get reimbursed for food costs from the CACFP program. This involves spending many hours processing requisitions to make sure those mountains of receipts all correspond with acceptable purchases.
They’ve got paperwork galore in this department! Fortunately they also have an eye for precision and flawless organization, so we rest easy knowing that all the billing will be submitted to CACFP in a timely manner.
✨Brenda supervises Crystal and Suzanne’s work around accounts receivable, accounts payable, and the budget itself. She’s the fearless leader of this operation, and gives freely of her time and financial mastery so that the team can count on her for guidance.
Thank you financial team!
⭐️Kelley!⭐️
Kelley is our Health Services Manager. She supervises the Nutrition Staff, which is super easy because they all do such a great job!! Thank you Bob, Kathi, Katie, Ken and Chris!!
EES is proud to support the CACFP program, and proud of our hardworking team of staff who make it possible for us to provide local, fresh and nutritious foods to the children in our program! Thank you everyone!